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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Pam RosenbergHaving a strategy is part of what any learning business needs to thrive. But what does establishing a strategy look like? In this episode, number 429, we get a peek behind the strategy-developing curtain in a conversation.

Pam Rosenberg, director of education for the American Society for Nondestructive Testing, has been in the exciting role of helping to develop ASNT’s first formal education strategy.

Pam talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about build, borrow, and buy choices for creating a catalog; the need to assess the quality of learning content; competition from subject matter experts; the reality and challenge of serving check-the-box learners; the importance of connection; and more.

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Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesPam Rosenberg: [00:00:00] We’re really at a great point in our education strategy because we have the world in front of us to expand and develop and all those good things.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:14] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:24] Having a strategy is part of what any learning business needs in order to thrive. But what does establishing a strategy look like? In this episode, number 429, we get a peek behind the strategy-developing curtain in a conversation with Pam Rosenberg. Pam is director of education for the American Society for Nondestructive Testing, and she’s been in the exciting role of helping to develop ASNT’s first formal education strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:53] While the association has existed for a long time (it was founded in 1941), the establishment of a formal education department is a recent development in the organization’s history. With the establishment of that education department came the need to develop an education strategy and the need to get content quickly as ASNT didn’t have a catalog of education to start. The association went the route of acquiring an e-learning catalog to jumpstart their efforts.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:21] Pam talks with Celisa about build, borrow, and buy choices for creating a catalog; the need to assess the quality of learning content; competition from subject matter experts; the reality and challenge of serving check-the-box learners; the importance of connection; and more. Celisa and Pam spoke in late June 2024.

About the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT)Celisa Steele: [00:01:53] Tell us about the American Society for Nondestructive Testing—what it does in general and then a sketch of what it offers in terms of learning opportunities.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:02:04] Yes. Nondestructive testing is exactly what it sounds like. The technicians and the engineers and all that, they test things without taking them out of production. Or they do a CT scan. Like you go to the hospital to get a CT scan on a part of your body, they’ll do a CT scan on an airplane engine or a helicopter engine and figure out where it will fail or if this has enough integrity so that it won’t fail, like welds on roller coasters, welds on the hulls of ships to make sure that they’re safe. A year ago, when the Titan submersible went underwater, there was NDT (nondestructive testing) that was done on that to tell the owners of that vessel that it’s going to fail, not if it’s going to fail. A nice little shout-out to our industry. But NDT professionals are huge in rail. NDT is literally everywhere, and it’s one of those industries that you have never heard of because the NDT professionals keep us safe. Bridges, food, toys, cars, clothing—anything that you touch has gone through some level of NDT inspection.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:18] It’s fascinating to think about how pervasive it is, and yet I don’t tend to talk about nondestructive testing other than when I have an opportunity, like today, to talk with you. So tell us a little bit about the learning opportunities that ASNT has out in the world.

The Origins of ASNT’s Formal Education StrategyPam Rosenberg: [00:03:35] ASNT is very unique with our education strategy and offerings. ASNT has been around a very long time, like a lot of other associations have been, but there was not a formal education strategy; it was housed under a different department and didn’t have a standalone strategy. Two summers ago, the board had approved the business case to establish a formal education department and, with that, an education strategy. We are 18, 19 months into having a formal strategy at this point, and our bread and butter—prior to our education department and prior to myself and my team coming on board—was that we had these instructor-led trainings for a certification prep course. That was the bread and butter, and then, of course, conference education and training. But, again, those are housed under our events team. That’s one of the main functions of meetings and conferences is the learning aspect of it.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:04:43] So we do have those, and we have a very robust set of publications, and that’s been where a lot of the training primarily came from as well, but, again, not through ASNT instructors out in the field but experts and professionals training their own selves. We now have what you would consider to be a typical training department. We’re still very immature, and I don’t say that in a bad way, in terms of where we are with that strategy. I have matured a lot since our education department inception, but we are still getting our footing in terms of making a name for ourselves in the NDT industry, that ASNT is an education provider. We have e-learning products, which are self-paced, and they range from 8 to 20 or 8 to 40 contact hours’ worth of training, and then instructor-led offerings. And we’re really at a great point in our education strategy because we have the world in front of us to expand and develop and all those good things.

Build, Borrow, or BuyCelisa Steele: [00:05:49] When we think about how to put together a portfolio for a learning business, there are choices. There are different ways to go about finding things to put into a portfolio. At the highest level, we could think about it as this as build, borrow, buy, which I’ve heard you talk about in the past, and I know that you have some experience with thinking through those choices. Tell us a little bit about thinking through those choices and then, ultimately, your decision to go that buy route for ASNT.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:06:22] Yes, we can dig into it a little bit. In the initial business case to establish an education strategy for ASNT was…we don’t have a catalog of offerings yet to spring us forward. So that was one of the initial objectives. One of the first tasks that our new team had to do was acquire and close on a training company. It was an e-learning catalog, and it was fully established. Depending on who you ask, it’s 16 to 20 different products, depending on which way you’re looking at it, but it was a really unique way to jumpstart our offerings.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:07:04] There are pluses and minuses to buying something outright, and we’ll definitely get into that a little bit, but that was really unique. It forced us to learn very quickly what this industry is, and we’re still learning to this day because, again, we are not the NDT professionals; we are just the people that bring everyone together for the learning, for the networking and engagement, and so on. That was a crash course, so to speak, to literally put us on the map as a training provider. Since then it has afforded us a lot of opportunities. Once the dust settled on the acquisition and us being the owners of this wonderful catalog of offerings, it allowed us to use that revenue to continue to push forward and think strategically about what new offerings we can build, buy, or borrow.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:03] The driving reason, at least initially for this buy decision, was because you needed something to have in that catalog as you were going out with this newly formed education department. Talk a little bit about what you’ve learned from that process that might then help you in the future. Or perhaps other people think through that choice around when it makes sense to do what you did and buy/acquire some outside content.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:08:32] Great question. Unless you’re working directly with another actually established training association or an organization that has thoughtfully and intentionally used best practices when developing their training, there’s going to be a lot of things that we uncovered and that you, potential buyers, will uncover when you do finally get the keys to the castle. Without getting too nitty-gritty on it, everyone can call themselves a trainer, and everyone is an expert on something. But, unless you have someone like an instructional designer whose expertise is building learning, not just throwing words on a deck and recording it and calling it a training, there’s going to be some deficiencies in terms of how the material is presented. Again, this is a blanket statement. I’m not saying that this will be the case in any acquisition that you potentially come across, but, really thinking strategically, you probably won’t get the full keys to the castle until money is exchanged and ink is on paper, so that is something to be aware of. And, when the industry changes and knowledge changes and grows and advances and things like that, having that ability to adapt easily with that material that you’ve acquired can probably be a bit of a challenge.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:09:57] It’s hard. People think one hour of training, “Oh, yeah, I’ll just record it, and I’ll edit it. It won’t take a long time.” I don’t remember exactly what the calculation is, but I know for a live presentation, one hour of live instructor-led training—for lack of a better term—is 10 hours of prep time for every single hour. I think that’s what the calculation is. For e-learning or self-paced online, I think one hour of contact learning is 80 or 100 hours. Again, I may be way off on that calculation. I’m not the expert on that. That’s why there are instructional designers and learning professionals. But it’s enormous. And, if you want to do it the right way, again, you could record a presentation and call it learning, but for the knowledge to transfer successfully and to make it be a successful product, some thought needs to go into it, not just what the words are that are coming out.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:10:59] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Competitors and Subject Matter ExpertsCelisa Steele: [00:11:36] So you used that content initially to have something in your portfolio, and then it sounded like you were using the revenue that came from the acquisition, those 16 to 20 products that you then had in your catalog, to be able to fund things that you were deciding to build in-house. Is that true?

Pam Rosenberg: [00:11:53] I’m not going to get into the financial aspect of it because, to be quite honest, I don’t understand the accounting side of it and the investment that we had to make upfront to acquire this. But it has allowed us to take a strategic look at what our competitors are doing and where there are some gaps there and for us too because this industry is very interesting. A huge percentage of the NDT industry are people that call themselves trainers, educators, and facilitators, so we have a lot of competition. But where we excel is we have the learning staff, not just NDT people who have taken on a training role—they play a very important part in this industry; I’m not downplaying them at all. But it allows us to work on—buzzword—“partnerships.” Who has the advanced training but doesn’t have the mechanics to get people in seats? So that’s where we’ve spent a lot of our time. Where can we make those connections with people that have that established training? Can we take a look at it? How does this sound, and where can we elevate it and then also bring people to the training because of our name and our reputation? That has allowed us to do that and make some great new connections that way, and that has also allowed us to, in turn, work with our subject matter experts.

Business ModelsCelisa Steele: [00:13:12] Are you selling B2B and doing bulk sales into an organization? Are you in the subscription space or some sort of bundling space? I’d be curious to know how you’re approaching any packaging and whether it is B2B or B2C.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:13:30] Great question. Before we acquired—again, I’m strictly speaking e-learning because that’s what makes up the bulk of our revenue at this particular moment—it was definitely a mixture, but heavy leaning on B2B sales, and that was a lot of the customers that we retained through that acquisition. It is a lot of bulk purchasing and figuring out what that model looks like. But, again, at the end of the day, we’re a member association, so making sure that we are walking that delicate balance of we’re not just going to give away the farm because you’re guaranteeing us 10 seats or 10 enrollments or something like that. Making sure that some of their particular customers who have an academic lens, is there an opportunity for your students to be involved with ASNT? Again, to make sure that we’re cultivating young and newer entering NDT professionals in the field and learning about their purchasing habits. So we do have a fair amount of one-off sales here and there to individual companies and NDT firms. Right now it’s a good mix of both, and we’re trying to convert a lot of them into those bulk purchasing groups because we get to build a connection with them, and it’s really helping to figure out what our top sellers are, and that will help drive a lot of decisions going forward.

The Borrow OptionCelisa Steele: [00:14:53] I mentioned build, borrow, buy and so we talked about buying this catalog. You’ve talked some about building internally and partnering with some of the subject matter experts that are already in the field but maybe don’t have some of the skill sets that you can add in terms of, on the marketing side, getting the people in the seats, or, on the instructional design side, trying to improve those products. Talk a little bit about what “borrow” means in your mind. I don’t know if you’re doing anything with the borrow model at this point, but, if you are, I’d love to hear that.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:15:24] Yes. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, we are working with some industry training providers or people that have very unique or advanced techniques. Again, this is specific to our industry. They’ve got the 40-hour training. We cannot build that mostly. We don’t have a million dollars to go buy a machine and then put it in our training facility. So we need to borrow their training, but they benefit from it, and we benefit from it. We get more exposure, and they do as well. In a lot of industries, there’s a particular subsection of the industry itself, and there’s only one or two players that have the technology or that have the equipment to do these types of things.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:16:13] In a previous organization, in medical gases, the only person in the game was this one company, so it made sense to go with them. There wasn’t any rough competition because we were going with that provider. I can’t think of another example that is across the board. This allows us to “borrow” in a sense, but we are also in an agreement through our e-learning. I was previously talking about live instructor-led. In an e-learning aspect, I think aviation—very, very technical. But another group has developed this e-learning course, and it allows us to—it was part of the acquisition, one of the catalog products—it allows us to easily keep something out there under the ASNT umbrella but fulfilled somewhere else.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:17:04] Those, I feel, have a little bit of an advantage in a different way because you didn’t have to build it, and it’s much easier—maybe not much easier—to terminate that and pull it from the catalog because you don’t have the ownership of it. You don’t have the depreciation on the asset and things like that. So that one is a little bit easier to have in your catalog because you’re not the full owner of it, and you are not necessarily responsible for maintaining the content. However, there is the other side of that. You are not responsible for maintaining the content. It’s harder to say, “Hey, why isn’t this updated? When are you going to get to this technology?” You don’t have that control. You’re dependent on who you’re borrowing from. And, again, if that training company that you’re borrowing from has some bad press in the news, how does that impact you as a partnering organization that’s borrowing and licensing that? What is your exposure and liability? Which is probably, hopefully not much if you’ve done your due diligence, but there is that potential risk.

Common Opportunities and Challenges in EducationCelisa Steele: [00:18:07] You’ve worked at other associations beyond ASNT. You were at the Risk Management Association, the American Society for Plumbing Engineers. Those are fairly different fields, but your focus has always been on education in those associations. I’m curious to know, in your experience, have you seen common themes, opportunities, or common challenges that apply when thinking about education—no matter what the industry—whether it’s risk management or nondestructive testing or engineering? Whatever it is.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:18:45] People want to feel connected. Whether they would say that out loud or not, they want to feel connected to an experience or to the training and the learning that they’re going through. Whether feeling connected to an e-learning course is a little bit harder, you want to make sure that it is speaking to you and that you are the right audience for what the training is built for. Because, if you can’t make a connection and pick up those buzzwords, and it’s worthless, you probably won’t have a repeat customer on your hands, or you won’t have a returning member. I find that to be a really key component of what has kept me in the education space because there is something so special about seeing the lightbulb turn on with a learner, whether they’re taking an exam prep course, or they’re just learning the fundamentals of the math side of things. It’s having that opportunity to get true comprehension and have that ability to ask peers that are in the classroom but also, whether it’s through a discussion forum or live with the instructor, have a way to connect with them because that’s going to make a huge difference.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:20:01] So much of how we learn is on the job. That contradicts what I was just saying. But you have to have the right tools to learn on the job, and you have to have the right foundation. And, with education specifically—you can say the e-learning and the self-paced ones, depending on how you’ve built it—but putting people in a room together allows you to make those new connections and not necessarily ask the…because the expert in the room is the instructor or the facilitator, but, “Oh, yeah, this other student said something that was really thought-provoking.” Those are the biggest takeaways as an education provider but also as someone in the room. Those are the things that stick with you the most, and giving people that opportunity to get together in an education setting has been, again, what has kept me in the education side of the association house.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:00] That’s great. I appreciate the focus on connection because I think you’re right that, so often, learners are there for connection although they probably wouldn’t say they’re there for connection. If you ask them, they’ll say they’re there for the content or something related to that. But I do think that is such an important part and the benefit of peer learning, and what you can learn from those around you is huge for adults, and especially adults that are in a shared profession or field. To have that chance to interact and hear from one another can be a really big part of the value that comes from any learning experience.

Changes in EducationCelisa Steele: [00:21:44] You’ve been working in education in a variety of organizations for a number of years at this point. If you had to look back and think about, from where you started to where things are now, what big shifts, or even small ones, have you noticed over the course of your career?

Pam Rosenberg: [00:22:02] What hasn’t changed a lot is—and I don’t get credit for saying this—a large percentage of the learners that I’ve interacted with, a lot of them are here to check a box. “I got the training. I got the certificate.” I don’t get credit for that statement, but that’s just an observation that we’ve made as an education team. But, again, you have to be so much more thoughtful about what the training is, with a little bit of “choose your own adventure” sprinkled in there. Because you can advertise a product all day. You can say, “The prerequisites need to be this. You need to have the 101 in this particular topic.” But you know that people are going to show up and not have the 101 completed, or they’re showing up there on the 300 level. They’re just there to get recertification hours. That will be consistent all the time. But, to have a true impact, you really need to build, in my opinion, “Here’s this training. It’s a total of 20 hours, but I need 50 percent of my time to be focused on this. But the outline shows it’s only 20 percent of this. What is a way that I can get more learning specifically on this?” As an education professional, I need to spend more time on the legal and financial aspects of association management because that’s not where my expertise is. How can I find something that has been curated that will allow me to do this association training or go to this association conference, that will allow me to choose a slightly different track or a different end goal? Because I know the fundamentals of education or whatever the cases are. I’m the membership professional. But, financially, that’s very hard because building these really robust and advanced products takes a lot of thought and effort.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:24:01] The tech is changing very, very fast, and we don’t even know what it’s going to look like in three months from now, let alone in a year, to make that case for why we need this tool to help us do this or why we need to spend the contract hours to work with a subject matter expert, for example. That, I think, is what I’ve seen as a need a bit more. And, not new to the association space, but there is an organization or a firm that’s going to come to you, that says, “I need these people trained on this, but they already have these things fulfilled, so they don’t really need to take your level one training. They really need level one and a half and level two.” So finding ways to make your products mold to your clients better is something that…because, again, everyone has similar end goals, but how they get there sometimes varies a little bit, and every organization has slightly different needs about what they need from their learners. I guess that was a long way of saying you’ve got to build a choose-your-own-adventure-type scenario. That’s where I see things going.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:11] You’re talking about, I think, personalization, without saying that buzzword there. And maybe part of why you’re avoiding it is because I think that we don’t know how to do that in a cost-effective and meaningful way. But, whatever we can do to allow the learner to tailor our solution to their specific needs, that’s very valuable, so that they can spend their time focused on what they need to focus on, so that they can choose their own adventure.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:25:43] Yes, exactly.

The Future of Continuing Education, Professional Development, and Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:25:45] That last question was having you look back, think about your past and what’s changed or remained the same with education. If you look to the future, and you think about continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning, are there trends or ideas that you have your eye on or things that you see coming that interest you?

Pam Rosenberg: [00:26:07] I would love to figure out what the solution is to allow learners to easily—because people are doing it—have that blend of learning. Again, I’m strictly speaking for adult learning here. “Hey, here’s this product. You have homework to do beforehand. You’re going to have homework to do in between the modules.” Really put the learners in the room together and have thoughtful conversations around that, and allow for more peer-to-peer learning with guided, SME-guided, instructor conversations. Because, again, people learn so much more by having those conversations, asking those questions, and not being afraid to ask those questions because someone in the room has had those questions, and that’s why everyone is in this shared room together. This kind of 360 approach where there’s a little bit of…there are training companies and associations that do this, but allowing people to balance their time between “I’ve got my work hat on, so I can do my professional development” but also juggle the work responsibilities and the home responsibilities, and allow for people to have the space in between the training to sit and think about it.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:27:31] I think that is really, really beneficial because you’re not going to absorb it in the lecture. When you sit and think about it and digest, and then you come back and revisit that conversation, that’s where that knowledge transfer stays. It’s habit. You commit it to memory, and then it becomes more of a habit rather than, again, something that I did, and I don’t remember anything I learned even though I finished it 30 minutes ago. Allowing for more intentional…. And there’s that balance because that’s going to be less people that are taking the training, but you’ll have a better response, and then people that have success with the program will do the marketing for you. “Oh, I took this course. You need to do this. And it doesn’t cost us anything to market and find that person.” So, yes, the cost of the acquisition is a lot lower when you have more thoughtful and intentional training.

Personal Approach to Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:28:21] We do always like to ask guests about their own lifelong learning given that this is the Leading Learning Podcast. Talk a little bit about your sources, habits, or practices when you think about your own lifelong learning.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:28:39] As I’ve been in this association space—and I talked to it previously—I learned the most at conferences or little networking sessions from the hallway conversations. “Oh, hey, I saw that you spoke on this topic. This is how we’ve done it.” Or “Can you share more with me about that?” Being in the room and listening to the subject matter experts but also listening to peers because chances are people that are in the seats are in the same position that I’m in—allowing those open discussions. That’s where I get the most out of it. I love learning with people together, and I also love bringing people together that are not necessarily in my area. I’m not in the education space. I’m bringing people together in the membership space to talk about something. Is there something in that the membership space at ASNT? Can I learn? Can I take some of those nuggets away about how they’re doing it? What I do is not membership-related directly, but let’s think about that. I definitely read the articles, the best that I can, that come out in the industry, publications, and things like that.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:29:59] I have found that my greatest leap for association management came from the CAE prep course. I was able to participate in that through Association Forum in the Chicago area. I did my absolute most learning through there, and I still use that learning to this day, especially when it’s areas outside of education. Legally this. Financially that. Because, again, I know enough that’ll raise a red flag to say, “I don’t know enough about this, but this is something that I need to be aware of. I need to go talk to somebody else.” And that has kept us out of trouble, or me out of trouble, in a lot of aspects. I don’t have a problem raising my hand, saying, “I don’t know what this means,” or “Can you explain this a little bit more?” Just love learning what other associations do because, chances are, you’re not that disconnected from another association that will allow you to make those connections that “We have this opportunity.” I can’t remember exactly when it was; I want to say it was earlier in this calendar year.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:31:04] But, again, we do magnetic res, and we use the same kind of technology, the NDT profession does, as when you go get an MRI. It’s the magnetic particle testing. It’s the same. So let’s talk with the medical imaging group, and how do they use it? Bring one of their experts to us, and they can use one of our experts for their training. It’s a wonderful way to keep learning and expand your knowledge. One of the best sessions that I ever sat in on was two associations ago. There was a session on plumbing aboard a spaceship and plumbing for NASCAR as well. It was so fun. Nobody in the room will ever probably have that opportunity to do space shuttle plumbing. Never. But it’s the way that the people in the room were thinking about how to solve these problems, that we’re able to take back and apply to our everyday. When you’re in the room with these kinds of people, it’s so cool, and it’s such a unique experience. So I will always be a lifelong learner. That’s just who I am.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:19] Pam Rosenberg is director of education for the American Society for Nondestructive Testing.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbMost learning businesses have three goals at heart: reach, revenue, and impact.

Reach deals with clearly identifying who you can and should serve and then connecting with them. Impact involves delivering real results for learners, organizations, fields, professions, and industries. Revenue is the lifeblood that keeps a learning business alive.

Very few would disagree that impact and reach are important, but making money off education can cause discomfort to some. And so in this episode we focus on the necessity, the reality, and the opportunity revenue represents.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] While huge amounts of money are spent on continuing education, professional development, and other forms of lifelong learning, learning businesses often bump up against beliefs that education and learning should be free or low-cost enough to be accessible to all.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:29] We believe most learning businesses have three goals at heart: reach, revenue, and impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:35] Reach deals with clearly identifying who you can and should serve and then connecting with as many of those identified learners as you can.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] Impact is what makes you relevant and effective by delivering significant and real results for learners, organizations, fields, professions, [and] industries.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:55] Revenue is the lifeblood that keeps a learning business alive. And it’s the revenue piece of this triumvirate that we want to focus on today, in episode 428.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:06] Why pick on revenue out of those three? Why do we want to focus on revenue today?

The Uncomfortable Association of Money and LearningJeff Cobb: [00:01:11] Because, interestingly, out of those three, it’s the one that can get a little bit of pushback. Or maybe pushback isn’t quite the right word. I think it can create some discomfort. Very few people are going to disagree that impact and reach are important. Of course you want to have an impact. Of course you want to reach the right people. But revenue, you’re mixing money and education. It feels a little bit like, “Hmm, I don’t know about that.”

Celisa Steele: [00:01:39] Maybe part of the reason that we’re a little uncomfortable when it comes to education, learning, and money is that in the U.S., K-12, or even pre-K-12, is free. And so it may be that we are conditioned from a very early age to perceive of education as free, and then we come to expect that it should be free and open to all. Now, of course, there are private schools all along that pre-K-12 spectrum, but there is also this free option that exists.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:12] Of course, we might call it the not-paid-for-directly option because nothing is free. But, nonetheless, if you’ve got a child, and you want to put them into this system, the system is there because it has been funded for you to participate.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:24] The kindergartner is not having to fork over money out of her own pocket. But, yes, it obviously has to be paid for somehow. But this idea or this association that many of us have between learning and education and low or no cost, that can create some interesting implications for learning businesses and what they can charge for their products and services. There can be a lot of downward price pressure because of this idea of free, and don’t we want everyone to have access to education? And, by making it free, we open up how many people can benefit from this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:03] And that everyone aspect to the openness and accessibility of K-12 education in particular, that also has implications for what learning businesses provide. There’s this impulse that you want the portfolio to cover the full gamut from beginner to expert and all the subjects and topics that might be needed in whatever your particular field or profession is, and you might feel that even more if you have a membership base within that field and profession that’s looking to you for education. But then, of course, trying to offer everything and then trying to offer it for free or even at a very low price just isn’t a very viable model in most instances.

The Necessity of Revenue for Learning BusinessesCelisa Steele: [00:03:43] Which leads us to the necessity of revenue. Even learning businesses that are organized as nonprofits and learning businesses that offer education as a member benefit, even in those contexts learning businesses are going to seek to maximize revenue. Or maybe we should say we believe they should seek to maximize revenue because that means more money is there to be put against delivering on the big-picture mission of that learning business, whether that’s helping to raise the bar in a particular field or profession or whether it’s about empowering each individual to attain their highest level of realization. Whatever it is, by having more revenue, you’re able to do more of that work.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:22] Yes, you want to be paid as well as you reasonably and fairly can for the level of value that you’re providing. Of course, we do advocate that learning businesses provide very high value that they are then charging commensurately for. And, of course, the reality is that education is a big driver of revenue, is a big source of revenue, particularly for the types of organizations that we’re talking to—we’re talking to learning businesses. This is your business. If you look at associations, for example, a big segment of this learning business world that we serve, education is a huge source of nondues revenue for those organizations. Of course, it is one that aligns very much with their missions in serving their members and in serving the fields, professions, industries that they exist to serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:11] We also look at continuing education units that are housed at academic institutions—those PCO units (professional and continuing and online units) that don’t tend to grant degrees. But those have become really big business, frankly, for academic institutions and one that offers a way for a lot of academic institutions to be making money as they’re facing declining enrollments in this enrollment cliff that is being forecast. And so you have again a sense where the learning business is providing a lot of revenue that is helping with the overall organization and its mission.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:49] Yes, and I think, in this case, revenue is helping these organizations, or perhaps prodding these organizations, to rethink their role or to update how they think about their role and how they think about their strategies. They’re not just providing the higher education for that 18- to, say, 25-year-old traditional academic degree student, but they are now much more about who is this post-traditional student that we’re serving, and how do we look at lifelong learning as our role as a college or university? There is money to be made there, but there is also a mission there that is, I think, a good and valid role for colleges and universities to be playing in society.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:31] You already touched on it, but, if a learning business is freestanding and it’s not embedded in that academic institution, it’s not embedded in an association, well, in that case, revenue is absolutely 100-percent necessary because, without that revenue, that learning business doesn’t have other sources to keep it going and making it viable and sustainable over time.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:06:56] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

The Size and Significance of the Adult Lifelong Learning MarketJeff Cobb: [00:07:33] Let’s talk about the ways in which revenue flows and produces results—all of this getting and spending that’s going on in the education market. How can we break this down a little bit?

Celisa Steele: [00:07:46] For one, we know that employers are spending a lot on training and continuing education and professional development. There’s one statistic that the global corporate training market was valued at about US$383 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach US$485 billion by 2028. Really huge numbers. You have these employers that have these employees; they want them to be able to perform well, to perform better; so they’re investing a lot of money in making that happen.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:23] Individual learners are spending for themselves as well—another one of those sets of stats that’s floating around out there. The U.S. continuing education market is estimated to be worth $93.3 billion by 2028. A lot of Bs we’re throwing around—billions. These are big markets, and all of that spending is not necessarily individuals, but a lot of it is. We’ve seen the rise of these services like, say, a Udemy, and Udemy is split between…they serve corporate buyers, but they also serve a huge number of individual buyers who are going out to buy that one course they need on that one topic. Or MasterClass. Or any number of these different providers that are out there. And individuals are pulling out that credit card and investing in these lifelong learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:15] You have the individual learners. You have the employers. You also have a lot of money being spent on workforce development; a lot of that’s coming through governmental agencies or quasi-governmental agencies that are trying to say, okay, the economy, we need to think about the economy. And a big way to help the economy is to make sure that we have a workforce that can fill the jobs that are needed to fuel that and have that all running along. So a lot of money is being put in there. One stat we can cite there is that, since January of 2021, the Department of Commerce in the U.S. has dedicated more than $1.6 billion that goes into things around workforce investment, including education as a big part of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:59] All of this speaks to that demand side of the equation in classic economics. There is a demand out there for education. There are people; there are organizations; there are governments that are willing to spend this money, that want to spend this money, to invest in education and training for a whole range of different needs and purposes. But they are prepared. If you are in the learning business and need to generate revenue, you’ve got sources of revenue. But those sources do have expectations.

The Expectation of a Return on InvestmentCelisa Steele: [00:10:30] That’s right. In the simplest terms, we can say that they’re expecting a return on investment. It’s going to cost that learner time, and it’s going to usually cost someone some dollars for that training, whether it’s the employer paying or that learner paying out of her own pocket, but there’s going to be some money spent. And so the learner and the employer have expectations. They have the belief that spending the time and money on this is going to create some kind of result. That’s really important to think about. That gets us back to impact. We talked about reach, revenue, and impact at the beginning. But part of it is that, if people are going to put that revenue out there, it needs to come with some impact around it. Expectations are on the rise, given the proliferation of free or very low-cost resources that are out there. Especially if you’re trying to charge, which we believe most learning businesses are and should be, and especially if you’re trying to charge at any kind of premium level, you’re going to need to make sure that you are delivering value. And you mentioned value earlier, Jeff.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:33] Yes, and we’ve seen this shift a lot during our careers. We’ve been doing this for decades now. As you just said, Celisa, there’s a lot more competition, a lot more options out there than there used to be. A lot of that’s because of what technology has made possible, both in moving things online but also in gaining greater visibility into what’s available, even offline, and being able to set up events and run events. Everything that you could traditionally do from an educational standpoint, you can do more and faster now than used to be the case. Of course, we’ve seen learning evolve. Things are more trackable than they used to be. They’re more measurable. We know better what to track and what to measure.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:10] In this employment market and just life in general these days, the need for learning and the need for knowing that your time is being invested wisely and you are getting that return has gone up significantly. And it is valued by people. We see this in our own surveying when we ask people about, when they decide to invest in paying for an educational opportunity, what are the things, what are the value factors that they’re weighing? One of the top three always is “Is this demonstrated to actually improve knowledge or skills? Is there some evidence that this is going to do something for me?” And then we know that employers are increasingly concerned about retention and that employees care about this stuff.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:51] LinkedIn does a workplace learning report. One from 2023 talked about the connection between employee retention and access to learning. That report from LinkedIn said that 93 percent of organizations are worried about employee retention. This is a real concern for the vast majority of organizations. And the number one way that organizations are working to improve retention is by providing learning opportunities.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:19] Yes, I don’t think that’s something we’re going to see change anytime soon. It’s probably going to get more and more intense over time. We have this significant demand out there for learning—individuals, organizations, societies willing to invest in it. There is this expectation of return on it. Those two things alone, I think, are positive drivers for revenue. But I think one of the keep-people-up-at-night sides of revenue that will often spur organizations to figure out how do we generate more and how do we keep more is the underlying cost structures of delivering effective learning. And, if you’re going to generate revenue, if you’re going to generate positive net revenue, you have to have an eye on those underlying costs. That’s another element of the ways in which revenue flows here.

ROI for the Learning BusinessCelisa Steele: [00:14:07] That’s right. You need revenue, but then you need to further understand, okay, out of that revenue, what here is actually net positive? What is actually profit versus what is going to cover the costs that went into creating and maintaining and running these learning programs? In our experience, a lot of learning businesses don’t have really great insight into those underlying costs. It can get pretty tricky when you get into things like employee time against a particular offering in your portfolio. And so a lot of learning businesses don’t know quite how to allocate salaries against things in their portfolio. It can be a challenge to get to those accurate projections, to get to that accurate financial modeling, even on the portfolio level. But, by the time you begin trying to break it down into individual products or even product lines, then that begins to get a little bit murky for a lot of learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:05] This varies by the type of learning business that you are. Your average commercial training firm might be much more attuned to this than, say, an education department, or even be a quasi-education department, in, say, a small association where you’re part of a whole mix of other stuff and getting that level of clarity. But, increasingly, going back to some of the things we were saying about the expectation of return, the demand that’s out there, the competitive environment, if you’re going to be serious about revenue, you also have to be serious about this cost side and serious about accounting and finance, basically, and being able to roll up your sleeves and create projections and understand how the revenue is playing out within your learning business so that you do have visibility into “Is what we’re doing sustainable? Is this product line really worth continuing? If we’re going to introduce a new product line, what can we reasonably expect from that in terms of both gross and net revenue?” Your average education professional may not think of themselves as that financially attuned person, but, increasingly, if you’re in the learning business, and you need to generate revenue, and you need to be able to sustain that business, you’re going to have to be able to either do those things yourself or make sure you’ve got good people to do them.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:22] It’s another facet of return on investment. We were talking about the return on investment from the learner point of view, the employer point of view. What you’re getting at there, Jeff, is the return on investment from the learning business standpoint. Is this product line—whatever aspect of our portfolio—is that providing a return on our investment? And is it, to your point, sustainable and viable long term?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:45] Definitely.

Positive Net Revenue Is FreedomJeff Cobb: [00:16:56] We’ve been talking about the ins and outs of revenue, being clear that the revenue is out there. There is the demand for what learning businesses offer. For me, the bottom line is that strong, positive net revenue is freedom. We deal with so many organizations that are feeling constrained. They’re feeling stressed. They’re reliant on a board of directors or some other part of the organization to give them enough budget to do what they need to do. They don’t feel like they can hire the staff they want. They don’t feel like they can invest in the way they want. When you have strong positive net revenue, those kinds of problems disappear. You’re in a position to invest appropriately in your learning business, and, by extension, you’re able to serve your learners in the way that probably every learning business wants to be able to serve their learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:55] We started out talking about revenue as a necessity, that learning businesses need it to survive. We talked about revenue as a reality, that education is being spent on, that there are lots of investment, lots of dollars being put against education. And then, Jeff, you just got to the opportunity. The opportunity is there that, if you can figure out the right approach to revenue and make sure that you’re getting the reach, the impact, and the revenue, then it’s opportunity. It gives you that freedom, as you were saying, to be able to do what you need to do to deliver on your mission as a learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:39] While huge amounts of money are spent on continuing education, professional development, and other forms of lifelong learning, learning businesses often bump up against beliefs that education and learning should be free or low-cost enough to be accessible to all. That creates an interesting tension that we believe is better explored than ignored.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* The Irresistible Episode—Now with Financial Modeling! * Peanut Butter and Chocolate: Workforce Development and Credentials

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbHeutagogy might be the most important and powerful idea in learning that you never heard mentioned on the Leading Learning Podcast. Until today. If a learning business embraces heutagogy, it will be well positioned to lead learning in the field, industry, or profession it serves because it will have enlisted the help of all learners.

In this episode, number 427, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele talk about the emergence of heutagogy, its relationship to andragogy, and the potential it might represent for learning businesses.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Heutagogy might be the most important and powerful idea in learning that you’ve never heard us mention. Until today.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:12] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:14] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:22] If you’ve tuned in before, odds are pretty good that you’ve heard us talk about andragogy.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] And odds are pretty good that you’ve also heard us talk about self-directed learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:32] But we are absolutely, 100-percent sure you have never heard us talk about heutagogy, and that’s a gap we want to address in today’s episode, number 427.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:43] Because, despite our lack of use of the term hithertofore, we are proponents of and believers of heutagogy.

What Is Heutagogy?Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] And we want to make sure that you are going to be a believer too. So let’s dig into this term and figure out what heutagogy is. Celisa, you were the one who uncovered this gem for us.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:04] It’s a term that was coined by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon, and it was used in an article that they published in 2000, and that article was called “From Andragogy to Heutagogy.” They define, in that article, heutagogy as “the study of self-determined learning.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:21] As that title suggests, the authors are definitely building on the work of Malcolm Knowles and crediting him with the shift in 1970 away from pedagogy, which has that kid focus, to andragogy, which is for adult learners.

Why Heutagogy?Celisa Steele: [00:01:40] So why heutagogy? There’s a cynical view of that, which is just that, hey, a new word gets attention. You coin a new word, and that’s going to help you get out there and get your article published. That’s the cynical take on it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:53] It’s an important thing to do if you are a researching academic sort. You have that whole “publish or perish” hanging over you. But I think we can take a little bit more generous view and say basically what Hase and Kenyon say is that, while andragogy was a good step, it just wasn’t far enough. It’s still too focused on a teacher-student relationship and too grounded in a reality that’s no longer true. You can think about how much the world has changed or had changed since Knowles published The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy Versus Pedagogy in 1970.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:33] Right. So you have Knowles publishing The Modern Practice of Adult Education, 1970. Hase and Kenyon, it’s 2000, so 30 years later, where they’re publishing “From Andragogy to Heutagogy.” As you said, a lot changed in those 30 years. Well, it’s been not quite 30 years since Hase and Kenyon put out their article, but here we are in 2024. So it’s been 24 years. We can think about how much has changed even since 2000. COVID, generative AI, the decline in the trust of expertise—those are just a few that I can tick off fairly readily about things that have changed in the world in which we work and live.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:11] Even before that, in 2000, what had happened with technology since Knowles was writing, lifespan, what work and jobs and careers looked like even then and certainly what they look like now—just a lot had changed since his initial idea of andragogy was put out there.

Beyond AndragogyCelisa Steele: [00:03:29] In short, I think that we believe that Hase and Kenyon were really on to something with this idea of “Let’s move beyond andragogy,” and we’ll go along with what they call it, heutagogy. One of the things that they point out is, given all that’s changed and given the pace of change, the accelerating pace of change, is that andragogy is still probably too focused on formal learning. Hase and Kenyon point to what they call “the value of everyday, unorganized experiences and the process of reflection.” That’s what we might call informal learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:04] Yes. Hase and Kenyon say that “heutagogy looks to the future in which knowing how to learn will be a fundamental skill given the pace of innovation and the changing structures of communities and workplaces.” I can hear echoes in that of Alvin Toffler, of Peter Drucker. People have been thinking about this type of thing before, but Hase and Kenyon formalized that a bit.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:29] Yes, and I think that part of what they’re doing in their formulation of heutagogy is forefronting learners’ motivation and effort and ability, and it downplays the teacher or the instructor—and possibly even the learning business if it’s less important what’s going on in a formal sense. A lot of learning businesses are really focused on creating and delivering what falls under that formal learning umbrella—courses, seminars, and conferences. It, to some extent, perhaps threatens what a learning business does. Or maybe not.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:06] Yes. We’ve raised this possibility before, and I think we definitely can talk about it more in this episode. But, if you think about it in the extreme, we really can’t ever teach others. It really comes down to the learner in the end. And we’ve talked before about concepts of learner responsibility and what the behavior, what the motivation of the learner has to be if learning is actually going to happen. Really, what a teacher can do and what a learning business can help to facilitate through providing structure, instructors, and that sort of thing is stimulate and encourage others to learn.

An Umbrella TermCelisa Steele: [00:05:45] Yes. I think, as we’ve already begun to allude to in our conversation so far, really heutagogy is a new name, an umbrella term for a lot of other ideas floating around. And Hase and Kenyon do give due to some of those other ideas that they’re building off of when they formulate heutagogy. Things like systems thinking and organizational learning and learner-managed learning and action learning and work-based learning. There are a lot of these various trends that they believe are tributaries flowing into the way that they describe and define heutagogy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:22] Yes, the classic “standing on the shoulders of giants” sort of thing and taking some of this thinking and, again, putting some structure, putting some formalization around it. Of course, heutagogy does build on andragogy. I’ll dip into a little bit of what they say about that in the paper. They say that “Knowles’ definition [of self-directed learning] provides a linear approach to learning and sounds like the chapters of a train the trainer guide”—very, very much rooted in traditional concepts of training and education. On the other hand, “Heutagogy takes account of intuition and concepts such as ‘double loop learning’ [Chris Argyris] that are not linear and not necessarily planned.”

Celisa Steele: [00:07:06] “It may be that a person doesn’t identify a learning need” per se. They might not be super clear on what their learning need is, but they can identify “the potential to learn from a novel experience.” Again, this is this idea of you want to have learning that is as adaptable and applicable in as many situations as possible, and that’s where heutagogy is focusing. As they describe it—they being Hase and Kenyon in this article—they talk about it as including “aspects of capability, action learning processes such as reflection, environmental scanning as understood in Systems Theory, and valuing experience and interaction with others.” In essence, heutagogy “goes beyond problem solving” because it enables productivity. Or actually, “proactivity” is what they say, not productivity. Both, I think, are actually true, but it is this focus on what can be done with learning, which may be greater than any sort of learning objectives anyone might ascribe to a particular course.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:17] I don’t know that their language necessarily mirrors this; maybe I’m adding my own gloss on it, but I’m thinking about proactivity and thinking about how they’re treating learning. We’ve talked before about how a great deal of learning can be unconscious. A great deal of learning doesn’t necessarily have intentionality behind it. This is another one of those approaches that gives us some language and some tools for helping to raise things to consciousness, helping to raise things to intentionality. Potentially, this is a point of leverage that we can use in engaging with our learners and helping them understand themselves as learners better and how they can learn better, even when they’re not in that classroom or that conference situation. We all box ourselves in so much and see ourselves as not really learning unless we’re in those formal learning structures. This is an approach that says, yes, you’re learning in those structures, obviously, but there’s so much that they can happen on a self-directed basis.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:09:22] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

The Potential Opportunity for Learning BusinessesCelisa Steele: [00:09:58] And so all of this points to a potential opportunity for learning businesses. A potential heutagogical opportunity…

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:06] Heutagogical opportunity!

Celisa Steele: [00:10:07] …for learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:08] You heard it here first.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:10] I think, just as you were describing, Jeff, if a learning business can really support learners in being self-directed, there’s a lot of potential opportunity because that very much could distinguish you from other learning providers that are just providing the course or the conference or that construct but aren’t necessarily helping to develop your capability to learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:35] Yes. I think that truly learner-centric approach is a real fit for many learning businesses. Associations, of course, have their memberships, their communities, and thinking about people operating and learning within that community—not so much within a classroom or a conference per se—and thinking about how you can leverage that. Even if you’re in an academic continuing education unit, you’ve got a little more latitude, a little more freedom than you do if you’re within the confines of that accredited degree path structure that the rest of the institution has to operate within. How do you take advantage of that and start being that facilitative structure around the learning needs of your learners that they can potentially take hold of themselves and direct themselves in?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:20] We’ve talked about developing pathways and trying to help smooth the path for your learners by making it clear what a next step might be. All of that is great, and we do believe that is a value that a learning business can provide. But this is about going beyond pathways. This is really about how do you help someone almost create their own pathway, which might be something that you never imagined. But, again, you’re helping to facilitate and equip them with the skills that are going to actually allow them to identify “What is the right pathway for me?” and figure out how to get where they would like to be.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:56] Yes, I think there’s a comparison to how creativity works in here—you’ll often hear that creativity and innovation work best within constraints. You provide a framework within which people can operate, but then they’re driving the bus. But you’re also providing them with a launch pad because they get used to being creative within these structures and can ultimately…. Picasso goes from being the classic painter to, well, being what he’s known for today. I can think of an analogy in learning. We need to set these guardrails up. Pathways are valuable. But then how are we empowering people to go off the path and go where they need to go with their learning?

Celisa Steele: [00:12:33] One point that I find particularly interesting from the Hase and Kenyon article is that they really focus on capacity. Again, if we think about pathways and certifications, they’re arguing that it’s really not about competency. It’s about capacity. And so this is a quote from their article: “Capable people are those who: know how to learn; are creative; have a high degree of self-efficacy; can apply competencies in novel as well as familiar situations; and can work well with others. In comparison with competencies which consist of knowledge and skills, capability is a holistic attribute. Developing capable people requires innovative approaches to learning consistent with the concept of heutagogy.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:20] Yes, I like that. We have an article that’s from quite a while back, but it’s still one of the most popular articles on our Mission to Learn site. It’s about 15 ways of the self-directed learner, and a lot of this language from Hase and Kenyon reflects that. It’s similar sort of language. What are the attitudes and the behaviors of that sort of learner? And then, again, back to learning businesses, how can we help people unlock those and actualize them?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:44] I think that one of the challenges in unlocking that will be a willingness to relinquish some control and some power. If the idea is about letting that learner be self-directed, that means you don’t really know where they’re going. You don’t really know what they’re going to do with the materials that you put out there. And so it’s a little bit at odds with the way so many organizations are created. We want to have a bit of control and even some power and say in what people are going to do and how they’re going to make use of our products and services. And this suggests that we might have to let go of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:20] Yes, it doesn’t lend itself very well to smile sheets or standard approaches to assessment or certification, but this is fertile ground for talking about how we might use some alternative approaches to those things. How will we measure impact if this is the sort of environment that we’re supporting for our learners? I don’t think that’s impossible. I think there are valid ways to do that, but it is going to require learning business leaders to think a bit differently.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:48] And we’ve been focused a lot on the idea of personalized learning. What can we do to get there? I think this takes it one step further. This is individualized learning. It is that individual learner getting to say, “Okay, this is what and how I learn.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:12] Heutagogy might be the most important and powerful idea in learning that you’ve never heard us mention. Until today. If your learning business embraces heutagogy, it will be well positioned to lead learning in the field, industry, or profession you serve because you’ll have enlisted the help of all your learners.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* An Essential Guide to Andragogy for Learning Businesses * The Power of Reflection in Learning and Leading * Exploring Motivation and Learning * What’s Necessary to Learn * The Self-Directed Learner

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Luke DowdenIn the U.S., higher education institutions are increasingly interested in serving nontraditional students, in providing credentials beyond degrees, and in using online learning to extend their reach beyond physical campuses. As those changes happen in higher ed, ripples are created that impact the learning business landscape.

Luke Dowden is the chief online learning officer at the Alamo Colleges District, located in San Antonio, Texas. In this episode, number 426, Luke talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Jeff Cobb about the good and the bad of online learning becoming an established part of higher education, digital credentialing, non-credit offerings, credit for prior learning, and partnerships between higher education and other organizations serving the third sector.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesLuke Dowden: [00:00:00] It’s not training for the sake of training. It’s not education for the sake of education. But it helps that learner gain some kind of economic or social mobility that they are desiring.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:14] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:15] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:23] In the U.S., higher education institutions are increasingly interested in serving nontraditional students, in providing credentials beyond degrees, and in using online learning to extend their reach beyond physical campuses. As those changes happen in higher ed, ripples are created that impact the learning business landscape.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] Luke Dowden is the chief online learning officer at the Alamo Colleges District, located in San Antonio, Texas. Texas is the eighth largest economy in the world, and San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the U.S. but, unfortunately, has the highest rate of urban poverty in the country. The chancellor has established a moonshot for the Alamo Colleges District to partner to end poverty through education and training.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:12] In this episode, number 426, Luke talks about the good and the bad of online learning becoming an established part of higher education, and he cites online learning’s promise of access and agency while not ignoring questions of quality and connectedness. Jeff and Luke also talk about digital credentialing, non-credit offerings, credit for prior learning, and partnerships between higher education and other organizations serving the third sector. Luke points out that competition for attention is often the fiercest competition any learning provider faces. We hope you’ll give your attention to Jeff and Luke’s conversation, which took place in July 2024.

The Rise of Titles Like Chief Online Learning OfficerJeff Cobb: [00:02:05] Your title is chief online learning officer. A couple questions related to that. What is that title in and of itself? A decade or more ago that did not exist as a title, I’m sure. How common do you find that as a title now in your world? Do you have a lot of peers who have that same sort of title?

Luke Dowden: [00:02:25] They do, or they have adjacent titles. You might have associate or assistant provosts of online learning. You may have vice presidents of online and extended education. It’s definitely a top title that’s emerged in the last seven or eight years. For a long time, there were directors of online learning, directors of distance learning. But as more and more institutions adopted online learning—and this has been nice to be in the industry and see this emerge—you’ve seen titles that indicate a strategic nature behind them. It’s not just the operations. For those of us that have been in online learning for over 15, 20 years, there’s a deep set of operational acumen that you need to run a successful distance, online, extended learning program. This elevation of chief or vice provosts or vice presidents of online learning really signals the strategic importance to an institution.

Luke Dowden: [00:03:21] Certainly for us, the Alamo Colleges District, of those 72,000 students, Jeff, almost 16,000 were fully online this past fall. So you can see just for our organization, but, if you look at some of the other trends in the iPads’ data, you can see the growth of online learning. And this was before COVID. A lot of people, and rightfully so, we did see a number of institutions realize the benefit of having an online learning platform. We were fortunate. We were already pretty heavily invested in the infrastructure that you need—not just the technology but the people and the training of faculty—before COVID, so that we could really tap into those resources. But hopefully that answers your question in terms of the emergence of that title. It definitely is a phenomenon. For your listeners, Quality Matters is an organization that partners on a report called “The Changing Landscape of Online Education” (CHLOE). The CHLOE report has been tracking the changes over time and the emergence of chief online learning officers. There’s a researcher that has been tracking these roles for quite some time.

Online Learning As an Established Part of Higher Education: The Good, the Bad, and the UglyJeff Cobb: [00:04:31] That relates to my second question because obviously, at this point, online learning is an established fact in higher education. It was before COVID, as you said, and then COVID kicked things up several notches. But an institution really can’t exist without thinking about online learning at this point. You’ve been doing this long enough; you’ve seen the rise of online as a part of higher education. What do you see as the good of that? This is the good, bad, and ugly question around online learning becoming an established part of higher education.

Luke Dowden: [00:05:09] I just want to be fair to your listeners. The majority of my career has been in online learning. I know that I said that earlier. I don’t consider myself an evangelist. I’ll say that very quickly I’m as much a champion as I am a critic of online learning. I think the good is about access, and I want to also be clear that I’m not just speaking to my experience now in San Antonio. I founded an office of distance learning at a Research 1 in Louisiana, and I worked at a small urban community college. I worked at a regional university where I did some recruiting for graduate and adult programs. So, when I respond to your good, bad, and ugly question, Jeff, I’m really bringing in all of that experience.

Luke Dowden: [00:05:50] The good is access. For some learners, learning is education support. They’ve got family, job, taking care of parents. I talk to a lot of my colleagues and even some learners now that are part of the sandwich generation that are raising their kids, but they’re also taking care of parents, or they have other extended family members that they’re taking care of. So, for me, the good is the access. And some of that is democratizing learning. There are a lot of learners that might feel lost in a big lecture classroom, so there’s a sense of agency that I think online learning gives you. We definitely heard more and more from students that participate in learning in a different way because they can do it on their own time, but they’re also finding agency and voice. Those are the good things.

Luke Dowden: [00:06:36] From a personal experience, I first received distance learning as a high school student. I wanted Spanish, and the only way to get it was in a little telephone box and a TV training. You and I are recording on Zoom where it’s a lot more synchronous. You could hear them, but there was a delay in the video—that was before compressed video, before asynchronous online learning. But that’s how I got Spanish. Spanish I and Spanish II. It was ported in from a university an hour away to my little, small, rural school. So I even think about rural learners that we serve in online learning across the United States.

Luke Dowden: [00:07:13] The bad for us—that’s deficit language in my current environment, so we would say “opportunities for improvement”—I think quality assurance. I spoke to the CHLOE report earlier, but what I would tell you is, in the 2022 report…. This is a statement that I want to read because I think it’s important, that underscores why I said quality assurance is an opportunity for improvement. Almost all institutions in the CHLOE sample (96%) had adopted quality online standards. So having online standards and the adoption runs pretty high. But there are major shortcomings in the quality assurance (QA) process of those schools that were surveyed. And it comes from a lot of different areas.

Luke Dowden: [00:07:52] Are faculty designing courses on their own? Are they designing them with an instructional designer? Are they co-designed together? Are they giving courses that are well-designed? How are faculty prepared? What’s the wrap-around support for students? I think that’s another area where we’ve put some significant energy here. So that’s one. I think the other is understanding the needs of the online learner. Just because they’re learning online doesn’t mean they don’t want to be a part of a community. And we’ve been fortunate. The discussion around mental health and the need to support mental health of not just learners but people in our society. We’ve also started to focus, in online learning, on belonging and connectedness, and what are ways that we can create—if it’s through a technology platform or through some group, some other technology-mediated way of connecting people within majors?

Luke Dowden: [00:08:46] And I’ll speak a little bit about being a parent. I have a son that is one of our community college students and a graduate who talked about the importance of being connected to people in their programs and majors. That’s another area that we can always improve and then connecting those learners to the opportunity they’re seeking. And what we may think is completion—what we’re judged on is completion—it may look very different for them. Completing a course may be the goal for that learner. So understanding their goals as well is another area. Hopefully, that’s helpful to your listeners.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:09:26] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

The Challenges of Serving Nontraditional LearnersJeff Cobb: [00:10:05] Very with often online learning, and I think even face-to-face these days, colleges are often not serving what we think of as the traditional college and university students anymore. In fact, those are actually in the minority at this point. Whether online or off, I’d love your perspective on how well higher education is rising to that challenge of looking beyond the stereotypical traditional learner and serving the lifelong learner. What are some of the main challenges they’re facing with that?

Luke Dowden: [00:10:38] I’m, again, being open about my bias. I think community colleges in Texas are doing an excellent job. I think we have the policy construct in place. Many know about House Bill 8—that is our state’s move to fund community colleges based on performance. We have incentives, Jeff, in place to better serve and serve more economically disadvantaged, academically disadvantaged, and adults 25+. There is a connectivity to the business community and the focus on business and industry and their needs. In terms of a sector in higher education that I think has a lot of promise and is doing a good job, I certainly think it’s community colleges. It doesn’t mean that others aren’t needed. We need different types of institutions for different types of learners, and I don’t think we talk enough about that in some of the narratives and the dialog. I have a lot of respect for private institutions and the liberal arts and what they provide. I have a child that is in that learning environment while I have another child that needed the community college and wanted the hands-on and wanted to be able to work and learn at the same time, as we think about work-based learning. We need different types of institutions for different types of learners.

Luke Dowden: [00:11:57] You ask about the challenges faced. I think understanding the market, that’s something that I’ve watched different organizations struggle with. Do they really understand the market that they’re serving? And then will you adapt the delivery in a fast enough method that you can serve more of the market? Meaning that, “Well, should we just always offer them in sixteen weeks, or could it be eight weeks?” One of the institutions I was at, I said, “We want to do what we do in the summer, twice in the fall and twice in the spring,” and people looked at me funny because we would have an eight-week session in the summer and two four-week sessions. I said, “We just want to do what we do in the summer, twice in the fall and twice in the spring.” And I said that enough that, when I had left that organization, that’s what they were doing. You can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean by that is create the conditions that you are doing something, but you’re maybe doing it over here, and you need to think about your calendar or how you’ll approach the rhythm or the different options and the different configurations of learning.

Luke Dowden: [00:13:02] In Oklahoma one time, there were 52 Tuesdays. So, 52 Tuesdays, if you come, you can earn your degree. And so I still think that there are those opportunities to improve. A couple of the other challenges to your original question of adapting and understanding the market is you do have people that stop in and out. When you work with folks that are learners, that learning is not going to be the first priority because of other priorities in their lives. Then you have to create a way for them to come back in easily. A lot of the work that I did at the last institution in Louisiana was around designing for people to stop out, expecting that, and creating pathways for them to come back in. And the hardest part is that there’s a lot of competition for people’s attention. We’re competing for attention. You’re not just competing against an online competitor or another brick-and-mortar competitor, but you’re creating an experience. Think about the things that we like to go and spend money and time on. I would say that people are very mindful of the experience they want, the expectations they’re coming in with. I think there’s also a new set of expectations that learners are bringing with them, based on what they’re experiencing with other services.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:24] Yes, I do think that we often talk about that, that competition for attention—not just being in competition with other providers, other businesses—and also that whole issue of really understanding your market because organizations do struggle with that, understandably, but it is something that most need to put more effort into.

The Rise of Digital Credentials and MicrocredentialsJeff Cobb: [00:14:40] You and I met originally because we were on a panel about digital credentials, microcredentials, alternative credentials, not necessarily your traditional degree. I want to have a little bit of conversation with you about that. What’s your perspective at this point on digital credentials? There seems to be a lot of buzz out there about it, particularly in the higher-education world. How much potential are you seeing in that at this point? And what are you seeing as the main challenges to them truly going mainstream?

Luke Dowden: [00:15:13] There’s been a long history of continuing ed in this country, and digital credentials and microcredentials in many ways are an extension of that. I want to lend appreciation to the history that we’ve had—good, bad, indifferent—around continuing professional education because that is a field that has been well established. But it’s always been to the side and not in the mainstream of higher education. But digital credentials and microcredentials have really pushed themselves into the mainstream. Are they mainstream yet? No. Do they garner a lot of attention? Yes. For me, for them to become mainstream, the organizations like mine…I’m very proud of our approach and others that really put learners at the center of what we’re trying to accomplish with microcredentials, digital credentials, alternate credentials, whatever you want to call them.

Luke Dowden: [00:16:04] We understand learners are struggling in the job market to articulate the skills they have, to quickly upskill and develop new skills, and to have evidence of skills. To the extent that digital credentials help someone provide evidence of something they have, realize a skill that they have, or gain a new skill, they’re going to become important. But I think it’s important to talk about the learner and the benefit to the learner, and then their connectedness to whatever job or next learning opportunity that it’s going to go to.

Luke Dowden: [00:16:34] We reached a point in our work there…we had started with digital badges around marketable skills because companies kept saying people don’t have oral communication, written communication, critical thinking, teamwork collaboration. Those were the top, regardless of industry. It didn’t matter if it was advanced manufacturing, IT, healthcare, it was the same list. So we started there.

Luke Dowden: [00:16:57] But we reached a point where we had to stop talking about badges. We still will report numbers, but we had to talk about skills because skills were what mattered to the learner and what mattered to the employer. To the extent that we stay focused on skills—and the badge or the microcredential, the professional certificate doesn’t become the thing—then I think that’s where we’ll realize the potential. The challenge, though, is that the technology is still emerging around badging and pathways, skills, wallets, comprehensive learner records, and ecosystems. It’s dizzying. It’s dizzying for us that are in that ecosystem and for learners trying to navigate, “What platform do I put my information on?” And will that be consumed by human resources information systems, which are significant barriers to digital credential adoption? We know that. I believe the first human resource information system that has large-scale adoption, that really starts to ingest these types of records, that will be the game changer for us.

Luke Dowden: [00:18:05] Conversely, we know this from spending time with SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, the majority of companies in the United States are not very large companies. They’re not. They’re small companies who may not have a human resource information system at all. How will they value digital credentials? Again, we’re fortunate that SHRM, that serves a medium to a smaller business, is involved in this work. But I think there are lots of challenges to adoption—not to mention the language that we use. We’ve got a new set of words around upskilling, reskilling, short-term training, digital credentials, digital wallet that, in our work…and we were fortunate. We worked with chambers of commerce that said, “Luke, we don’t care what you call it, but, whatever you call it, you have to explain it to us.” For higher-ed organizations or any organization, especially those that you work with, Jeff, the language is important, and you have to own the need to educate people about it. Hopefully, in that response—and I know it’s a little long-winded—you can see the layered set of challenges with digital credentials being mainstreamed.

Non-Credit Learning Opportunities in Higher EducationJeff Cobb: [00:19:14] Yes, definitely. I hear you and appreciate the challenge on the employer side of being able to make use of those credentials in a scalable way. That is going to change things once we do finally tip on that. On the higher-education side, you can tell me how much this is connected or not because you’re more ensconced in this world than I am, but we find, particularly when we’re talking with some of our association clients, and they want to work with higher education, they always run into issues because, if they’re dealing with an accredited institution that’s going to grant credit for a learning experience, that’s automatically a stumbling block. It slows things down that something has to go through this system, where you’re going to earn credit for the learning opportunity. Are you seeing more openness to or focus on non-credit learning opportunities in higher education, and those potentially being reflected in digital credentials? To what extent do you see those connected or not? And, regardless, is there more openness now to non-credit-type activity in the higher education world?

Luke Dowden: [00:20:19] I think it depends on what group of higher-education employees you talk to. By faculty, it varies, at type of institution, by discipline, by part of the country. It varies. Staff members, the same way. I would say here, for where I am now, I’m proud our organization’s realized we needed a much more robust set of credit-for-prior-learning procedures. We had an entire group of deans that worked on those. Then you have a set of processes that make it easier for learners, especially our veterans, to say, “Hey, I’d like you to evaluate my learning.” This credit for experience is a misnomer. That’s talking about terms. We’re engaged in credit for prior learning. So I would say I don’t know that I’ve seen a change.

Luke Dowden: [00:21:13] I know that, if you do work in digital credentials, you recognize very quickly you need robust credit-for-prior-learning procedures, practices, policies, and systems so that you can help move that learning. I do think there is a greater recognition of this false wall that we put between non-credit and credit. It’s learning. How do we value that to keep people moving towards credentials? Credential attainment is important. You know this, Jeff, and I know this, but you ask any economist, or you look at the Center on Education and the Workforce, and they will show you the lifetime earnings of someone with more credentials over time. And, of course, it’s even greater in certain disciplines—business, engineering, computer science, etc. But, still, the difference in someone with an associate’s degree and their lifetime earnings over someone with a high school diploma is, in a conservative nature, around a half a million dollars. And then it grows from there.

Luke Dowden: [00:22:15] Credentials are important. They are. And the half-life of skills. You and I both know there’s a constant need to replenish your skills because technology takes care of that skill that you had—it serves that purpose—and you need to recalibrate your own self-worth and your own ability to function in a new environment with a set of new realities. I know that’s a long answer to that question, but it’s some things that I think about in this interconnectedness of the credential and the acceptance of learning. I hope we break that, we stop talking about non-credit and credit at some point. We’re not there. I do think there are organizations that are certainly moving in that direction, and those will be the organizations that survive the enrollment cliff that many of our colleges and universities in the country are facing.

The Importance of Shared Values in Collaborations and Partnerships Between Higher Education and AssociationsJeff Cobb: [00:23:19] I do a lot of my work in the trade and professional association world, and one thing I’ve been increasingly interested in and trying to find connections in is how those worlds might work together productively: higher education and associations. I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to ask somebody like yourself your perspective on that. Do you see opportunities for collaboration between higher education and trade and professional associations?

Luke Dowden: [00:23:46] I do, but I think it’s all about a shared set of values. Do you have a shared set of values around learners and learning? I think there’s an opportunity to discuss that and determine that. Do you see a need where you can help stimulate, create, expand talent pipelines? Our country needs more talent to field high-demand, high-wage jobs. To the extent that a professional association and higher education (community college, four-year university, even standalone graduate school programs) can band together to supercharge a talent pipeline for an industry, like semiconductors or any kind of other advanced manufacturing, I think there’s an opportunity, but I think it’s around understanding the pathway. Can we help create a pathway? Can we bring the curriculum and the learning design? Can you bring the wrap-around support? Because, when you begin to serve different type of learners….

Luke Dowden: [00:24:45] We haven’t talked about segments within the adult learning population. They’ve got different needs. They have transportation needs. They have drop-in childcare needs. I think there’s a great need to re-imagine partnerships that serve the whole person, that get them trained and into the talent pipeline. I see great opportunity there. And you need all types of organizations. You need intermediaries. You need businesses that are at the table. You need some foundations that can invest. Maybe there are federal grants or state grants. I live in the world of possibility. I think things are possible, but you don’t want to lose the focus on the learner. What are we trying to help that learner accomplish? And then how are we contributing to the greater good of society? Hopefully that doesn’t sound too Pollyanna-ish for your audience, but I think that you have to look for areas where the right partner, the right time. We’ve certainly had those experiences where totally right partner, right time, and it’s worked.

The Future of Learning from a Higher-Ed PerspectiveJeff Cobb: [00:25:46] Right. I like that you want to focus on possibility. That’s not Pollyanna at all. It does obviously suggest the future, what’s out there in the future, so I don’t want to have you leave the conversation without getting a little of your perspective on the future. What has you most excited now, when you do look out at the horizon, what’s going on, and you think about what is possible for colleges, universities, continued education out there in the future?

Luke Dowden: [00:26:12] I think there’s an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves, and it’s not a far leap. I think it’s getting into the delivery mechanisms working. It’s moving from just descriptive explanation of who, what, when. But how do we analyze the data that we have on learners and then apply that to improving the learning experience? I think there are some organizations that are doing that really well. As companies move to a skills-based hiring—we know that’s still nascent—but there are significant organizations, Walmart, of course, that are involved, investing, and bringing others to the table around hiring based on skills, and how we adjust to ensure that our learners, whatever credential we award, can speak to their skills? They can tell you the level that they have that skill. They can give you examples, and they’ve got some documentation to back it up. I’m excited about that type of learning design.

Luke Dowden: [00:27:13] But learning design just interests me in general and then the use of design thinking. Do we go through these cycles where we iterate on a learning experience and continue to improve it? But it’s really about scale. And the thing that I do have to credit Alamo with is we think about scale here, and how do we serve more and open up more pipelines, Jeff? What excites me is can it help someone get an entry-level, family-sustaining-wage job that then allows them to grow inside of the company? It’s not a dead-end job; it’s an entry-level, family-sustaining-wage job that then opens up possibilities for that learner. It opens up benefits. It opens up the opportunity for their learning to be paid for by the company or even training inside of the company. That excites me. That excites me for an individual that I may never meet, you may never meet, to benefit from something that we can create by focusing and listening to them and providing training that does just that. It’s not training for the sake of training. It’s not education for the sake of education. But it helps that learner gain some kind of economic or social mobility that they are desiring.

Personal Approach to Lifelong LearningJeff Cobb: [00:28:32] What about you as a learner? Switching gears a little bit, we do always like to ask guests about their own approaches to lifelong learning. So do you have specific habits or practices, maybe favorite resources that you’d be willing to share?

Luke Dowden: [00:28:46] I get a lot of learning from LinkedIn. I’m not an influencer. I don’t get paid by LinkedIn, but I really enjoy watching what others are engaged in. From time to time, I enjoy participating on panels, Jeff; that’s how we met. I get to expand my network. I like that. I’m a connector, and so I like to expand my network. I learn by what others are doing. There are times where I’ll just deep dive on a topic—like I’m about to deep dive on artificial intelligence, spend a lot of time there thinking about it. But a lot of my learning is with engaging. I’m not consistent. My learning style will flip. A couple of years ago, I was heavy into podcasts. I feel myself entering that learning again because I’m in the car a lot. But those are really it. It’s definitely through professional associations and engaging in conferences and panels, as traditional as that sounds. Like I said, yes, I’m a chief online learning officer, and I still like to see people face to face, but I think podcasts are important. I think connecting and networking with people on LinkedIn. And then just engaging with my colleagues here, being present when people are presenting, and learning so much that I can about the field of education, definitely community colleges, I maintain a strong interest in.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:12] Luke Dowden is the chief online learning officer at the Alamo Colleges District. Learn more about how the district approaches online learning. They have also created six insight briefs that share their journey to elevate training options since introducing microcredentials, and that could be a great source if you’re considering adding or elevating microcredentials as part of your learning business’s portfolio.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Not Calling the Shots with Kemi Jona * Digital Credentials Aren’t Valuable Unless… * Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech * Generational Shifts and Alternative Credentials with Jim Fong of UPCEA

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbLearning is both a natural, intuitive activity all humans engage in and a complicated process we haven’t yet fully appreciated or understood. While there are plenty of nuances and neuroscientific details that factor in, fundamentally learning requires three elements: motivation, time, and effort.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 425, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele focus on some of the most important takeaways from andragogy and learning science, things that can help you be a better learner yourself and things that can position your learning business to address common barriers to learning.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] Learning is a complicated, nuanced process. But, despite the complexity, really only three things are required to learn well: motivation, time, and effort.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] From one perspective, learning is a natural, intuitive activity that all humans engage in. From our birth on, we’re learning. We learn as we develop. We learn how to sit up, how to crawl, how to walk. We learn how to understand and then create language. As we grow, we learn how to read, how to write, how to persuade.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:44] And yet, despite learning being a natural and common activity, there’s still a lot we haven’t fully appreciated or have only recently learned about how learning happens—and therefore how learning businesses can best support their learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:59] In this episode, number 425, we want to focus on some of the most important takeaways from andragogy and learning science, things that can help you be a better learner yourself and things that can position your learning business to help tackle common barriers to learning.

The Importance of Motivation, Time, and Effort in LearningJeff Cobb: [00:01:16] While there are plenty of nuances and neuroscientific details that go into learning, fundamentally we believe learning requires three elements: motivation, time, and effort.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:29] Time, that speaks to when learning happens. Effort, that’s required for how learning happens. And motivation, that provides the why of learning. All three—time, effort, and motivation—are needed.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:45] Definitely. With motivation and effort but no time, learners can’t really make progress.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:51] With motivation and time but no effort, no durable learning is possible.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:57] And, with effort and time but no motivation, progress is going to be pretty slow and directionless.

Students Often Aren’t Taught How to LearnCelisa Steele: [00:02:05] Yes, I might call it efficient but not necessarily effective in that case. And so we need time, motivation, and effort for learning to happen. Those aren’t particularly complicated elements, but I think they’re often overlooked.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:20] It’s so true. I think we’re positioned from early on in our lives to overlook them, at least in the United States. If you think about the education that we receive, that pre-K–12 system that we’re all participating in, when you’re young, it’s really not set up to position us well to be self-directed learners. You look at that system, and basically it directs us all the way through, dictating when and where learning happens, relying heavily on external motivators—the required attendance, the subjects that we have to take, the teacher-assigned grades. Often, we don’t get a great explanation around how to study effectively, how to actually be a good learner. We’re much more focused on the short-term gains of ineffective learning practices, like cramming, which I’m sure we’ve all done, or going through our notes and highlighting them. In general, we’re not set up to think about how learning happens and about how to position ourselves well to be these motivated learners that know how to manage our time around learning and understand the effort that we’re going to have to put into the learning.

Andragogy and Learning Science Help Us Understand How Learning HappensCelisa Steele: [00:03:32] So we want this episode to help fill that gap just a little bit. What we want to touch on are some of the most important takeaways from andragogy and learning science. These are things that we think, when you become aware of them, they’re going to help you tackle some of the common barriers to learning. You’ll hear people talking about they don’t have enough time, or that they have no time at all. Or people who still are struggling to know what to do or where to find resources. Or, even as you were talking about with cramming and highlighting, Jeff, sometimes a misunderstanding of what goes into effective learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:08] Yes, lots of misunderstandings around that. As a reminder, andragogy is the method and practice of teaching adult learners. It’s oriented towards adult education. Pedagogy is about teaching children. Andragogy is about adult education, associated, of course, with Malcolm Knowles. And I’ll say that we think of this as an approach, as a set of assumptions. Knowles himself described it as a set of assumptions. It’s not really learning science per se, but it is very helpful, very useful conceptually when thinking about adult learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:43] We want to draw on some of the takeaways from andragogy, but we also want to draw on takeaways from learning science, and that is where you get data and research that really look at which ways, which practices are most effective for instructors to teach, that will help students then learn more effectively. We want to draw from both those domains: andragogy and learning science.

The Role of Motivation in LearningJeff Cobb: [00:05:09] Let’s start with the first of the three pillars that we’ve proposed here out of motivation, effort, and time. We’ll look at motivation first. I will say that, personally, I’ve become much, much more appreciative over time of how important motivation is for people who want to learn because, ultimately, the learner does have to take on a certain level of responsibility for their learning—we’ve written about this in a number of cases—and that requires a certain level of motivation. Motivation can be more or less conscious. We’re not always fully conscious of what drives us, but we exist across a spectrum, and motivation can be more or less intrinsic. We’ve talked in the past about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Our theory is that, if you can be more conscious and if your motivations can be more intrinsic, that’s probably an optimal learning state.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:05] On the intrinsic motivation side, there have been studies done that show that intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation ties to self-determination theory, where you have this idea of, “I really need to be invested in my own learning, my own choices.” And so that ability to make sure that your motivation for learning ties to some goal that you identify with rather than getting the A—back to that K–12 system we were talking about—or passing the test, or whatever it is. It’s something much more personal. “I want to know about that because I’m curious or because it will help me solve this problem in my life.” That intrinsic motivation is much more powerful. Self-determination theory—we associate that with Edward Deci and Richard Ryan—and, again, a lot there ties to this idea of adults wanting to have that autonomy, wanting to have that sense of buy-in in what they do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:05] I think, as a lifelong learner, the more you’re able to identify, to tap the intrinsic motivations that you may have in any learning situation, that’s going to serve you well. It’s not that extrinsic motivators aren’t there or can’t be attractive, but, for example, if you’re engaged in a learning activity because you want a raise, you want to get that monetary reward, why is it that you want that monetary reward? Dig deep and figure out what your real motivation is, what that deeper intrinsic motivation is. This connects to the other point we’re making here around motivation, which is that you can be more or less conscious of your motivations, and we’d advocate trying to be as conscious of your motivations as possible, and also having a good sense of yourself as a learner and what learning requires. This would be metacognitive skills that enable you to more fully and more productively know your motivations that then direct your learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:03] I think that metacognition also helps you be aware of mindset. We know how important mindset can be in learning situations. You have Carol Dweck helping to popularize the ideas of either having a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, where you believe that your own and others’ abilities, skills, and knowledge are fixed quantities essentially, then that gives you a very different spin on why you might take a course. Because, if you don’t really believe it’s going to change you, you’re not going to be as open to the full range of what a learning experience might help you do in your own life. The growth mindset, on the other hand, where you believe that you can grow and change, that opens you up to step in wide open to that learning experience and be thinking about, “Wow, this could change how I approach X, Y, and Z or how I do things.” And so that mindset, and even that metacognition to be aware of your mindset, can be very powerful in how effective any particular learning experience is for you as a learner.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:09] I think also in that metacognition bucket, and certainly related to this idea of consciousness, is reflection. Reflection is something that we’ve talked about many times as being so important for learning in general but particularly for self-directed learners. Really being able to step back and look at your performance, at…

Celisa Steele: [00:09:29] …your feelings, at your willingness to try and fail. All of those things are important to reflect on. And I would say too that it’s really important to be honest in your reflection because, if you’re going to look at something like your performance, to get the full learning potential out of that reflection, you have to honestly say, “Wow, I did fail when I tried that.” And then you begin to unpack why or what you might do differently. But, if you aren’t honest in your assessment, and you say, “Well, I did fine,” that’s going to limit what improvements you might make and what new skills and how you might progress in your development.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:07] Yes. I’d say related to all of this, the mindset and then the reflection, is attention and being aware of your attention and then paying attention to when and how you’re able to learn best, really kind of…. We’ve talked about this at events we’ve held before where you attend an event; you’re present at it. But then we talk about attending to an event, which means giving it your attention and being aware of being in that learning situation, being aware of the need for a particular mindset, being aware of reflection, generally being conscious of that learning experience. And I would tie all of this back again to that intrinsic motivation and self-determination theory. I think when you are able to engage these metacognitive skills, be aware, reflect, attend to how you learn best, you’re more in control. You have that autonomy that Deci and Ryan talk about. I think you probably also have a greater sense of competence around what you’re doing, which is another factor that comes into their self-determination theory. So all of this is bundled up under that heading of motivation for us.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:11:13] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

The Role of Effort in LearningCelisa Steele: [00:11:52] The second pillar that we’ve posited as an essential element for learning is effort. To learn, we must pay attention, and, to pay attention, that requires energy. Jeff, you began talking about attention as we were wrapping up talking about motivation. But here, in the case of effort, when we’re thinking about attention here, it’s an acknowledgment that, to pay attention, it does require energy, and we can’t expect to expend high effort indefinitely. We have to be aware of the load that learning takes. And there are many takeaways from this. One would be, for example, we shouldn’t attempt to multi-task. There have been many studies that show that we can’t actually multi-task in the first place, that you’re essentially doing one thing for a short period of time, switching to another thing for a short period of time, and going back and forth, and that level of divided attention really prevents learning. We know from studies of learning around cognitive load that we need to give learning our full attention if we’re going to be able to absorb and process and then begin to move from short-term memory into long-term memory what we are learning, what’s being talked about in that learning experience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:09] Yes, there’s this level of attending to ourselves as learners and being aware of being learners but then paying attention to what it is that we are trying to learn. I said earlier that I’ve come to appreciate motivation much more. Even more so, I’ve come to appreciate the role of attention in learning because, if you can’t capture somebody’s attention as a teacher, if you can’t make the effort to give that attention as a learner, that connection is just not going to be made. And this is something we talk about in our “Presenting for Impact” course. If you’re an instructor, if you’re a facilitator, gaining the learners’ attention and being able to maintain that attention…of course, we know in this world we live in right now that can be extremely hard with all of the things that are competing for our attention.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:54] And then we know, to learn the most, we also need to engage actively—engagement, that requires effort. There are many ways that we might engage, that we might put in the effort to a learning experience. One very common and old way of putting in some effort is around notes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:15] Right. Just taking notes while we’re in a learning experience, that sounds like a no-brainer. But I’ve often been in rooms—whether I’m in the front of the room teaching, or I’m sitting in the room and looking around—and people are not necessarily taking notes. In fact, a lot of them aren’t paying attention because they’re multi-tasking. But, even if they are paying attention, they may not be taking notes. And, of course, there are approaches to notes that are more effective than others. In the first place, there’s some evidence that handwritten note-taking can be more effective than digital note-taking. You can get into arguments about that, but that seems to be generally true. But then there are other good, solid approaches for how to take notes in a way that you’re going to be able to memorize and set yourself up for review and the reflection that we talked about better than if you’re just randomly scribbling on a sheet of paper and thinking you’ll do something with it later.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:00] One specific method is the Cornell method, and it essentially has learners divide a note page (a physical sheet of paper usually) into notes, cues, and summaries. The notes are what you’re jotting down, those key points from a lecture, for example, or from a conference session that you’re attending. And you’re not trying to write down everything; you’re trying to jot down those key points. And then you might often add cues after the fact. Cues would be, “Okay, what is that note tied to?” It might be in the form of a question that the note essentially answers or other ways to assign headings or questions that help group and organize your notes. And then you would have a summary section where you are jotting down those key takeaways. So, if someone asks you, “Okay, how was that breakout session at the conference?” You could read that sentence or two. Or those handful of bullet points that you put there, those would be the key takeaways from that session. There are these established forms like that. Or, of course, you can develop your own.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:04] But the main thing is to be aware that note-taking can help you learn and then to have a format because, if you are trying to invent a format every time, that adds to the cognitive load of your experience in that learning environment. I you already know how you’re going to take your notes, that helps you focus your available mental bandwidth on the actual learning that’s happening, that learning experience that you’re in at the moment.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:29] Yes, and I’d say this approach to note-taking points back towards metacognition because, when you’re consciously taking notes in a certain way, you’re aware of yourself as a learner in a learner activity and really attending to that activity in a particular way, all of which does take effort, which is what we’re talking about here.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:46] Now, another way to engage—and this already popped up in some of your comments, Celisa—is obviously to ask questions of the instructor, of the facilitator, of your peers, of yourself, as you’re going along and really challenging yourself to do that. Don’t be passive. Take that material you’re receiving and probe and poke and ask about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:06] And be sure to make use of your prior knowledge. As adults, we come in with a range of experiences, past learning that we’ve engaged in, and so we tend to bring to any particular subject or topic some prior knowledge. One of the most effective ways we can put in a little bit of effort is to connect what we’re learning with what we already know, so you’re beginning to tie the new material, the new concepts to what you already know. That helps to anchor it in your mind. It helps to put it into your long-term memory. You can also begin to elaborate, so you’re taking whatever concepts you hear, maybe tying it to past experience, and beginning to elaborate and think about how that applies to your own work or your own life.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:50] I would say a good facilitator, a good instructor is going to help you do this. They’re going to provide circumstances that are going to make that part of the learning activity, but it’s also part of reflection for you to reflect on what that prior knowledge is. And then, of course, as part of that and beyond that, look for the applications of what you’re learning in your real life, in your work, or wherever you’re thinking it applies. What problems or needs do you have that what you’re learning might actually help you with? And think about how you would really apply what you’re learning against that problem, against that opportunity.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:24] Another way to put in effort that’s going to help you learn more effectively is around active retrieval. You mentioned highlighting earlier on in our conversation, Jeff. Highlighting is a relatively passive way of reviewing material. Active retrieval has you not just re-reading your notes but actually using some of those questions of yourself, quizzing yourself on key points and seeing, “Okay, can I actually pull out the important information based on my own questions of myself?” So you don’t want to just look at what’s in front of you; you want to practice that actively. “Without any paper in front of me, can I come up with this information? Can I apply these skills without the crutch of the notes beside me?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:09] Yes, that’s another thing I’ve gained so much appreciation for over time. Honestly, I find it can often be very painful to do this. It does take an unusual level of cognitive effort, at least for me. But the payoffs are just so large when you work without a net and have to bring whatever you learned out of your mind on your own, without passively doing something like reviewing notes.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:36] And so all of that ties into reflection and being aware of what’s going on—that metacognition—all that’s going to help you know when to push ahead and when to take a break and then maybe return later to that topic because, again, it does take effort, and effort requires energy, and we don’t have limitless energy. So you do need to be aware of when your energy and your effort begin to flag. Maybe that’s a signal to take a break rather than trying to force yourself to plunge ahead. There’s a lot to be said for taking breaks, giving your brain that mental pause so that you can come back and re-engage and be more effective in your learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:16] Yes, and I’d say too that lifestyle factors can come into play here and impact what level of effort you’re able to put into things. I’d say they probably can impact your motivation at times as well. Getting enough sleep. Getting high-quality sleep. Trying to manage stress, manage your diet. Getting exercise. All of these things play a role in how well we’re able to show up to learning, how well we are able to pay attention, to engage, to tap into our motivation to learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:45] And then, ultimately, how well we’re able to remember because we know that memory is heavily affected by all those things you ticked off: sleep, stress, diet, and exercise.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:06] That’s motivation and effort out of our three pillars here. Let’s talk about the third and final one, time.

The Role of Time in LearningCelisa Steele: [00:21:14] One of the points we’d like to make is that learning is both episodic and continuous. If you’ve been tuning into the podcast for any amount of time, you may have heard us say, or you may have heard elsewhere other people saying, that learning is a process, not an event. And we do believe that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:32] Absolutely.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:33] But events (meaning courses, conferences, etc.) do factor into the process of learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:40] That’s right. The process is made up of events of a sort that can continuously happen over time, consistently happen over time. Of course, there are ways to improve learning in those episodes. If it’s a specific course, a Webinar, or a conference session or whatever, we obviously know that there are things to do, that they can make those better designed, that can make you better able as a learner to take advantage of a particular episode. But then there’s also improvement across those episodes. Are you able to set goals? Is there an overall learning plan? We’ve talked a lot about pathways. How do you think about a pathway, whether you’re doing that for your learners or helping your learners design their own pathway and thinking about that process taking place over time?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:23] I think we’ve all heard—I know I even say it myself—but learners often feel like there isn’t enough time. Actually, not even learners, I think just adults. Humans these days tend to feel like there’s not enough time. One thing that we have heard and that I have come to believe with my whole heart is that time is not a resource; it’s a priority. We do have time. It’s just how we choose to spend it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:49] Yes, definitely. If you want to seriously engage with learning, if you’ve got any sort of significant learning goal, you have to make the learning a priority, and you have to make the time for doing it a priority. If you do that, you’ll discover that you do actually have time to learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:06] I think wrapped up in what you just said there, Jeff, is that you do need to schedule time to learn. If you think it’s just going to happen, odds are it’s not going to happen because your day is going to fill up with other tasks and other activities that wind up taking all of your available time. So you need to set aside the time, carve it out to learn. And then what you do with the time that you do schedule for learning is important—you can use that time that you’re scheduling more or less effectively.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:40] One very effective practice is—above and beyond just carving out time. “Okay, I’m going to go to the conference on these three days,” or “I’m going to take this online learning course over the next month.” Beyond carving out the time for those episodes, for those events that make up learning, you also need to carve out some time for that more continuous process, for the learning that happens across episodes. That means you’re going to then have time for spaced repetition and distributed practice because those are what contribute to durable learning in your progress and help move new information, new skills from that shorter-term memory to your longer-term memory, where you can call on them when needed and where you’re much more fluent then in using those skills or that knowledge when they are applicable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:30] Yes. To be honest, for me, this is at the core of time as a factor in learning because we talked about learning is episodic as well as continuous, happening over time. But it is the “over time” part that is so important. You have to have repeated exposure to whatever it is you’re trying to learn. You have to engage with it in different ways, at different points in time, over time. The one shot hardly ever does it for truly learning something. So be aware of this need to space things out and to keep coming back, sometimes repeating things and reviewing them, reflecting on them, trying them in different ways.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:11] I know personally this is something I do as a musician. If I want to learn, say, the scales on a guitar, that’s not going to be a one-step process. I’m going to do those same scales repeatedly over and over again, over time, but not just rote repeating the scales. I’m going to have to try them out in different ways, in different contexts over time. And I think this is another aspect of making good use of your time. How do you orchestrate your repetition, your practice, in a way that you’re going to vary the context in which you’re trying to learn the material and ultimately cement it into your long-term memory?

Celisa Steele: [00:25:46] I think that we also have to be realistic about what is sustainable. We know that our brains get tired, that our brains need breaks, or we need changes of pace or things that are going to re-engage us so that we don’t begin to tune out that monotone of a lecture, for example. There are specific approaches like the Pomodoro technique. The idea there is you set a timer for 25 minutes, and you’re going to focus on whatever the task or the learning is at hand for those 25 minutes. And then you’re going to take a 5-minute break, and you might get up, walk outside, do some jumping jacks, whatever it is, but you’re going to do something that truly is a break. Doing those multiple 30-minute segments like that—where you have 25 minutes of intense focus, a 5-minute break, and then you rinse and repeat—suddenly makes a morning of learning possible. If you think you’re going to sit down from 8 am to noon and plow through that online course, that’s not really as effective because, again, our brains get tired, they need breaks, and so we need to be aware of that. Part of our scheduling, part of our attention to time and its role in learning is to be realistic and to carve out breaks.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:00] The truth is, this is another thing I’ve come to appreciate—I feel like this is turning into “the things I’ve come to appreciate about learning over time.” But short shots of repetition and practice over time—again, spaced out over time—can be extraordinarily effective. Oftentimes, you’re going to sit down and do that four-hour session, which, as you’re saying, is hard to sustain. Even if you break it up into chunks, there’s still only so much you can absorb in one session. But 5, 10, 15 minutes every morning for two weeks, you’d be surprised what you can learn at the end of that, what you can walk away with. It’s actually in your long-term memory that you’re now able to know or do or call up when needed.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:39] One of the other things we would like to say about the role of time in learning is the sense of progress and how it can make time feel as you’re learning. What we have in mind here is this idea of the S-curve of learning. If you plot out progress as you’re learning a new skill, for example, it’s natural that that new skill or behavior is going to be pretty hard at first. You’re going to have a flatter line of progress at first, while it’s new. It’s going to get easier over time with practice, so you’re going to have a sharper rise in that curve of your learning. And then once you get really proficient, it’s going to begin to flatten out again. So you get kind of a sideways S if you plot it on a graph there.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:28] It’s important, at some level, just to be aware of this, to have that metacognition, to be aware that learning, in most cases, does go more slowly at first when you’re totally new; then you begin to pick up a lot of speed as you’re really becoming more fluent with it; and then it becomes so easy that you begin to flatten out again. When you flatten out, that signals that you’re ready to potentially jump to another S-curve, to move up to that next tier of learning that you want to do (add on a new skill, add on something new). And, again, you’ll expect it’s going to be slower at first; you’re going to get better at it; and then, once you’ve really become fluent in it, it’ll flatten out again.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:08] I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything about this specifically, or if any scientific studies have been done on it, but I suspect those curves become a little bit different over time as you gain more and more expertise in a particular area. I think any of us know when we start out with something brand-new…. My examples are always musical because that’s where I think I do a lot of my learning. But, if you start out as a student on the piano, and you don’t know anything about playing the piano, at some point in that curve, you’re going to make a huge leap, because just from going to knowing nothing to being able to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is a big leap. But, as you know more and more, and it gets to be more and more about fine-tuning, this is, again, where I think those metacognitive skills come into play in knowing yourself as a learner, knowing what you’re trying to accomplish as a learner, and you’re probably going to have more incremental goals that, frankly, may be harder to achieve than what you were trying to achieve early on in the process. But being aware that this is how things work and that it’s a natural flow of building competency over time, I think, helps with managing the whole process.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:12] There’s a concept of deliberate practice, and I think that also ties to this idea of improvement over time because, if something’s too easy, and if you’re aware of that, then that means you probably want to move on and begin to build on that skill or that knowledge. Because, if it’s too easy and you just stay at that level, odds are you’re going to become uninterested in it. If you try to do something, and it’s too hard, then odds are you’re going to become discouraged. You want to pitch the practice to your own appropriate level. And that level is going to change over time because, like you said, Jeff, if you go from knowing nothing on the piano to suddenly knowing, okay, which keys play which notes to being able to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” if you keep playing Mary had a little lamb, you’re going to drive yourself crazy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:59] Or drive everybody in the house crazy too.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:00] So you want to move on. You want to take your deliberate practice and now begin to focus on a new song or whatever your next goal might mean for you. But that’s the idea of deliberate practice and being aware of where you really are now. Sometimes you’ll have an instructor, a facilitator, a coach, or a mentor who can also help you see that and help you know when it’s time to move along. But it’s also something for you to cultivate in yourself, that awareness of, “Okay, where am I? Am I ready to take on a new challenge or to turn the volume up on this a little bit? Or am I good right now in terms of what I’m doing?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:35] That’s a look at time. We’ve talked about effort as well. We’ve talked about motivation. Again, our view—this is reductionist, obviously, but boiling things down—the motivation needs to be there. You’ve got to put in the effort if you really want to learn something. And it all requires time, in both what you do in a specific episode of time but then also what you do consistently and continually over time, putting in that effort, hopefully motivated to do it, to really achieve the learning goals that you set out for yourself.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:17] Learning is a complicated, nuanced process. But, despite the complexity, really only three things are required to learn well: motivation, time, and effort.

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Related Resources* An Essential Guide to Andragogy for Learning Businesses * Taking Action with Learning Science * Exploring Motivation and Learning * The Truth in Learning, Leadership, and Motivation with Matthew Richter

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbFundamentally there are only two factors to consider when looking to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business: audiences (those you sell to) and products (what you sell).

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 424, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele break down four high-level approaches to growing your learning business, weigh the generic risks of each, and then focus in on ways to maximize adoption of existing products among your existing audiences.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Sometimes it’s helpful to take hairy subjects, like marketing and strategy, and break them down into simple—but not simplistic—terms, like today’s look at audiences and products, existing and new.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:29] If you’ve tuned in before, odds are you know that we focus on and often talk about the reach, revenue, and impact of learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:39] In this episode, we want to focus on the core ways in which a learning business can grow its reach, revenue, and impact. In the simplest terms, that comes down to new and existing audiences and products.

Four Options with New and Existing Audiences and ProductsJeff Cobb: [00:00:52] That’s right. There are basically two factors to consider: audiences and products. In other words, those you sell to and what you sell to them. Using those two factors, you can set up a 2×2 matrix—a favorite tool of consultants like ourselves—and you can use that to outline the four approaches to growing reach, revenue, and impact for your learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:17] That’s right. You can grow by reaching new audiences with new products, and, if you’re a brand-new learning business, that’s your option. But we’re assuming that you’re probably not new, that most of our listeners are probably folks already working in a learning business. But, even if you are in an existing learning business, this is still an option—you could decide to develop a new product and promote it to a new audience. That might be the case if you’ve traditionally had a domestic base, but now you want to tap an international audience, and you need a new offering to appeal to that international audience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:55] So that would be one quadrant of our 2×2 matrix if you’re inclined to think visually about this. You don’t have to; you can just follow along with what we’re saying. But, if you want that kind of visual representation, that’s one: reaching new audiences with new products. But you can also grow your reach, revenue, and impact by taking current products, offerings that are already in your portfolio, and targeting those to new audiences. That might be the case if you’re looking to go international and you already have offerings that would be of interest and appropriate for that.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:27] So those are the first two quadrants. The third quadrant has to do with the fact that you can also drive growth by developing new products that you then offer to your current audiences. Maybe you have a basic offering for professionals in a topic, but you want to build out an intermediate offering for them to be able to continue on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:50] And then, finally, you can look at your current audiences and your current products and figure out how to maximize the revenue coming from each audience and coming from each current product.

Risk and the Four OptionsCelisa Steele: [00:03:01] It not only maximizes the revenue but also the reach and the impact as part of that as well. We’re going to talk more about this approach, this quadrant, in just a moment or two, but we will say here that, when we consider these four options, if we consider these four quadrants in terms of risks, going out to new audiences with new products is the riskiest because, in that situation, you don’t have a relationship with the audience or audiences that you’re targeting, and you’re investing time and money in new and, therefore, unproven products.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:34] So true. This one, I think, is often like a moth to a flame. I find, when I’m working with organizations, there’s that idea that there’s that whole new market out there, and we have new products we can introduce. But, as you said, that’s the riskiest. The next most risky is going to be targeting new audiences with your existing products. You’re dealing with products, but you’re trying to present them to new audiences that you don’t have a relationship with.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:00] And then what we would put just behind that in terms of risk is targeting existing audiences with new products. So you’re, again, investing in unknown products, but you do have a relationship with the audiences you’re targeting. They’ve hopefully had positive experiences with your offerings in the past. Hopefully that will therefore predispose them and incline them to try something new that you have to offer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:24] And then, finally, trying to grow with your existing products and your existing audiences is the least risky because you’re working with audiences who you presumably know well and hopefully trust you and also with products that are already built and are known quantities. This tends to involve the least investment of time and money of the four options.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:45] We want to focus in on this approach in this episode and talk a little bit about what you can do with your existing products and existing audiences to try to grow your reach, revenue, and impact. Now, we will state here that there is an assumption built into this being the least risky approach, and that is it assumes that you have the right products for the audiences that you’re targeting. Hopefully you’ve done the market assessment, and hopefully you revisit that market assessment work periodically to really help ensure that you do have the right products for your existing audiences.

More Customers Through Better ConversionJeff Cobb: [00:05:22] Let’s assume that you do have the right products; then getting more customers for the offerings you already have is one of the most straightforward ways to grow. For this to happen, you have to increase your prospects and leads. That’s, of course, easy enough to say, but how do you go about doing that?

Celisa Steele: [00:05:42] Right. Here we’re talking about you have an audience that you’re focused on, but you want to make sure that the greatest percentage possible of that audience is actually a customer, someone that comes to you for your learning products and services. Making sure that your current target audience or audiences are fully aware of your offerings that are relevant to them, that’s a really important way to get more customers. I would say that, in our experience, organizations often assume that there’s higher awareness among their audiences than there actually is. They might feel like they are beating the drum ad nauseam about a particular conference or course or whatever it might be, but often, when you actually ask people in that audience, they might say, “I’ve never heard of that before. I didn’t know this organization offered that.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:27] Yes, we find that all the time when we go out and do market assessment work, surveying, for organizations. We like to talk about awareness in relationship to conversion. To better understand how to maximize participation in your offerings, you have to understand how aware your current audiences are of your offerings and then also whether they’ve actually participated in them. This will give you a conversion ratio—that is, out of those who are aware, how many have converted into paying participants? First, you get the general awareness, and then you get is this product actually working with those who are aware?

Celisa Steele: [00:07:07] This is an area where we have some experience working with clients and consulting engagements around trying to gauge this awareness. And so, Jeff, there’s a survey question that we’ll tend to use.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:19] Yes, we use this all the time, and we’re happy to freely share this for folks to try, even if you’re not working with us. We’ll ask a version of this: “Prior to this survey, how aware were you of the following options from our learning business?” It might be specific online education options, or it may be some subcategory—whatever you’re trying to find out more about. And then we say, “Please also indicate whether you have ever participated in one of these.” We’ll give categories of awareness and participation, starting with “not aware”; “aware, have participated”; “aware, have not participated”; “aware, unsure about participation.”

Celisa Steele: [00:08:03] I think that last one probably hurts a lot of learning businesses—that someone might have heard of it, and they can’t remember if they’ve participated or not. Again, unfortunately…

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:12] The truth can hurt.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:13] Yes, the truth can hurt. This can be the case. So it’s still helpful to ask that question and to find out how many of the participants in your audience fall into that particular category. What this is going to tell you is it’s going to give you a sense of overall awareness. If the awareness is relatively low, that is, if you have a lot of people saying “not aware” in response to that survey question, then that’s going to steer you towards the idea that more promotion is probably needed. You need to get the word out. You need to make sure that you really are communicating with the audience and doing that through the right platforms and vehicles to really connect with them and make sure that they do become aware of what you have to offer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:56] Right. And then, of course, you’re concerned with how strong is participation relative to the awareness that seems to be out there. If participation is relatively low compared to the level of awareness, then you may need to adjust aspects of the offering. There may be things about the offering that just aren’t capturing interest at the level that you need and aren’t driving people towards conversion—actually enrolling and registering for whatever that learning experience is.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:23] Right. This gets back to the caveat we said at the beginning that, while it can be least risky to try to get more reach, revenue, and impact out of your existing audiences and your existing products, you do have to make sure that you have the right products for that audience. And what a high level of awareness but a low level of participation might tell you is, actually, that product isn’t as spot-on a fit as you thought it would be for your audience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:49] Right. Once we’ve done this, as we mentioned, we’ll create, basically, a conversion ratio with participation in the numerator and awareness in the denominator. If you need to pause and go refresh yourself on what a numerator is and what a denominator is, you can do that. But the numerator is on the top, and the denominator’s what it’s divided by. There’s no magic or scientific answer to what your conversion ratio should be. It’s going to depend on the nature of the offering and your knowledge, over time, of how your products tend to perform. But, as a general rule, if you have a conversion ratio of below .7 or so, you definitely have some room for improvement. You may need to address elements of your offering or improve the quality (as opposed to the quantity) of your promotions. We’ll get into that more in just a minute.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:37] Yes, and I think that’s a point, though, I will pause right here to underscore, which is that, again, if you have high awareness but low participation, it could point to an underlying opportunity in the product itself, to change how that works or what factors are involved in that product. But, to what you just said there, Jeff, too, it might also point to what you need to emphasize in the promotion itself. Maybe you aren’t speaking the love language of your learners in your promotions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:03] Often organizations do not really make the value clear because so many times you’re dealing with an LMS. It’s just churning out these standard product pages, sales pages, and you may be listing things like learning objectives, for example. But those rarely convey the value—the real outcomes—that you’re going to produce from any learning experience, and so you’re just not hooking the learner with the language you’re putting out there. We’ll say too that we’re always going to ask as a follow-on for those who say they’re aware, but they haven’t participated: What’s your primary reason for not participating in whatever the offering is? You can usually have some carry-forward logic, and then you may want to ask about specific points that you’re concerned about, that you know may be an issue with the product. Or you may want that to be open-ended. It really depends on the nature of the research you’re doing.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:52] That wraps up our look at conversion. If you’re looking to get more reach, revenue, and impact out of your existing products with your existing audience, you want to think about conversion. We just gave you some ways to think about that and to perhaps do some market assessment to make sure you understand the conversion piece.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:12:16] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

More Customers Through ReferralsCelisa Steele: [00:12:54] Another route to go is to get more customers by using your current customers to help you. Essentially, this is asking for referrals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:06] Yes, and this is such a powerful thing to do that I think organizations don’t do enough of. We don’t do enough of this. It’s something that we’re working on in our business. Getting one customer to tell another prospective customer that they should look at your stuff, that they should participate in these experiences, go to that conference—very, very powerful. Of course, you do have to ask for those referrals. Some will happen organically, but, if you really want this to take off, it’s something that you have to do.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:32] This reminds me, in the conversation you had with Kemi Jona of the University of Virginia, he was talking about the importance of curation filters and that, when he gets a recommendation from a colleague about an article to read or a book to read, then that bumps it to the top of his list because that resource has passed the threshold of someone that he trusts. And that’s often even for unpaid stuff that he was talking about—an article on the Web. Think about how much more valuable that would be for a paid experience. So, again, if we pause to reflect on our own behavior, we can recognize the importance of referrals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:09] Yes, there’s research out there to back up this type of thing. We know that earned advertising, which is essentially what a referral really is, is more effective than owned (or paid) advertising. The stuff that you pitch yourself or you pay to appear somewhere else, that’s just not as effective. It often means that you should rethink things if you’re spending a lot of money on paid advertising and not giving any thought to this earned advertising. It’s worth thinking about. Are there some ways that we can invest time—and time is probably going to be the biggest one—but possibly even some dollars in getting those referrals?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:47] Right. And so, to get referrals—again, we made the point just a moment ago—you need to ask for them. Again, you might get a few spontaneously, but there’s a lot to be said for going ahead and making it clear that you are looking for referrals. Ask for them rather than just waiting and hoping. You also want to think then about when to ask current customers for referrals. When are the logical points that you’re going to be able to have interaction with those current learners, that you can then ask them for a referral, and then perhaps bake it into part of your process? Maybe as part of your after-course evaluations or any sort of follow-up that you might be doing with those learners who have just seen what the experience is like and how great it is, and they might therefore be primed to share with others. Can you go ahead and plant that seed and say, “Who else would benefit from this course? Will you reach out to them?” And give them a little bit of language to help them do that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:42] Yes, giving them language, equipping them, to make it as easy as possible for them to make that referral, I think that’s really important because a lot of times somebody will ask me if I’m willing to be a referral, if I’m willing to refer business, and, yes, I am, but it’s not like I’m suddenly going to stop on a dime and do that. But, if you give me an e-mail I can forward, I might do it right away.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:05] We’ve experimented with referrals for events in the past. For example, when we had some conferences in the past, we wanted to make sure that those who had registered were helping to spread the word, and so we offered that they could bring a colleague or a friend for free. That was relatively easy for us to put in place. It was an online conference, so it had relatively low cost for us to allow someone else to come for free, and then, for that attendee, that was a way for them to deliver some value to a colleague they know and like. So it was hopefully that win-win. And that’s the kind of thing that you can think about. Are there times and places when it might make sense for you to either offer a deep reduction in price or potentially even offer something for free to help make sure that that referral flywheel is working for you?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:56] Right. And, of course, we do it for our consulting work too. It’s often more important in higher-ticket-type items. If you’re providing consulting, custom training, coaching, or things like that, you definitely want a referral process built into that. It’s by far the easiest way to get not only customers but the types of customers that you want.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:17] Right. As you said, the higher the price tag, the more valuable the referral in general because, if someone’s really contemplating that high-ticket item, knowing that someone that they have a trusted relationship with says, “Yes, this is good value for you,” that’s going to help tip the balance and make them say, “Okay, I will spend that amount on this.” I would say too that you can think about referrals either as standard practice—that’s something that we bake in around our consulting engagements—or you can also potentially run some experiments, more like we did with our online conference and this idea of if, for a period of time, we ran a bring-a-colleague-for-free promotion, would that help us with referrals? Be thinking about how to have your current learners help you get the word out about the value that you provide.

More Customers Through TestimonialsJeff Cobb: [00:18:06] That’s referrals, as one approach. The next approach, it really is a referral in a way because you’re again getting people to speak on your behalf, but this is a little more scalable, I think, and something that you can incorporate into multiple places in what you do, and that’s testimonials, getting customer testimonials.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:27] Right. Again, this is social proof. This is trust. We tend to believe what our peers say about a product or experience more than the organization that’s providing that product or experience because it seems like, of course, that organization, the learning business that’s providing experience, is going to have a bit of a biased view. They’re going to say, “This is great! Come learn with us!” But if that peer will say, “This was a great experience,” you’re much more likely to believe that. Essentially, we need to make sure that you’re making good use of testimonials. You want to put them in your promotions. You want to make them prominent in your course catalog. You want to feature them on your conference Web site. Etc. Think about all the places where you’re talking about the value of the learning experiences you offer. Are there testimonials there? Could there be more? Could they be more targeted?

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:16] Right. Testimonials, as you suggested there, Celisa, are like the proof of value—you have actual customers attesting to the value of the course or whatever the experience is. Ideally, you would couple testimonials with what we might characterize as “hard” data, which can be things like course completions, satisfaction ratings, days to job hire for certificants, things like that—that quantitative type of data that people often look for. But all of this combines to get at the fantastic value of what you offer.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:48] That’s right. Combining the anecdotal and qualitative testimonials with quantitative data whenever you can, that’s the goal because you’re getting both sides. You’re getting those numbers as well as the stories to help convey the value of what you’re offering. And, related to how to present these things, a picture goes a long way when it accompanies a testimonial. It helps it feel like, oh, wow, this is an actual, real person. When we talked about referrals a few moments ago, that’s more of a one-on-one, someone saying, I’m saying, “Hey, Jeff, you should check this out. I had a great experience at this conference. I think you would enjoy it.” With a testimonial, it’s more of me speaking generically like, “Hey, this was a great conference. I learned a lot. I think others might benefit from it.” But part of what helps it feel more like a personal recommendation is if my picture is there with what I’m saying.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:43] Right. I’ll say this is a case where, if a picture is worth a thousand words, which it is, a video is probably worth a million words. We’ve certainly done some of that as well. And, of course, it’s so easy now to shoot videos or to get your prospective testimonials to shoot videos. We’ll mention too that you can incentivize referrals and testimonials—offer something in exchange for them. Depending on what that is, you may want to make it clear that people have been offered some sort of incentive. I think it’s always better if you don’t have to incentivize. And you can appeal to the altruistic tendencies that people have. It’s just a simple request. If it’s timed right, it can yield testimonials. Because your customers presumably like you, they want to help you, and a logical point for asking for a testimonial is just after they’ve completed the educational experience, and presumably or hopefully at that poin, they’re going to be pretty jazzed up about it and look forward to saying good things about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:40] Our recommendation here is to look at your promotions and check and see are you making good use of testimonials? And then, if you’re not making good use, do you have testimonials, and you just haven’t put them to use? Or do you need to perhaps organize a social proof initiative, or you’re going to go out and gather some testimonials that you can begin to use? Or maybe you need to put a system in place that ensures that you’re going to continue to collect testimonials at the logical point, for example, as part of a post-course evaluation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:12] I will say I have never met an organization that couldn’t do more and better with both referrals and testimonials. Even the ones that are doing it well, there’s always more that can be done there. And I’ll say that’s true of us as well. Physician, heal thyself. This is an area that we’re always working on.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:29] We’ve been focused on this idea of audiences and trying to look at conversion among your existing audiences, looking at referrals among your existing audiences, looking at testimonials from your existing audiences. Now we want to turn from audience to product, and we’re going to look at the idea of how you can get greater reach, revenue, and impact out of your existing products by doing things like bundling, upselling, and having add-ons available.

Greater Use of Existing Products Through Bundling, Upselling, and Add-OnsJeff Cobb: [00:22:57] Everybody’s familiar with this. I think it happens all the time, for example, with travel sites. If you go to, say, Expedia, and you’re just looking for a flight, they’re going to try to get you to book a hotel too. It’s right there at the top of your flight options. Of course, they’re doing the same thing with cars too and so basically trying to get a much bigger transaction by getting folks to buy not just a flight but a flight and a hotel or, better yet, a flight, a hotel, and a car. And that’s because they realize that, at least for some customers, that’s going to represent some high value because they might need all of those things when they’re going to be taking a trip. They want to be right there to say, “You may need this, and we’re going to provide it.”

Celisa Steele: [00:23:35] Another tactic is suggestive selling, and this is where you look to get a customer to add something on or to upgrade. Again, we’ll stay in the travel industry. Southwest offers an add-on for EarlyBird Check-In. When you purchase that flight, do you want to be able to board early on? That’s going to cost you a little bit extra. We’ve got Amazon that pushes products through its suggestive selling, and it’ll say, “These things are frequently bought together,” and that, by the way, actually makes it a little bit of social proof because the phrase “frequently bought together” says, hey, others who are like you, who were here and interested in what you searched for, bought that plus this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:17] I want to be just like those other frequently-bought-together people. I will say I do usually take the EarlyBird Check-In on Southwest because I don’t like having to stand in line C or whatever at the very end that you can get stuck in. In the learning world, we’ve seen this kind of thing a lot with conferences. You might, for example, see three registration options. Maybe one’s for the live sessions only. One is for live, and then you also get the recorded sessions bundled up with it. And maybe one comes with entry to a reception where the keynote speakers are going to be in attendance or a pre-conference workshop.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:55] This is just a note to say that there are options to think about beyond early bird discounts and on-site penalties for your conferences. What other value might you add—and then charge more for? That front-row seat in the general sessions, so you’re on the front row for that keynoter? Maybe a small-group Q&A with a presenter? Those are things to be thinking about. And all of that could, of course, work for in-person or potentially online education. Maybe not the front-row seat, but this idea of having closer contact or more interaction, like the Q&A session, that would work, whether in person or online.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:33] We’ll wrap this up by saying that, when you’re using bundling or using suggestive selling—it may go without saying, but we’re going to say it anyway—the combinations and options need to be relevant and logical; they need to make sense. Think about your different audience segments—there’re probably certain segments that would be looking for more value and willing to pay, and then certain things that would make sense for them. And, if you do the work to figure out what they care about and what they value, then you’re going to be able to make the right bundling offers or the right suggestive offers.

Greater Use of Existing Products By Increasing Buying FrequencyCelisa Steele: [00:26:03] Another way to get greater use out of your existing products is to look at the buying frequency. This is the idea that your customers will purchase sooner than they have typically. Now, this does mean that you are retaining customers, and retaining customers usually means that you have to stay in communication with them, and you have to provide value—and that’s, by the way, not always value that you charge for, but it might be things like the newsletter that you send out that shows the kinds of expertise your learning business has to share, Web site, blog posts, things like that that help keep you and your learning business on your customers’ radar and also help the customer understand that next logical step. What else do you offer that they can and should make use of?

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:53] Right. Again, a classic example—one that’s going to be familiar to so many of our listeners—is the annual conference attendee. This is a person who shows up once a year. But, if you think of the value to your learning business and to the learner if you can get them to participate in a few additional learning experiences throughout the year, that can often represent significantly more revenue for you, and it’s moving the customer from a one-off experience to a more ongoing, relationship-driven interaction with your organization and with learning, which they’re going to benefit from.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:26] Getting people to purchase more frequently requires putting forethought into the learning and buying path that you’re providing for them. Make sure that there are clear and logical next steps presented to the learner, so, when they finish a course, what’s the next one that would make sense for them to take? Learning and certification paths, career-focused curriculum, competency models—all of these can be very useful in making that next logical step very clear to your learners.

Wrapping UpJeff Cobb: [00:27:56] To wrap all this up, tie a bow around it, we’ll note that marketing at its essence is about the audiences you serve and the products that you offer to those audiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:09] In the end, the core of a learning business’s marketing strategy really boils down to audiences and products, the existing ones and the ones that you might add.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:19] We hope the view that we offered of those four essential options—new products to new audiences, existing products to new audiences, new products to existing audiences, and existing products to existing audiences—might give you some clarity as you think through your marketing strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:45] Sometimes it’s helpful to take hairy subjects, like marketing and strategy, and break them down into simple—but not simplistic—terms, like today’s look at audiences and products, existing and new.

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Related Resources* Tool Talk: The Product Value Profile * Product Development and Learning Communities with James Young * 3 Factors That Limit Sales of Education

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Randy BowmanIn a crowded and competitive market, high quality signaled by accreditation can help a learning business stand out. That’s why we wanted to talk with Randy Bowman, president and CEO of the International Accreditors for Continuing Education and Training, a nonprofit standards development and accrediting body.

In episode 423, Randy talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about what IACET does to support providers of learning, the development and maintenance of important standards like the continuing education unit (or CEU), the benefits of accreditation, and the surprising fact that two-thirds of organizations undergoing IACET’s accreditation process don’t offer CEUs—they embark on the process for the other value it can bring it.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesRandy Bowman: [00:00:00] Whether you pursue accreditation or not, pursue the quality.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:08] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:09] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] In a crowded and competitive market, high quality, signaled by accreditation, can help a learning business stand out. And that’s why we wanted to talk with Randy Bowman, president and CEO of IACET. The International Accreditors for Continuing Education and Training (or IACET for short) is a nonprofit standards development and accrediting body in the continuing education and training space. Randy brings to his role as CEO at IACET deep technical expertise, a focus on transformative leadership, and a commitment to human-centered design, and he works to ensure education and technology serve as pathways to human potential and societal progress. In episode 423, Randy talks with Celisa about what IACET does to support providers of learning, the development and maintenance of important standards like the Continuing Education Unit (or CEU), the benefits of accreditation, and the surprising fact that two-thirds of organizations undergoing IACET’s accreditation process don’t offer CEUs—they embark on the process for the other value it can bring. Celisa and Randy spoke in late June 2024.

What IACET Does and OffersCelisa Steele: [00:01:37] Tell us about IACET, what it does in general, and then maybe a sketch of what it offers in terms of learning opportunities.

Randy Bowman: [00:01:46] Sure. IACET basically has three pillars of work that it does. The first is, as a standards-developing organization, we have developed and maintained the standard for continuing education and training. And then the second pillar is related to that, in that we accredit training organizations who have adopted that standard and provide that third-party verification that all of their operations, all of their systems, and their learning program as a whole conform to the standard that we’ve already created. And then, of course, we do offer, as a third pillar, training to organizations who wish to become accredited on how to become accredited. It’s pretty easy. But we also have some great training opportunities just for organizations who want to improve their learning programs and make sure that those are aligned to the standard. Even if they’re not necessarily seeking accreditation, they still want to follow the best practices and want to learn more about the best ways to adhere to that standard.

The Origin of the CEU and The ANSI-IACET Standard for Continuing Education and TrainingCelisa Steele: [00:03:08] I know that one of the places I would love for us to dig in a little bit is around standards development, and you mentioned that standard for continuing education and training. So tell us a little bit more about that standard—why it exists and anything else you’d like for listeners to know about that standard.

Randy Bowman: [00:03:26] Sure. Probably most of your listeners are very familiar with the term CEU, the Continuing Education Unit. That particular measure for continuing education training was developed by the Council on Continuing Education in 1968 as a committee in the Department of Education. The U.S. Department of Education commissioned the committee. They spent two years researching a way to measure non-credit training activity, and, out of that work, they published the concept of the Continuing Education Unit, which has been in the public domain ever since. As you can imagine, that group of people were very passionate about continuing education, and they wanted to make sure that that CEU definition was maintained.

Randy Bowman: [00:04:19] So they established an association that eventually became IACET, and we’ve been maintaining that standard ever since. The ANSI-IACET standard for continuing education and training looks at the whole life cycle of an organization and the whole life cycle of instructional design and development and measures that against research-backed best practices to ensure that, when a learner engages with a training provider, they’re getting a high-quality learning experience, that what the training provider says the learning event will deliver—what the outcome of the learning event is supposed to be—the standard makes sure that that actually happens, and that you get what you expect.

Maintaining Standards Over TImeCelisa Steele: [00:05:14] You mentioned, in describing the history—thank you for that—you mentioned maintaining it. I don’t know if there are any interesting shifts. What goes into maintaining and keeping an eye on the standard?

Randy Bowman: [00:05:26] Every five years we do re-review the standard and see if it’s still meeting needs and then make adjustments as needed. Some good examples of some recent adjustments that we’re in the process of making right now. In its 50-year history, the CEU has basically been defined as ten hours of learning activity equals one CEU, and you could round to the nearest 10th. Basically, anything more than half an hour of learning time could earn a 10th of a CEU because that half rounded up is 0.1. Well, as we all know, microlearning is taking the world by storm right now, and there is lots of research that shows three- and six-minute learning opportunities/learning events are valuable. How do you measure that to a CEU when you can only go to the 10th? That means you have to stack all them or put them together in a bundle, which then gets away from the whole idea of microlearning. So one of the things we have kicked around and that we’re going to be introducing in our next publication of the standard is allowing for the rounding to the hundredths. That will now allow six-minute learning events to earn a CEU. So that’s just one.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:55] Yes, I love that example because it is clearly where the standard, you’re trying to keep pace with what’s actually happening in the learning world—how people are learning. I like that a lot.

Randy Bowman: [00:07:05] Right. You can’t just rest on the legacy of it. You have to constantly be innovating.

What’s the Value of Accreditation?Celisa Steele: [00:07:10] I think in what you’ve already shared you’ve begun to get into this a little bit, but let’s speak specifically and directly about major benefits of accreditation. In other words, what’s the value of accreditation?

Randy Bowman: [00:07:27] There are several. Some of them are more tangible than others. Probably the most tangible one that your audience may be aware of is some regulatory and licensing boards either require or accept IACET CEUs earned by learners for that learner to maintain their license. We have a few instances of that. About 50 percent of the engineering boards in the United States accept IACET CEUs for engineers to maintain their engineering license. We have some in the early childcare industry, in secondary education, in teachers’ licensing, construction safety and training. There are some areas where it’s regulatory, required. Being accredited allows you to give learners who are in those fields CEUs that they can use to maintain their license. That’s the tangible value.

Randy Bowman: [00:08:31] Some of the less tangible values…. By the way, only about a third of the people who seek accreditation are actually giving out CEUs. About two-thirds don’t. They don’t give CEUs. It’s not important to them. They find value in these next set of things we’re going to talk about, such as benchmarking. Since the standard is the standard, it’s that, if you become accredited, you can say, “I meet this standard” and, in some cases, “I exceed this standard” because it is just a minimum standard—the minimum quality needed to do a good learning event. So there are ways to go above it, but it gives you that benchmark that, “Yes, we are doing the right things. I can tell my boss I’m doing the right things. I can tell my learners I’m doing the right things.” Scalability and succession planning are tied to this.

Randy Bowman: [00:09:28] One of the biggest benefits we hear from our accredited providers is it’s not necessarily the accreditation that is the most valuable thing; it is the journey to accreditation. It’s not the destination; it’s the journey. So, as they’re going through trying to become accredited, they’re really having to do a lot of internal evaluation, and they’re finding their own gaps, and so they’re updating their documentation. In some cases, they’re actually documenting work. We find that so many of the training providers are out there doing the right things. They know how to give high-quality learning events, but they may not have documented what they’re doing, especially in some of the smaller training providers. It’s all in Bob’s head. So, as Bob goes through this process, it has to come out of his head and onto paper.

Randy Bowman: [00:10:23] We know when you write things down, you have to be more concrete; you have to be more specific. And suddenly those little assumptions that people are making are revealed—those things that “Oh, everybody knows how” are revealed. And so the organization has to take care of that, and then they end up with an operations manual that they probably haven’t had. Now they’re geared for scalability and succession planning. Hey, I need to onboard three instructional designers right now. Well, I bring them on board, and I give them my operations manual that I had to develop through accreditation, and then they know exactly how we want things done. I can be assured that, if they follow those directions that we’ve given them, they will get the same output as if I had done it myself as Bob. If someone needs to leave a position vacant—maybe promoted—it’s easy now to backfill because all of that information is out of Jane’s head, and her successor can pick up right where she left off because it’s written down in a location, and the directions are there.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:44] I love that emphasis on succession planning, on consistency. You mentioned scalability, then, that can come from having that down. I found it fascinating that only about a third of the folks that go after accreditation care about the accreditation. It’s more about the process for the two-thirds, the majority. That’s very interesting.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:12:08] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Advice for Learning Businesses That Haven’t Yet Pursued AccreditationCelisa Steele: [00:12:44] I do want to take advantage of having you here to ask some advice on behalf of folks who might be listening, and I’m thinking of at least two groups. The first group is learning businesses that haven’t yet gone down that accreditation path. What advice would you offer them in helping them assess whether this makes sense for them to even pursue or to engage with?

Randy Bowman: [00:13:12] First and foremost, I would say understand your learners’ needs. There are hundreds of accreditations out there, hundreds of accreditation bodies. Like I said, depending on what regulatory industry you’re in or who your regulators are or who your licensing board is, your learners may be looking not just for CEUs but for CMEs, CEs, or a plethora of other abbreviations. And so find out what your learners need continuing education for to maintain their own licenses and their credentials within their industry, and then seek accreditation from the correct body in your area.

Randy Bowman: [00:13:55] It is a daunting landscape out there, especially if you cross multiple jurisdictions and multiple industries. You may find that you need several accreditations from different bodies to fulfill all your learners’ needs. So, first and foremost, check with your learners. What do they need? And then do the research to figure out which accrediting body is the right one for them. As a shameless plug, our accreditation, though, offers a great foundation because we are content-agnostic; we’re not industry-specific, and we focus on that framework of designing and developing quality education, quality training. Usually if you have the IACET accreditation, you will find that you have everything you need as you pursue the other accreditations because you’ve done all the heavy lifting for this one.

Overview of the Accreditation ProcessCelisa Steele: [00:14:54] Before I ask your advice for the second group, which I’m going to do here in just a second, could you perhaps sketch for us what it looks like to go down this path? So somebody decided, “Okay, yes, this makes sense. I do want to start here, and I’m going to approach IACET.” What does it look like, then, to go through that accreditation process?

Randy Bowman: [00:15:13] First, I would say you need to get the standard—and this will be good for whatever accreditation you’re looking for. Find out what the requirements are, and get the standard. We happen to have a nice tool for ours called the Accreditation Readiness Calculator. It’s complimentary. We give it out all the time. But take that, and it walks you through and says, “Do you have a policy on non-discrimination? Do you have a process for ensuring that your learner support systems do X, Y, and Z? Do you do this? Do you do that?” In our case, it’s about 60 questions that we ask that are just yes/no, and all you’re saying is, “Do I have this or not?” It allows you to do a mini gap analysis to see what do I have? What don’t I have? What do I have in my head, but I’ve never written down?

Randy Bowman: [00:16:08] And so that begins your process of knowing, “How ready am I?” It’s a self-evaluation that you just do. A “self-study” is a term you’ll hear in the accreditation world a lot. You need to go do a self-study, and, basically, they mean do a gap analysis. Then you have a map. Once you’ve done the gap analysis, you then have a map of what you need to do to align to the standard. Anything that’s a no, well, you know you need to make some organizational changes. Maybe anything that is a yes but not quite there is something you need to review and take those documents one at a time and update them. I generally advise people, if this is something you want to do, make sure you’re intentional about it. Accreditation has a tendency….

Randy Bowman: [00:17:01] Generally, it’s not someone’s primary job, and it’s one of those things that falls into what I would say is important but not urgent. And so you really need to be intentional and block out two hours a week that this is going to be my accreditation time, where I’m going to devote my time to either creating a new policy, creating a new process, updating a policy, updating a process to meet that standard. And, if you just sit down with your gap analysis at the beginning and go, okay, I’m going to do this one first, second, third, fourth, you put those on your calendar—intentionally blocking out that time—you now have a nice roadmap that will lead you to be successful in making the changes necessary to align with whatever standard you’re looking at.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:52] Someone makes use of the calculator that you have. They do what you’ve just suggested around blocking out the time to fill in those gaps. Then they filled in those gaps. What happens next?

Randy Bowman: [00:18:03] Then you’ll have to actually apply to whatever organization, and that will vary depending on how it is. You’ll apply, and there will be an application, and the application is generally going to ask for you to provide documentation that you meet those different standards. In our case, we ask for policies, processes, and evidence. We want to see that you have certain policies in place. So, in our system, you’d upload those policies, and then we’re going to say, “Show us evidence that you communicate these policies to the appropriate stakeholders,” whether it’s learners, employees, contractors.

Randy Bowman: [00:18:47] You’ll show us where you have the policy, on your Web site or in your handbook, so that you communicate that—that’s the policy and the evidence. And we’re going to ask for those processes. And once you submit all that documentation, it will be assigned to some peer reviewers, what we call “commissioners.” These are industry experts who know continuing education and training very well, and they will take a look at your policies and your processes and determine, make an evaluation, an assessment: “Does this meet the standard?” And then they’re going to look at your evidence to make sure you’re following and doing what it is you said you do in your process.

Randy Bowman: [00:19:30] After that, there’s usually some kind of interview that the commissioners are going to have with the applicants. We’ve done the desk audit; now we just want to get a feeling about the people who are running the program because, at the end of the day, it’s people that make things happen, not documents. So they want to get a feel for these people. Have they truly incorporated these policies in their processes, into the fabric of their organization? And you can tell that when you talk to somebody. You can tell if they actually have taken these policies and these processes, and it’s something they use every day, and it’s something they’re following. And so the interview reveals those gaps. After that, you’re accredited.

Advice for Learning Businesses That Have Pursued AccreditationCelisa Steele: [00:20:26] The other group that I wanted to ask your advice on behalf of has to do with organizations that are already doing something with accreditation. Do you have suggestions or recommendations for how they can make sure that they and their learners are getting the most value out of that accreditation?

Randy Bowman: [00:20:49] If you’re already accredited and you want to make sure your learners are getting the most, I would say you’ve probably already done your homework. And, if there are any industries that you’re specific in, any jurisdictions that you’re specific in that maybe don’t require accreditation as part of their continuing education licensing program, I would say one of the best ways to get value out of your accreditation is to be an advocate to those industries and those jurisdictions to start accepting CEUs or accepting accredited training, and asking those industries to hold themselves to a standard. The truth is, you’re the biggest advocate of that. When we approach a regulatory body, we have an agenda, and rightly so. They’re aware of that; they’re less likely to listen to us. But, if you, as their constituent, as somebody in their state and in their industry, are advocating for it, they’re more likely to be receptive. That’s, I think, one of the best ways that you can add value, find a way to add value to your accreditation for your learners.

Key Events and Shifts at IACET and in Accreditation in GeneralCelisa Steele: [00:22:03] I like that idea a lot, of being the advocate for the whole idea of accreditation and trying to spread that as broadly as possible. I appreciate that viewpoint. IACET has been around for a while. You said earlier that the CEU has been around since 1968, I think. And so, I’m curious. If you look back on IACET’s history, are there key events or shifts that have happened in the organization’s existence or perhaps in accreditation more broadly or generally? I realize that’s probably a really big question—sorry about that.

Randy Bowman: [00:22:37] Yes, when we first were established, we were called the Council for Continuing Education. In the 1990s, we had our first what I would call big change, and we changed the name to IACET, for International Association for Continuing Education and Training, to bring in that idea that the standard framework is international; the accreditation is international. It’s not something just for U.S.-based training providers. In the early 2000s, we ourselves decided it was time to become accredited, and so we reached out and became ANSI-accredited, the American National Standards Institute. We followed their standards development process to become a standards-development organization and an accredited standards-development organization.

Randy Bowman: [00:23:31] That’s really great because it means that we completely understand people going through the accreditation process because we have to do it too. We know what it’s like to answer to someone, but, if nothing else, it was a huge transition, in that it gave our standard a little bit more authenticity because the process we use follows the process that ANSI requires. So we’ve been ANSI-accredited since 2007. Continuing to do that. And then probably the next biggest change was around 2018, when IACET moved from being a volunteer-managed association with an association management system and really turned to more of a staff-driven association management model. That has allowed us in these past five or six years since then to expand our brand and expand our reach and our impact. When you have dedicated staff working every day for just this mission, it makes a difference.

The Future of AccreditationCelisa Steele: [00:24:45] I love that you, as an organization, decided to pursue the ANSI accreditation. That seems like a wonderful example of walking the walk in solidarity with those you serve. You can speak to the same value that they can of the overall process and what goes into that. So that was a little bit of a history, looking back. But now, if we look ahead, when you think about the future of accreditation, what comes to mind? What interests you? Are there trends or anything on the horizon that you tend to think about?

Randy Bowman: [00:25:20] I do, actually. I would say, especially in the higher education and academic fields, we’re starting to see some regulatory backlash to accreditation. If you followed any of the news, you’ll see that there are certain states that have said that, hey, we don’t like where our universities are being accredited, and we want them to change accrediting bodies every 10 years. I’m seeing some backlash against that, and I think that’s going to trickle down. But I think a lot of that has to do with…. Historically, accrediting bodies have been very exclusive. They build walls. And, to a certain degree, you have to. An accreditation is an obstacle. There is a gatekeeping piece to accreditation. But, instead of building gates, I think accreditors have been building walls. If you’re going through accreditation and you’re not meeting the standard, all they say is “Doesn’t meet standard.” And, if you ask a question, as you’re going through accreditation, you’re looked at in almost disdain, that, “Well, how can you not know this?”

Randy Bowman: [00:26:35] We’re doing things differently here at IACET. We want to build ladders and platforms to get people up over those walls. We want to teach them how to bring them up to that standard. I think you’re going to see that become a trend among accrediting bodies. We’re coming up with a group of people who don’t like bureaucratic administrative nonsense. They want to get to the meat of whatever it is we’re doing, and they want to get to the meat of it fast. And I think accrediting bodies who continue to operate in this ivory tower-type mentality aren’t going to be meeting the needs of their training providers, and they’re going to see accreditation decrease in importance and in value. And so accrediting bodies that instead become more customer-centric, more learner-centric, and that are there to offer ladders and ropes and assistance and guide step-by-step through the journey are going to change the accreditation landscape in a positive way.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:44] I certainly hope you’re right. That sounds like a much better future to be headed towards rather than one where you get your hand slapped if you don’t manage to follow the procedures the first time.

Randy Bowman: [00:27:55] Yes, I just don’t understand it. To me, if we’re trying to raise the standard and the quality of continuing education and training, why are you going to slap people down? That doesn’t make any sense to me. No. Instead of saying, “Oh, you’re not good enough,” let’s say, “Here’s where there are some gaps, and here are the tools and resources you need to bridge those gaps so that you can be the kind of training organization that you want to be.” People want to be the best. They want to do good, quality work. They want to deliver a great product. And, if they’re not, let’s help them get there.

Personal Approach to Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:28:36] Given that this is the Leading Learning Podcast, one of the things we always like to ask guests is about their own approach to lifelong learning. So, Randy, what are your sources, habits, or practices in terms of your own lifelong learning?

Randy Bowman: [00:28:50] I’m a reader. I love to read. I am always on the lookout for new books. And usually, how I find those is I’ll be on something like LinkedIn, and some posts or something will capture me. I’ll go, “Wow, that guy has a real insightful thought,” and, next thing I know, he’s got that either from a book or a book he’s written or she’s written or something else. And then I go, “I’ve got to have the whole book. I like the snippet.” And so my Amazon Wish List is always much, much larger than my Amazon budget will allow. That’s where I get most of my stuff from—seeing those and then buying the book and devouring it.

An Invitation to Pursue QualityCelisa Steele: [00:29:32] As we begin to wrap up, any final thoughts, anything else you would like for listeners to be sure to walk away from our conversation knowing or having thought about?

Randy Bowman: [00:29:43] I would just say to our listeners pursue excellence. Pursue quality. Whether you get accredited or not—which is going to sound like, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to sell accreditation?” But here’s the thing. Whether you pursue accreditation or not, pursue the quality. Yes, the third-party verification of accreditation that, yes, you match that, is valuable, and it’s wonderful, but I would rather somebody come and get the standard and do that self-study on their program and move their program forward, move their training program forward and not get accreditation than to not do anything.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:31] Randy Bowman is president and CEO of IACET.

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Related Resources* Building a World That Learns Better * The Third Sector of Education: Sustaining and Shaping Society * Accrediting Lifelong Learning with Casandra Blassingame

The post Pursuing Quality with IACET’s Randy Bowman appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbCompetitive advantage, whether sustained or transient, is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Collaborative advantage may be the answer.

In this episode, number 422, we recap competitive advantage, sustained advantage, and transient advantage and then posit a fourth type of advantage for learning businesses to consider.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] If your learning business hasn’t revisited its strategy in a while, now is a good time to assess the basis of your strategic advantage—and the viability of that source of advantage.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:25] Strategy is of fundamental importance to the success of any organization, including learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:32] It is. Yet it’s all too easy to gloss over learning business strategy in the first place or to fail to reassess the basis for the strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:42] But failing to meaningfully engage around strategy and continuing to do what you’ve done is a mistake. To paraphrase Marshall Goldsmith, what got your learning business here won’t get you there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:54] And, boy, is that true these days. If you keep doing the same things, your learning business will stagnate or, worse, lose ground. And that’s increasingly true, as maintaining strategic advantage has gotten harder and harder. So we want to devote this episode, number 422, to a discussion of strategic advantage.

Three Types of Strategic AdvantageCelisa Steele: [00:01:15] We’re going to talk about three types of advantage: competitive advantage, sustained advantage, and transient advantage. And then, stick around, because we’re going to posit a fourth type of advantage for your consideration.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:30] We’ll note that we’re learning out loud in doing this. We’re trying to digest our own thinking about strategy and advantage right now, so I think this is probably the beginning of something that we’ll be revisiting. But maybe we can start off with that first one, which I think is well established at this point, though possibly overused, overemphasized, and that’s competitive advantage.

Competitive AdvantageCelisa Steele: [00:01:52] A competitive advantage is a condition or circumstance that puts an organization in a favorable or superior business position compared to its competitors.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:05] This kind of advantage is going to allow a company or organization to generate more sales or margins and retain more customers than its competitors. A competitive advantage can stem from a range of things, such as your cost structure, your product offerings, your brand strength, your distribution network, customer service, or, say, proprietary technology.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:30] In general, those competitive advantages tend to be classified into two main types. There’s a cost advantage—when an organization produces goods or services at a lower cost than its competitors. Walmart tends to be a big poster child of the cost-advantage approach. But then there’s also a differentiation advantage classification, and that’s when an organization can offer unique or superior products that then justify a higher price.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:04] This concept of competitive advantage has been a foundational element of business strategy for many decades. If you’ve been to business school at any point in the past few decades, you have heard about competitive advantage, and you know, probably, that it is associated with Michael Porter, who’s a Harvard Business School professor. He popularized and formalized the term in his 1985 book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:33] In that book and his other work, Porter provided a framework for understanding how organizations can create and sustain superior performance by leveraging cost leadership, leveraging differentiation, or by having focus strategies.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:52] You used the word “sustain” there in talking about what Porter is aiming for with competitive advantage. So let’s move into talking about sustained advantage.

Sustained AdvantageCelisa Steele: [00:04:04] A sustained advantage is when an organization can maintain its competitive advantage over a long period, and that’s usually done by continuously reinforcing the factors that contribute to that organization’s superior position so that you’re, thereby, preventing competitors from eroding the advantage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:26] Sustained advantages are often derived from resources or capabilities that are valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and well-organized within the business.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:38] Basically, you just referred to the VRIO framework. So the V is valuable—these are resources and capabilities that enable an organization to exploit opportunities or to neutralize threats in the environment. The R has to do with rare—resources and capabilities that aren’t possessed by a lot of other organizations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:01] And then I is inimitable—those resources and capabilities that are difficult for other organizations to imitate. And then, finally, O is for organized—the organization is organized and ready to make use of its resources and capabilities to create and share value.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:19] So that’s the VRIO framework. Now, as we were explaining that, we kept talking about resources and capabilities. Maybe it’s worth, just for a moment, talking about what we mean by those. Those are terms that I think everybody understands intuitively or at a base level. But it can be helpful, I think, to spell it out a little bit more. Resources are assets, knowledge, and attributes that an organization controls, and these can be tangible. They can be physical assets. So think about equipment or buildings. Resources can also be intangible, things like brand reputation and intellectual property. Jeff, just speaking of brand reputation, I know that you are a strong advocate for a learning business really having a strong brand, particularly if it’s housed within a larger entity, as is the case with a lot of trade and professional associations. You really want that strong brand.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:13] Yes, definitely. You want people to be asking for your learning experiences by name and to know them as…. If you are part of, say, a trade or professional association, to not just be asking for the association, but, for example, NIGP: The Institute for Public Procurement, they have their Pathways program. You want people to be asking for Pathways because they understand how valuable that is. So your brand is a resource—and resources in general. And then the other element we talked about was capabilities, and these are the organization’s abilities to use resources effectively. Capabilities are often embedded in the organization’s processes and routines.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:55] Standard operating procedures, documentation—all those things can be part of your capabilities. Now, this idea of sustained advantage was also heavily influenced by Michael Porter’s work in the 1980s. His theories on competitive strategy tend to inherently involve the notion of sustaining that competitive advantage over the long term.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:20] It’s hard to underestimate, I think, just how influential Michael Porter has been and how influential his thinking has been. His concept was further refined through what’s called the resources-based view (RVB) of organizations, which emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the RBV, which was developed by scholars like Jay Barney, emphasized the importance of organization-specific resources and capabilities that, again, are valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized—that VRIO framework, again—in sustaining a competitive advantage.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:56] Again, we take the 80s and Michael Porter, and it’s a focus on competitive advantage and, specifically, sustained advantage. Now, we get to transient advantage.

Transient AdvantageJeff Cobb: [00:08:10] A transient advantage acknowledges that, in today’s world, the rapidly changing markets we work in, those traditional sustained advantages are increasingly difficult to maintain.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:23] And so, instead of striving for long-term dominance in a single area, organizations with a transient advantage focus on a cycle of continuous innovation. They’re trying to be agile. They’re trying to adapt. And they try to rapidly exploit any temporary opportunities, scale up quickly, and then they move on to the next opportunity before competitors can catch up.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:50] Yes, it’s kind of a catch-me-if-you-can approach. It’s an approach that requires a willingness to disrupt yourself, experiment, and pivot as necessary.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:01] Right, and to recognize the moment when you should move on. Don’t stay too long. This concept of transient advantage is relatively recent, certainly more recent than Porter and his work. It was introduced by Rita Gunther McGrath in her 2013 book The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:23] Those are fighting words. That’s a provocative title in this world of strategy because, if you’re saying the end of competitive advantage, you are taking on Michael Porter and that institution in doing that. And, in this book, McGrath argued that in the modern, fast-paced business environment, organizations should focus on a series of temporary advantages rather than striving for long-term, sustained advantages, as you were saying, Celisa. Her work highlighted the importance of agility, innovation, and the ability to quickly capitalize on emerging opportunities, which you have to have the ability to see.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:59] Exactly. You first have to see those opportunities before you can capitalize on them.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:10:07] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Positing a Fourth Type of Strategic Advantage: Collaborative AdvantageCelisa Steele: [00:10:43] That is our look towards the past—a look at what is common in terms of thinking about advantage, in terms of strategy, looking back at competitive advantage, sustained advantage, and transient advantage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:57] I would think probably a lot of listeners can relate to all of this. Even if you haven’t heard about these things before, most likely you’ve at least heard of competitive advantage, but the idea of having a competitive advantage, of being able to sustain that advantage, I think that’s desirable. People still want that. McGrath’s point of view was that you may want it, but it’s just very hard to do. I think we can probably all recognize the logic of this idea of transient advantage when you’ve got a market that’s changing rapidly, and it can still feel like that’s what we need to do, is to be looking for that transient advantage and capitalizing on that. In some situations, that probably is still the right thing to do, but we want to broaden out the perspective a little bit and add our thinking on it.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:40] And this is where we are working out loud, learning out loud here. But we started to think about the concept of collaborative advantage, and maybe, in part, it’s because we were re-reading and discussing The Inquiring Mind by Cyril Houle recently. But it strikes us that learning businesses that serve this third sector of education have the potential to worry less about competition and to focus more on collaboration.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:07] Yes, in that view, strategy doesn’t have to be tied to competitive advantage, whether we’re talking about sustainable or transient advantage. I think that’s probably rooted in this idea that’s so much about…. You heard when we were talking about competitive advantage and sustained advantage, even transient advantage had to do with resources and capitalizing on resources and capability. But, of course, learning and the ability to facilitate learning is not an exhaustible resource, and it often requires—in fact, benefits from—collaboration and multiple perspectives.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:42] I will say that strategy in general, the way it’s been written about historically, has somewhat rubbed me wrong because of the use of essentially militaristic terms. It’s about defending your position, or it’s about beating the competition. It’s about exploiting things. There’s always been a little bit of a negative feel to the language for me. And, just as you were saying, learning and lifelong learning is a high goal. It’s a moral goal. It’s an ethical goal, I would argue. And, if you’re thinking about that, if that’s the lens that you’re really focused on—learning and helping others to learn—you don’t want to beat anyone else. Anyone else who’s helping those adults to learn, those people to learn, you want to join forces with them. Maybe that’s a militaristic term there, but you want to do this together. You would be better served collaborating than competing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:37] You mentioned Cyril Houle and The Inquiring Mind and taking some inspiration from how he thinks about things. This is what we’re doing. It’s what we’ve arrived at in our own approach to things. Partnering with other organizations has become increasingly important to what we do. We’re going to be co-locating an event with the folks at Professionals for Association Revenue (PAR) this fall because we see the collaborative potential there around learning and then expanding the learning opportunities that they had already begun at that event and that we can add to. We’ve had very meaningful relationships/partnerships, for example, with 1EdTech, and then we worked with them on Webinars, and we’re looking at other ways to work together. When you collaborate like that, you’re going to get a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. For me, that’s really strategic when you can achieve that, and collaboration very often is the root of being able to do that.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:35] I think that this idea of collaboration and a collaborative advantage, in some ways, is easier because you don’t have to worry so much about competition. It takes the competition off the table, or at least greatly reduces it. But it does come with its own challenges, of course. It really ups the need to communicate. It ups the need to adjust what you’re doing and adjust your strategy, not just based on your own organization but what others across the sector are doing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:05] And so you have to pick your collaborators well. You need people who are going to share your values, who are as bought into this idea of collaborative advantage as you are, and that you’re going to be able to work with well to, again, achieve that whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:22] Again, it feels like collaborative advantage is very much in keeping with this idea of learning because we know that learning itself requires collaboration. That’s at the heart of learning because you have to have collaboration between the learner and whatever the vehicle of the learning experience is. A course, a conference, an e-learning module—none of that results in learning without the learner’s participation, without the learner’s collaboration. A strategy built around collaboration just feels like a truly natural, organic fit for learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:58] Maybe we can tie a bow around this for the time being—because I think this is something we will probably come back to at some point—by pointing out some of the key areas in which we see differences between these different approaches to strategy and to advantage with strategy, and there are three that we’ll highlight.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:16] Yes. We’ll touch on duration, stability, and then strategy in general. If you think about duration, we know that competitive advantage can be either sustained or transient. If it’s sustained, then it’s long-term. If it’s transient, then that advantage is temporary, but it’s renewable; you can move on to the next thing that’s going to allow you to have transient advantage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:41] Like sustained advantage, collaborative advantage can be long-term, and it’s also renewable like transient advantage, so you get the best of both of those worlds.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:54] If we think about stability, sustained advantages are stable. They’re long-term; they’re enduring. Transient advantages are dynamic, and they require that constant reinvention—keeping your eye on the opportunities out there and then moving rapidly to exploit them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:11] Collaborative is enduring, and it also requires ongoing attention.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:17] On these spectrums, we’re seeing collaborative as, in many ways, combining aspects of sustained and transient. The final area is around the strategy, and, with sustained advantage, that is really a focus on maintaining and defending a position. With transient advantage, you’re again focusing on that rapid exploitation. You’re focusing on being agile and being able to move from one thing to the next. I would say that collaborative is defining, rather than defending, a particular position.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:56] I like that because I feel like that’s what we’re trying to do in our work is define this whole area of the third sector and the learning business and what that means and collaborating with the organizations that see that also and help make that make sense. That’s defining rather than defending. And then collaborative advantage also focuses on the agility of relationships, so there’s not a need to beat others here, but there is a need to work through implications with others and to rapidly iterate with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:26] So that’s our current thinking on collaborative advantage, and we’re pretty sure we’ll be revisiting this topic.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:42] If your learning business hasn’t revisited its strategy in a while, now is a good time to assess the basis of your strategic advantage—and the viability of that source of advantage. Competitive advantage, whether sustained or transient, is becoming harder and harder to maintain. Collaborative advantage may be the answer.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* The Inquiring Mind, Part I * The Inquiring Mind, Part II * Porter’s Five Forces and Learning Business Competition

The post Beyond Competitive Advantage appeared first on Leading Learning.

The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbSelf-reflection is an important tool for learners and an important activity for learning business leaders. Dr. Will Thalheimer includes a succinct list of what a great learning leader should be in his book The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning & Work.

In episode 421 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele use his list as the basis for a look at what goes into leading a learning business well.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Self-reflection is an important tool for learners and an important activity for learning business leaders.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:11] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:12] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] We used to start the Leading Learning Podcast by saying, “If you’re a leader or an aspiring leader in the business of lifelong learning, you’re in the right place.”

Celisa Steele: [00:00:30] And there was some nice, snazzy drum music to go along with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] That’s right. We did have some different music back then.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:35] Now we no longer say that at the start of each episode, but it’s still true—we created and continue to create this podcast for current learning business leaders and emerging learning business leaders.

What It Means to Be a Learning Business LeaderJeff Cobb: [00:00:47] Thanks to a recent book, we got to thinking about what it means to be a learning business leader, and that’s what we want to focus on in this episode.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:56] Now, the book that got us thinking about that is the most recent publication from Dr. Will Thalheimer. It was published earlier this year, 2024, and it’s called The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning & Work: Empowering Learning for a Competitive Advantage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:16] And we are, of course, big fans of Dr. Will Thalheimer’s work, as listeners, long-time listeners here will recognize. He’s been on the podcast multiple times. He has spoken at some of our events in the past, most recently the 2024 Learning Business Summit, which we’ll be holding again in 2025. His focus is on corporate learning and development, workplace learning, but many of the nuggets from his work absolutely apply to learning businesses as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:47] And this most recent publication, The CEO’s Guide, is fifty chapters.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:52] Fifty.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:53] Fifty, but they’re very short—each one is usually just a couple of pages or maybe up to four or five pages. But, again, very focused, very targeted chapters.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:05] Practically Zen koans, I think, for the L&D world. It’s written, as the title suggests, for CEOs, but Chapter 43 is actually entitled “Your Learning Leader.”

11 Points on What a Great Organizational Learning Leader Should DoCelisa Steele: [00:02:19] There are 11 bullet points near the beginning that are introduced with this text: “Here’s what a great organizational learning leader should be” and then it follows with those points. But we thought, “Wow, okay, let’s see what Will has to say.” And then we thought what we can do is go through those points, gloss them with that learning business lens on them, putting that focus on them.

Learning Aligned with Business NeedsJeff Cobb: [00:02:42] That sounds like a great structure for a podcast episode, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do here. I will name the first, or articulate the first, of those 11 bullets. And that one says this learning leader is “tasked with creating learning that leads to benefits for the organization aligned with ‘business’ needs.”

Celisa Steele: [00:03:03] I think that’s very true for learning business leaders as well. The learning business is going to be really focused on how the learning products and services in its portfolio feed into the mission of the learning business. Now, if the learning business is embedded within a larger organization, as is the case with trade and professional associations often, then you are going to want to make sure that there is that alignment between that learning function and that learning portfolio with the larger organizational strategy. And then, of course, if the learning business is freestanding, then it absolutely still has to make sure that what you’re providing aligns with the business needs, the business realities of the overall organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:50] Right. Of course, we encapsulate those business goals and needs under those banners of reach, revenue, and impact. We won’t go into detail about those here because we’ve talked about them so many times, but that is the business focus of a learning business.

Learning That Benefits All Key StakeholdersCelisa Steele: [00:04:04] The second bullet in Dr. Will Thalheimer’s text is that great organizational learning leaders should be “tasked with creating learning that benefits employees and other key stakeholders, including the beneficiaries of those learning programs, employees, coworkers, customers, investors, families, communities, society, and the environs.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:29] That’s a tall order. You can tell these are leaders who are creating this learning because they’re thinking at that level about what they’re creating, and, of course, the same should be true in a learning business. In the case of a learning business, we’re not employee-focused like learning and development departments are, or at least not directly. We may be reaching the employees of the companies that are in the field or industry that our learning business serves. It’s just not about the employees within our own organization. And, of course, most of those other stakeholders are going to apply in some way.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:01] Right. We’ve talked about creating a learning culture within a learning business. I think this point from Will speaks to that very directly—this idea that there’s a ripple effect, that you can have impact directly on the learners, but then it spreads beyond them. It also spreads to who those learners touch—their families, their coworkers, and then ultimately that spreads out into society and, as he puts it, the environs as well.

Performance Beyond Learning InterventionsJeff Cobb: [00:05:29] That’s right. I think our people are all about the environs because you’re really reaching a lot with what you’re doing as a learning business leader, what you’re creating, and the extent to which you’re helping to facilitate learning across a field or industry. Now, let’s look at the third of these 11 bullet points, and this one is that a learning leader is “tasked with enabling improved work performance beyond learning interventions, using performance-activation and learning-in-the-workflow approaches.”

Celisa Steele: [00:06:00] Again, I think that this is very applicable to learning businesses, even if it might take a bit of a leap to make the connection. When you are providing learning and development for employees within your organization, you have a ton of opportunities for, as he calls it, performance activation and learning in the workflow. It’s a little bit harder for learning businesses, but I think this is a very important point for learning businesses to remember—that it isn’t always about a course, a conference, or a seminar. There are other things that you can be doing that will support the goals of making sure that the people you serve not only are hearing about important content and ideas but are applying them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:46] To me, this goes straight to the heart of the maxim that we cite so often—that learning is a process, not an event. Yes, we’re all doing courses; we’re doing conferences; we’re doing Webinars—those are part of our portfolio. But our goal isn’t to put people through a course or a Webinar or conference. Our goal is for them to actually change their behavior out in life and out in work, to do things differently and to do things better, and to always keep that in mind. What’s happening beyond that course, beyond that Webinar, beyond that conference? How are we designing to support that?

Celisa Steele: [00:07:18] We can design to support that even within the context of some of those containers, like courses and conferences. We can have job aids. We can have templates that are going to help make that application piece easier and make it possible for the learner to apply that. Again, we agree with Will here around thinking beyond pure or only learning interventions and thinking about performance and learning in the workflow.

A High-Performing TeamCelisa Steele: [00:07:46] Now, the next bullet is that a great learning leader should be “wholly responsible for hiring staff—not subjected to the request, ‘Can you find a place for Joe in training?’”

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:57] I don’t know exactly how much this happens in our world, but I’m sure it does happen somewhere. It’s just like, “We’re going to stick So-and-So over here because there happens to be an open box. And you, director of education or VP of learning, please take this person and put them in the role,” even though they may or may not have the background that you want a high-performing learning business staff to have.

Part of the Senior TeamCelisa Steele: [00:08:18] The next one is that a great learning leader should be “a member of your senior team—and specifically NOT housed under your Human Resources unit.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:30] This mostly would not be part of our world because we’re not talking about internal employee training, so it wouldn’t really be a human resources function. But I think it is often true that the leader of the learning business—if, for instance, they’re housed within, say, a trade or professional association—is not necessarily a member of the senior team, in spite of the fact that the organization’s mission probably says that education is one of its primary goals, in spite of the fact that members are probably saying that that’s one of the major reasons that they join the organization, and in spite of the fact that education is often generating significant revenue for the organization.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:10] If you’re a learning leader in this position, where you’re not considered a member of the senior team, it can be a bit of an uphill battle to advocate for yourself. But, as you were just pointing out there, Jeff, it can be worth making it clear to the organization what a fundamental role learning plays in the mission of the organization and, in the case of associations, that’s why members are often coming to you. This can be a place to potentially advocate for yourself and make sure that the learning focus isn’t lost and that it is represented on that senior leadership team.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:49] This will vary from learning business to learning business. If you are a freestanding learning business, that is your sole focus as a business, and this isn’t going to be as true—but it will be true in some instances.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:10:03] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Experience in LearningJeff Cobb: [00:10:41] The next bullet is that this learning leader is “a person who has spent a serious amount of time working in learning and development—NOT someone just passing through.” I don’t know—I feel like this has evolved a lot over the years. Again, I’m thinking primarily of learning businesses that might be housed within associations, as opposed to the more freestanding, say, a commercial training firm or even more of an academic-based learning business. I think it used to be much more the case that people ended up in some of those types of learning businesses accidentally, just like people often end up in associations accidentally. You’ll then end up in the education department, and you may or may not have that L&D background. I think that is changing, but it is still an issue out there.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:26] I think that this again offers an opportunity for potential areas to focus on or to work on. If you are someone who doesn’t necessarily come to leading a learning business with a lot of experience in learning science, that’s the kind of thing that you can fill in. There are a ton of resources to help you get up to speed there and to become someone who is knowledgeable and isn’t just there by happenstance. And so this is an area to make sure that you and your team really do have that grounding in what it means to deliver effective learning and different techniques and approaches for that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:03] The thing that we would add here that isn’t as much a part of Dr. Will Thalheimer’s world is the business experience and the business acumen as well because these are revenue-driving either standalone businesses, where revenue is the focus of the learning business, or they are a revenue creator within a larger business, and you have to have that sort of business acumen, that business background coming into it. Coming from a pure L&D background, where you haven’t had that business experience, can be a deficit for you in that position.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:34] As a side note, I believe Will is both a PhD and has an MBA.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:39] I believe he is. He is a very accomplished guy.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:43] He does bring both the learning aspect, and he went back and filled in some of the business side of things with his MBA.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:48] Right.

Deep Understanding of Learning and Learning-to-PerformanceCelisa Steele: [00:12:50] The seventh point that Will raises is that a learning leader should be “a person with a deep understanding of learning and learning-to-performance practices.” As we were discussing the sixth point, we began to get into this, that you really do need to have some knowledge of what goes into effective learning—and not just knowledge but understanding, as he says here, and also this idea of learning to performance. Again, it’s not just about presenting content, no matter how elegantly you do that. It really is about how do you make sure that that content has some impact on the performance of the learner?

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:26] This is the type of thing too that the person in this position has to stay on top of because this is evolving, and people like Will are doing a lot of the work that is evolving this and increasing our understanding, and you can’t just come into a position with whatever background you do have in learning and performance and expect what you know to remain true. That’s true of just about any job or career these days; you have to stay on top of it.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:50] One reason we are big fans of Will is because he does do precisely that work of helping to translate what we know from science and from studies that have been conducted rigorously into then what does that mean for how we design learning? And so taking advantage of people like Will, taking advantage of other people who are doing that translation work, is very important in helping you, as a learning leader, really have that deep understanding.

Knowledge and Affection for Learning ScienceJeff Cobb: [00:14:18] And this points to the next bullet, which is that this learning leader needs to be “a person with knowledge and affection”—I like that “affection” part of it—“for the learning and performance sciences,” “a person who knows how to balance practical priorities”—those might be business priorities in our world, certainly—“with evidence-based wisdom.”

Celisa Steele: [00:14:41] “Evidence-based” is important. I like that he pairs that with “wisdom.” This is a place where we can make sure that we are taking approaches that are going to help us move the needle in whatever the field or profession with the learners that we’re focused on. But I also appreciate this idea that he’s acknowledging that it’s a balance because I think we all know that some of the best practices for effective learning are a little bit impractical in terms of, if you were going to be quizzing yourself every other day on everything that you’ve learned, which would force some retrieval practice, that might not be practical. You might have to do it a little bit less often or a subset of what you’re learning. But, again, balancing that as much as possible and leveraging those techniques whenever you can.

Support for Ethical and Social Aspects of LearningJeff Cobb: [00:15:34] The next one is that this learning leader should be “a person responsible for voicing and enabling the ethical and social dimensions of employee learning.” Again here Will is mainly focused on corporate L&D, so that employee focus. We can drop “employee” and just say, I would say, “of learning” for whatever audience you’re serving. I feel like oftentimes this kind of ethical and social dimension doesn’t really get realized. We’re impacting entire fields and industries with the education and training we’re providing, and it is going to have some ethical and social aspects to it almost by default. I don’t think those tend to get forefronted a lot.
Support for Managers and Informal Learning LeadersCelisa Steele: [00:16:17] And then the tenth point that Will raises is that a learning leader should be “a person responsible for supporting managers and informal learning leaders throughout your organization.” This really does speak to the role of leading and leading a team, and this would apply to learning business leaders as well, to the extent that you are not a team of one. Even if you are a team of one—because he mentions informal learning leaders—it might be that, outside the purview of “education” or “professional development,” there might be others in the organization you want to support in their understanding of effective learning practices, and you want to be a resource to them. You want to help recruit them so that, again, there’s that culture of learning that you’re creating within your learning business and then more broadly in the learners that you serve.
Knowledge of the Milieu in Which Your Learning Business OperatesJeff Cobb: [00:17:10] Definitely. And then the next one of these, and this is our final one here, number 11, this learning leader is “a person with knowledge of the functional and cultural milieu”—I like that he uses “milieu” there—“in which your organization operates—whether in small or large business, in the nonprofit world, or in government, military, education, etc.”

Celisa Steele: [00:17:34] This speaks to this idea that, yes, you need to be knowledgeable in the field of learning and adult education. We added to that the need to be conversant in business practices. And then, here, I think Will is saying you need a little bit of domain expertise. So whatever the focus is for your learning business, make sure that you understand it. Maybe you’re not an expert coming out of that field or profession per se, but you need to understand it well enough to understand the implications for how you can help learners in those fields or professions actually achieve learning goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:12] Some of this comes down to how and how well you work with your subject matter experts in creating the different types of learning experiences you provide. It also comes down to decisions you make about how much in-house subject matter expertise do you hire for, do you actually have on staff. I increasingly see organizations that do have some substantial subject matter expertise in house that’s helping to inform what they’re doing from a learning standpoint.

What Would You Add to the List of What a Learning Business Leader Should Do?Celisa Steele: [00:18:40] Those are the 11 points that Will saw fit to include in his guide for CEOs. Jeff, what else comes to mind? What would you add to this list?

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:52] I’m not sure I would add anything to the list. It’s probably more about how to use a list like this and how to use a source like Dr. Will Thalheimer because we’ve noted a number of times that he’s coming more from that corporate learning and development world. And a couple of things may happen with the audience that we serve. One is that you see some things coming from the corporate L&D world, and you say, “Well, that’s not me,” so you’re not going to take advantage of it. I hope we’ve illustrated here that there is a lot in this list that does apply to the world that we work in, so you have to translate it. And I think that’s the other thing—a lot of people are receptive to these kinds of sources and looking at a list like this but don’t necessarily make as much effort as they should to translate it and figure out, “Okay, yes, here Will is saying ‘employees.’” It’s easy to translate that into a customer or member, but what does that really mean? How does it change that bullet? And then how does it apply within our organization once we do that and make that effort to translate and translate well?

Celisa Steele: [00:20:00] I agree that there’s a lot wrapped up in that idea of translation, and, in my mind, it ties to reflection, which we know is an important tool in learning. We would encourage you to reflect on this list. Maybe do some additional translation work beyond what Jeff and I have offered in the course of this conversation. And think what else would you add? What would you put on this list that might not be reflected in any of these bullets but that you see as being really fundamental to your success as a learning business leader?

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:31] We might just cap this off by noting that Will does make the point that chief learning officers, or whatever that top learning leader position is titled, do need support from the top of the organization, from the CEO and from the other senior leaders who hopefully are peers of that learning leader. And that includes support to spend on their own development and in hiring outside help when needed—consultants, coaches, or whatever the case might be—and support that helps to make sure that learning really is a focus of the organization’s overall strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:07] Another place for you, dear listener, to reflect a little is around do you have the support that you need in your organization, and, if not, how can you advocate for that support?

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:28] Self-reflection is an important tool for learners and an important activity for learning business leaders. We’re grateful to Will Thalheimer for including a succinct list of what a great learning leader should be in his book The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning & Work, which was the basis for our conversation.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer * Rethinking a Dangerous Art Form with Dr. Will Thalheimer

The post Empowering Learning Business Leaders appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Kemi JonaLearning businesses are part of the third sector of education—the sector that serves the adult learner after they work through the K-12 sector and, then for some, the degree-granting higher education sector. Higher education institutions are increasingly playing a role in serving lifelong and continuing learners.

Kemi Jona is the vice provost for online education and digital innovation at the University of Virginia, and he’s our guest for this episode, number 420, of the Leading Learning Podcast. Co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Kemi about the increasing role technology is playing in lifelong learning and the challenges colleges and universities face as they look beyond their traditional audiences to serve lifelong learners. Some of those challenges will sound familiar to learning business professionals. Kemi and Jeff also talk about the growth of microcredentials and stackable credentials, the role of credit and non-credit offerings, and collaborations between higher education and associations to support lifelong learners effectively.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesKemi Jona: [00:00:00] We are used to dealing with learners where we call all the shots.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:10] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:11] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] Learning businesses are part of the third sector of education—the sector that serves the adult learner after they work through the K-12 sector and, then for some, the degree-granting higher education sector. Higher education institutions are increasingly playing a role in serving lifelong and continuing learners. Kemi Jona is the vice provost for online education and digital innovation at the University of Virginia, and he’s our guest for this episode, number 420. Jeff talks with Kemi about the increasing role technology is playing in lifelong learning and the challenges colleges and universities face as they look beyond their traditional audiences to serve lifelong learners. Some of those challenges will sound familiar to learning business professionals. Kemi and Jeff also talk about the growth of microcredentials and stackable credentials, the role of credit and non-credit offerings, and collaborations between higher education and associations to support lifelong learners effectively. Jeff and Kemi spoke in June 2024.

What Is Digital Innovation?Jeff Cobb: [00:01:34] I would like to talk a little bit more about what’s meant by digital innovation, in the context of universities in general but certainly at the University of Virginia. Maybe you can say a little bit more about what your specific focus areas or initiatives are, both in online education but then more broadly in that digital innovation space.

Kemi Jona: [00:01:56] Absolutely. The strategic plan for the university—we call it the 2030 Plan—calls on the university to make UVA, as we’re called, more accessible to learners beyond campus, or what we call grounds, across the Commonwealth and across the country and the world. And so we’re really embarking on, I think, that poor understanding that, especially as a public university, core to our mission is to reach and serve the public first and foremost, obviously, within the state of which we’re a part of the public system there, and then beyond that, to support our country and learners around the world, who, in this day and age, coming to campus in a beautiful but hard-to-access Charlottesville, Virginia, is tricky. And I think many of your audience members have the same issue, where place-based is extremely difficult, especially post-COVID, where people have really rethought that we need to do better. We need to reach more audiences, and online is clearly the way to do that.

Kemi Jona: [00:03:05] The digital innovation part, in contrast, Jeff, I would say, is focusing on bringing innovative, new tools and platforms to all of our learners, whether they are on-grounds, as we call them—on-campus learners—whether they’re faculty members or even staff in the career center, for example, which many of us would not think of as a core formal learning activity but certainly is a critical function, and to create better, higher-quality, more accessible, and more engaging and enriching learning experiences using the digital medium to serve all learners. So some of it, yes, they’ll absolutely show up in our online classes, but a lot of it may show up in a face-to-face, regular on-campus course as well, and we can talk more about some of those ideas further if you’re interested.

Specific Digital Innovation EffortsJeff Cobb: [00:04:00] I’d love to. If there are specific examples you can offer of initiatives you’re particularly proud of or that you feel were particularly successful in terms of digital innovation in teaching and learning at the university.

Kemi Jona: [00:04:12] Sure. One effort that I’ve launched and that we’ll be piloting starting this fall is a virtual internship platform, or you might call it virtual work-based learning platform, that allows learners, again whether they’re traditional-age undergrads who are on campus or graduate students on campus or in fact online learners, to participate in projects that are sponsored by employers, real-world projects that can fit in a course, as a final project for a course, as a capstone, as a co-curricular activity that you might opt into yourself because you’re interested, let’s say, in brushing up on your data analytics skill set, and there’s a project out there to do that. So that I would call pretty squarely in a digital innovation space because it’s not really a core, formal online learning in terms of credit/non-credit, whatever you want to call it, and it can fit in lots of different places across our portfolio of offerings and really enhance those and give us new ways to engage our learners.

Kemi Jona: [00:05:22] I’ll give you one obvious example. We have a number of our sports teams. Our student athletes are playing in regional or national championships, and, as the ACC, our conference expands to include California institutions. In a couple of years, they’re going to be having to travel to California for games. How do we ensure through digital tools that they’re still able to, say, participate in an internship if they’re practicing or playing, when clearly in person, it may be very, very difficult, if not impossible.

Internship ProgramJeff Cobb: [00:05:59] How did something like that internship program come about? Was that you reaching out to employers? Was it employers reaching out to you? Obviously, you had to get a certain number of employers on board to be able to do something like this. What were the mechanics of that all coming together?

Kemi Jona: [00:06:16] What you just touched on, Jeff, is really one of the reasons why doing this kind of thing is so hard. Because if you’re just teaching a regular course or if your listeners are teeing up an offering, where you control the whole thing—a course instructor or whatever, that’s basically one person you’ve got to coordinate with. But, as you mentioned, if you’re trying to coordinate with employers, students, and faculty, you’ve got a lot of moving pieces now, and they all have to work together and come together. And so figuring that out and using a digital tool/digital platform to really facilitate that, lower the friction, create economies of scale and network effects. For example, by having a centralized marketplace of projects, any student at the university could go on there and find it, even if the career services office in our data science school was the one that found it. It allows us to broadly share those resources and then match them to students interests or to faculty course objectives. There’s a lot of power in a system like that.

Kemi Jona: [00:07:27] This particular platform, which is called Riipen (R-I-I-P-E-N), was particularly attractive to me because they help go and find the employers and the employer projects, which is something that an individual faculty can maybe do a little bit of from his or her network. But after, you could fill 50, 100, 300 project slots, then that gets to be overwhelming and basically the rational thing to do is to throw in the towel and say, “I can’t do this. This is just too much.” And so this is a way to unlock that potential and allow the students to do that. Now, the question about why do it? I think it’s a consensus view, which is employers want students/graduates who are job-ready. The students themselves certainly want to be marketable and competitive with relevant experience. They want to see how what they’re learning applies in specific contexts. We talked about analytics before. Well, analytics looks different in finance than it does in healthcare. And so practicing/applying the same tools and techniques but in a particular work context makes a world of difference and makes it a lot easier to be ready to hit the ground running.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:08:53] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

The Connection Between Technology and Lifelong LearningJeff Cobb: [00:09:32] You’ve been involved with technology and learning, as well as with lifelong learning, for many years now. I know you were at Northeastern before and had initiatives in this area. What’s your perspective on the connection between the two—between technology and lifelong learning? And have you seen the focus on lifelong learning shift in higher education in recent years as technology has created new possibilities and opportunities? I’m going to assume the answer to that is probably yes, but I’d like to hear how you’ve seen that happen.

Kemi Jona: [00:10:03] Well, yes, the end of your question really is the answer, which is technology has created new possibilities. I’ve been, as you said, interested in how technology and technology-mediated learning can create greater access to high-quality learning for learners of all ages. For my whole career, that’s been the through line for me, whether it be K-12, higher ed (as I’m working on now), or lifelong, as you suggested. And so, yes, the short answer is absolutely. Let’s go back and think what was lifelong learning before the Internet? It was go to the library and check out some books. I remember my mom was a big fan of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute that has chapters at various universities, and she’d go, and they’d have the all-star faculty lectures. She’d go in and meet her friends for lunch, and then they’d go listen to the great lecture. That’s quintessential lifelong learning and still is a terrific resource.

Kemi Jona: [00:11:09] But you’re going to have to live within whatever 15-, 20-minute drive of campus to really make it worthwhile to get there, and that’s obviously very limiting. So, yes, technology’s been a game changer. The Internet’s been a game changer for lifelong learning, including just being able to find stuff that you’re interested in, regardless of where you are. I think the second part to your question was about universities and lifelong learning, which I think is a really interesting and topical question, Jeff. I’m really glad that you asked it because, for many, many years, universities, especially public universities, there’s been a lot of lip service to the idea of lifelong learning, and, yes, we should support the needs of our state. Wisconsin, where I did my undergraduate—another great public institution—the Wisconsin idea is that the boundaries of the campus are the boundaries of the state, which is a compelling way to describe it. So there’s been a lot of talk about that.

Kemi Jona: [00:12:08] But what’s changed in recent years has been the financial pressure and the demographic cliff, if you will, that higher ed is facing, which is fewer and fewer traditional-age high school graduates—demographically, we know it’s going down. And, secondly, a shrinking percentage of those high school graduates are choosing to go to post-secondary, at least right away. So you have fewer numbers in the baseline and then fewer percentages of those choosing to go. And so, all of a sudden, it’s like, wait a second, where are all these traditional-age undergrads going? The obvious answer is, well, we should be doing a better job serving learners of all ages, not just 18 to 22 or 18 to 26. And figuring out what that means is really the challenge that a lot of universities have embarked on, and a lot of them have done a great job. And some are still trying to figure out what the answer is, and what does that look like?

Serving Post-Traditional LearnersJeff Cobb: [00:13:10] And what do you…? Because I know this has been a significant thing that we now have a much greater percentage of, as you refer to them, non-traditional learners, the ones who…

Kemi Jona: [00:13:19] Post-traditional.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:20] Post-traditional. Okay, yes.

Kemi Jona: [00:13:21] Because they’re the majority now, yes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:23] They’re the majority now. So what are the main challenges that institutions face in serving those people? I number pop to mind for me right away, but I’d love to hear your perspective.

Kemi Jona: [00:13:35] I think, in many respects, your listeners, Jeff, already deeply understand this audience because that is the core audience, which is a working adult who is juggling multiple responsibilities, perhaps a full-time job, perhaps several jobs, caregiving at home, whether for a parent or children or whoever it might be, community and other activities, and just the full-blown set of responsibilities. And, as shocking as it may sound, universities aren’t used to dealing with that population. We are used to dealing with learners where we call all the shots because either they’re 18 to 22—they’re living on campus or in the dorms. Going to school is basically their number one full-time job. If they have a job, it’s on the side. Many do.

Kemi Jona: [00:14:33] Or even a grad student who’s coming back for a traditional on-campus, let’s say, two-year master’s degree or two-year MBA or a law degree, professional degree. We control everything. We control the schedule. You’re expected to prioritize that over anything else in your life. We just haven’t thought that hard about having to meet the learners where they are really, which is, as you suggested, not on campus, living wherever they live, lots of other responsibilities that take precedence over a lifelong learning endeavor, whether it’s for credit, not for credit, whatever, and a busy schedule that is not going to be wrapped around the whims of a particular faculty schedule or program schedule. And so the idea of meeting the learner where they are and prioritizing the design of the program, the design of the experience around them rather than around the provider, whoever that is—in this case, the university—that’s a big mind shift, and that can be a real struggle for higher ed, the universities and others who have not embarked on that kind of thinking before.

Universities and an Entrepreneurial MindsetJeff Cobb: [00:15:44] It seems like it requires a good bit more of an entrepreneurial mindset these days because, in some instances, you have universities or parts of universities almost acting like commercial training firms. They’re reaching out to corporate partners and providing customized programing and other options. In other instances, they may be putting their stuff into, say, a Coursera or an edX catalog and getting that out there to the consumer. And then, of course, they’re your alumni, too. I remember years ago when I was writing a book that was called Leading the Learning Revolution, and I made the comment that it didn’t seem like my university, which was the University of Virginia—I’m an alumni there—was actually reaching out to me about lifelong learning opportunities, and, within a year, that had started. I was getting e-mails from the University of Virginia about “Hey, come. Larry Sabato is doing a course for you to tune into.” So there’re all these new opportunities to go along with those challenges. Do you feel like universities are embracing a more entrepreneurial mindset?

Kemi Jona: [00:16:44] I think you’ll find pockets of that happening. One thing to say right off the bat, Jeff, is that we’re going to change that come this fall. We’re going to launch a new lifelong learning service from the alumni association that is going to try to do a much better job, using AI, to match your profile of interests and career aspirations with the resources that we have available, both in terms of your career goals and your interests. And so we’re going to try to walk the talk of lifelong learning starting this fall and try to really lean into that idea. But, yes, I think there’s a couple of things going on. Some alumni associations, I think, do a much better job of that. We have an engagement office, which is probably the one sending you the e-mails, that focuses on digital resources.

Kemi Jona: [00:17:36] To your earlier question around what does technology change, we can serve up a bunch of digital resources now, and this obviously exploded during COVID when we had to rethink the whole, “Just come to campus, or go on a trip.” Both of those were off the table, so what else can we do? We have Zoom, Webinars from faculty like Larry Sabato, or other sorts of digital resources, meet-ups, and stuff like that—those are all online—and obviously more formal courses, whether they be non-credit or other things like that. So there’s a lot of opportunity there to do more. And, yes, absolutely, you’ve got very entrepreneurial units in places like the business school, which has done exactly that for time immemorial. And those are usually the leading providers because that’s just core and central to what a business school does. Engineering schools often will do something similar as well. So lots of places where we’re trying to reach out and understand what those learners want and how to serve it up or match it to the resources that we have.

Microcredentials and Stackable CredentialsJeff Cobb: [00:18:54] One of the things that seems to have a lot of buzz in higher education these days, and I think even more so than in the association world (where I’ve tended to do a lot of my work), is microcredentialing, microcredentials, stackable credentials. I feel like I’m continually seeing articles, Webinars about that in higher education. Do you feel like those approaches are getting any real traction at this point? And why or why not?

Kemi Jona: [00:19:20] To me, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, Jeff. On the one hand, I absolutely believe that the idea of breaking big chunks of learning down into smaller pieces is absolutely the right thing to do. I think we know that that’s what learners want. We know attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. I think, if I remember correctly, the optimum length of a video clip on Coursera is about eight minutes now. That’s the magic number that they push for. Regardless of what we call it, whether it’s microcredentials or stackable, I think that’s the correct direction of travel because it allows users to consume it, learners to consume it, in ways that make sense. On the other side, the flip side is there’s been a lot of hype, quite honestly. Just like with any learning technology, just like with AI (now generative AI), there’s a lot of hype.

Kemi Jona: [00:20:15] Those of us who have been in this business for a while have seen these hype cycles come and go, over and over, and so we’re a little bit more savvy with respect to, well, let’s see where the value really is. Let’s not get wrapped up in it. I think it’s both. I think part of it is definitely correct, and then some of it is a bit hyped up, especially by vendors and others. So where is the sweet spot? I’m absolutely a firm believer in that idea of stackability—you mentioned stackable credentials. And, for the listeners who are new to this concept, the idea is that, when you break up a larger learning experience or a set of experiences into smaller pieces, it would be really nice if the learner had the option at a later time to combine those into something more significant, maybe some kind of larger credential, whether it’s a certificate from one of your association members, whether it’s an academic certificate, or even a full degree on the academic side, if that’s something that someone aspires to. It’s like the Lego block idea. It’s nice to have a bunch of Lego blocks, but it’s also cool that the Lego blocks can stack together and fit together, and you can do something with those.

Kemi Jona: [00:21:31] What’s especially powerful is the idea that you don’t have to decide at the beginning that you want to stack it. It’s on the designer side, the provider side to figure out the potential for stacking and enable it, and then allow you, as the learner, to opt into it later if you feel like, hey, that was a really cool course. Maybe I took a project management PMI certificate or something like that, and now I’d really like to go and get a master’s in project management. Boy, wouldn’t it be cool if that PMI certificate would count for some number of courses? And guess what? It does. It does count in a lot of programs. At Northeastern, for example, we counted that towards a master’s in project management. And so a couple of examples for your listeners, Jeff, in terms of ways that stackability can be very powerful across the boundaries between association learners or non-academic providers and higher ed or academic providers.

Kemi Jona: [00:22:35] Back in, I think, 2016, 2017, I did a couple of stackability partnerships. The first was with IBM. This is when I was at Northeastern. We were the first to recognize some of their digital badges, the IBM digital badges, for credit in our graduate programs. IBM, as you know, has been a long-time leader in the digital badging realm. In fact, they’ve transformed a lot of their business around identifying skills through these digital badges, and so we recognized a number of them into several of our master’s degrees. You could cash those in, if you will, for credit if you wanted to continue on with your learning. And then, right after that, I think, in 2017, Northeastern was the first to recognize the Google IT Support Certificate, which was their first professional certificate, for 12 credits into our Bachelor of Science in IT. If you were working in a job, IT, and you got the certificate, the idea was you could continue working and then come in and finish your degree, counting that for 12 credits, which was about $6,000 or $7,000 worth of tuition, so it’s a pretty substantial amount. And creating those equivalencies, I think, is a really powerful model that I think your listeners could lean into and expand on.

Credit, Non-Credit, and Credit for Prior LearningJeff Cobb: [00:24:03] You’ve mentioned credits a number of times as you were making those comments, and I know that’s always a big deal in the university setting because the coin of the realm there is the degree, and you have to have the credits that that go towards that degree. But, a lot of times, having to deal with that can slow things down—getting things approved and getting them out the door—on the one hand, for things you may be developing, that you want to put out into the marketplace, but then, on the other hand, for things that might be coming to you, like people have participated in the PMI certification or that sort of thing. Are you seeing, as we evolve, more openness to and maybe even a certain eagerness to offering more non-credit opportunities in higher education or to be able to give award credit for higher-learning activities?

Kemi Jona: [00:24:54] Absolutely. Look, just because we were talking about credit doesn’t mean that’s the end-all, be-all. You’re absolutely correct that, if you want an academic credential, then pretty soon you’re going to need to get into the credit realm. But that doesn’t mean to denigrate the non-credit side, which I think is exploding. Obviously, Coursera has been a real key driver in terms of making that accessible to broad audiences, and edX as well. There’s a lot of opportunity that universities are leaning into to put non-credit experiences up there. Some of those non-credit experiences can then translate into for-credit later, as you said, credit for prior learning.

Kemi Jona: [00:25:37] Interestingly, Coursera has recently passed a 50-percent threshold of non-academic content being on the platform. We always think of Coursera—at least I do—as like a university, primary university vehicle or distribution channel. But the reality is that there is now more non-academic, corporate, or association content on there than there is academic content. It’s time to reboot our understanding of that, and I think it’s a good reflection, Jeff, of your question about the importance and prevalence of non-credit versus credit. If you look at their quarterly or annual reports, it’s all the non-credit stuff that’s going crazy and growing. And, if you look at it, the degree programs are pretty flat in terms of growth—a very slight growth but flat relative to the other stuff.

Collaboration Between Academia and AssociationsJeff Cobb: [00:26:40] Part of that credit space determines how well different types of institutions and organizations can actually work together, in my mind, to a certain extent. And you know that a lot of the work we do is with trade and professional associations—you’ve referenced that. I personally think there is a lot of opportunity for more collaboration between higher ed, academia and that trade and professional world. You’ve referenced a couple of things, like bringing certification into degree programs, giving credit for that. Do you see other opportunities? How do you view that whole potential of collaboration between those two worlds going forward?

Kemi Jona: [00:27:17] Yes, another great question, Jeff. I’m absolutely bullish on the opportunity space for that kind of collaboration. I think it’s huge, and it’s largely untapped. I think, if there’s one takeaway from our conversation today for the listeners, it’s to really lean into exploring and understanding the kinds of partnerships that are available. What are the reasons behind that? As we talked about before, universities broadly are in a tough enrollment situation. The traditional market, as we talked about, is shrinking. And so the question is, as a university, how do you diversify your revenue streams? That’s the key question leading to the non-credit conversation that we had and other things. And so building partnerships with associations or other professional learning organizations is, in my view, a really important way to expand your audiences, create new channels for learners to come in.

Kemi Jona: [00:28:24] One of the biggest line items of expense for universities—probably for any learning provider frankly, right after the cost of human capital, your salaries—is marketing. It’s how do you reach the audience, and how much does it cost you per person that you enroll? I’m sure this is a front-of-mind topic for a lot of your listeners as they work with limited budgets to try to expand their audiences or reach the audiences they know about, especially in those fields that are not mandated for continuing ed, where the audience has to come to you. And that’s great. I think there’s a shared understanding there with your audience, Jeff, and the academic audience, which is how do you reach people without having to pay a ton to Google AdWords or whatever other display ads or other costs?

Kemi Jona: [00:29:19] Creating partnerships with an association, where you’ve got access to that audience through your normal channels and can promote a new kind of pathway, which is to say, well, if you take our learning, we’ve got a special offer from University X that will convert that into credit or convert it into a part of a certificate where we can share faculty expertise or industry expertise to enrich our programs on either side, there’s just massive opportunity.

Kemi Jona: [00:29:52] The other one that I’m really excited about too is the idea of co-design and co-creation. That is an idea of recognizing, especially if we talk about lifelong learning, that learning is not limited to a university campus. Learning happens everywhere. That’s what lifelong learning means. And that means there are plenty of experts out there, especially curated by industry associations and others, that have decades of experience that could be really valuable as complements to faculty expertise in the business school, marketing, or whatever discipline it is, engineering, supply chain. And so the idea of building those programs with input from both sides, where we can co-design it and even co-brand it, can be really, really powerful. One example of some work that happened in Northeastern when I was there was a joint master’s degree between Northeastern and the Mayo Clinic in Digital Transformation of Healthcare. Mayo is a great brand, one of the top brands globally in healthcare, and so to be able to put that brand and the Northeastern brand together, with experts on both sides, was really a tremendous opportunity. There’s a lot more room for that kind of joint development in the future.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:09] Yes, I think that’s very powerful. The co-creation and co-branding component, in particular, has the potential to really address some core issues that the two camps have around maintaining price point, for example, or reaching and getting the attention of learners. Together, those are problems that can be solved in what is an increasingly noisy and competitive marketplace for lifelong learning opportunities.

Kemi Jona: [00:31:35] A hundred percent, yes. It gives you differentiation right out of the gate, especially if you have a strong brand that you can attach to that. We also know that our students are professional learners. Master’s programs, they love hearing from industry experts. A lot of times they’re hoping to work at firms that are represented by those experts, build their professional network, and hear what it really is like, not just from one faculty member but from a whole host of experts. It absolutely enriches the traditional academic offerings in that way. So I would not shy away if I were leading an association’s learning organization from reaching out to any number of relevant university programs and having a discussion like, “What can we do together that neither of us can do separately?” And differentiate, as you said, Jeff.

Personal Approach to Lifelong LearningJeff Cobb: [00:32:26] Yes. Kemi, this has been a great conversation. Before we wrap up, I want to switch gears a little bit because we always like to ask guests about their own approaches to lifelong learning since that’s what we’re all about here. What are some of your own habits and practices, maybe some favorite resources for supporting your own lifelong learning?

Kemi Jona: [00:32:48] It’s a great question, Jeff. Probably, like most of us, I wish I could devote more time to it. But I think what I’ve cobbled together to help me stay current is a number of things. One is I really lean into my network for recommendations. I know that I tend to share articles or posts with my friends that I think are relevant because then it goes through one filter of curation, and so, if I send it to somebody, they’re going to know, “Oh, well, it’s probably above threshold, worth reading.” And similarly, when I get something from my colleagues or friends, I really appreciate that. So sharing with your friends and your network. Obviously LinkedIn is a great place for that to happen more at scale.

Kemi Jona: [00:33:32] It can get a little noisy and crowded these days, but every once in a while I’ll pick up a real gem of an article or something that I see somebody refer to over there. I tend to subscribe to a good handful of mailing lists, Substacks, or whatever and follow folks like that because, again, it goes through at least one powerful filter of curation of someone who’s smart and who I trust. And then some podcasts. I tend to follow a number of podcast thinkers just to stay abreast of it. That’s my smorgasbord of different lifelong learning sources. And then I just try to sneak in some reading in a traditional format if I can.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:12] Right. That whole curation filters around this is such an important thing.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:26] Kemi Jona is the vice provost for online education and digital innovation at the University of Virginia. Connect with Kemi on LinkedIn.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Microcredentials and Mentoring with Veronica Diaz * Lifelong Learning Through COVID with Chris McLeod * Learning from Big Learning: 15 Lessons * Centering the Learner/Worker with CAEL’s Christine Carpenter * Capitalizing on Curation

The post Not Calling the Shots with Kemi Jona appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbIn our Learning Business Maturity Model, marketing is one of the five fundamental domains learning businesses need to work on and in to mature and be successful.

The Inquiring Mind by Cyril Houle was written in 1961, but it’s a foundational text that can still provide learning businesses with a better understanding of the motivations of the learners they aim to serve.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] The Inquiring Mind by Cyril Houle was written in 1961, but it’s a foundational text that can still provide learning businesses with a better understanding of the motivations of the learners they aim to serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:26] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] In our Learning Business Maturity Model, marketing is one of the five fundamental domains learning businesses need to work on and in to mature and be successful.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:37] To help you in understanding your market, we offer in this episode, number 419, the second part of our book report on The Inquiring Mind: A Study of the Adult Who Continues to Learn by Cyril Houle.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:52] In episode 418, we covered the first chapter of the book along with some background on Cyril Houle. That first chapter was called “Two Educations,” and, in that chapter, he (Houle) talks about three subgroups, or categories, of lifelong learners: the goal-oriented, the activity-oriented, and the learning-oriented. I’ll let that suffice for the brief recap for this episode, but you’ll find a link to that previous episode in the show notes for this episode.

Chapter Two of The Inquiring Mind: “Step to the Music”Jeff Cobb: [00:01:26] In this episode, we’re going to look at the other two chapters in the book, and we’ll repeat what we said in the last episode: It’s a modest volume, it’s a slim book, and it’s made up of these three chapters. And this second chapter is titled “Step to the Music.”

Celisa Steele: [00:01:44] That title comes from the opening epigraph of the chapter, which is from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” I will say that, as a side note, The Inquiring Mind is chocked full of quotations from other books. Each of those three chapters starts with an epigraph that is the source of the chapter title, and I will say that all of the quotes, the use of those epigraphs, make me heavily suspect that Houle was a learning-oriented lifelong learner because he does note that they tend to be avid readers.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:25] I feel certain that he was. We noted in the last episode that we dedicated the episode to Cyril Houle and to David Houle, his son. I know David is also probably one of those learning-oriented lifelong learners, somebody who seeks knowledge for the sake of knowledge, at least when it comes to understanding the world, understanding lifelong learning, those sorts of things. There’re probably areas in which both of them are more goal-oriented or activity-oriented. We’ve talked about how that can switch up some, but, on the whole, I think they were probably very learning-oriented.

The Motivations of Goal-Oriented and Activity-Oriented LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:02:57] And so, in this chapter, “Step to the Music,” Cyril Houle digs into the motivations that define those three categories of learners and looks at how those learners tend to see both themselves and other lifelong learners. The goal-oriented learners tend to feel pretty comfortable and confident in their approach because it tends to fit with our society and our economy, which tend to be pretty goal-oriented. They tend to see “adult education as a way to solve problems or pursue particular interests.” And so they really identify as going after some goal, and they also tend to attribute the same kinds of motives to other learners. They think other learners are also out there trying to achieve some goal. In fact, this group of goal-oriented tends to be fairly impatient with anybody who doesn’t describe why they’re learning as being related to a goal. They don’t get this idea of “Oh, I’m just reading a book to read a book.” Why are you reading that book? What do you hope to do once you’ve finished the book? They’re very application-focused, very practical-focused.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:07] These are the people who e-mail us and want to know what the agenda is for whatever it is that we’re offering. Because I think they’re probably thinking about what are their goals, and is this agenda going to help them meet their goals or not? So that’s the goal-oriented group.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:21] And then there’s the activity-oriented group. People may be a little less willing to own up to that, just depending on how they’re thinking about activity and what seems safe or acceptable. In some cases, they may be seeking out these learning activity-type environments simply because they’re lonely, or they’re looking for friends or looking for a spouse or significant other. It may not be the type of thing that everybody wants to put out there. But, for the most part, when they’re asked directly about their motives, those activity-oriented people prefer to say things which, when you take them at face value, would actually put them in one of the other categories.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:01] I think it gets back to what our society, what our economy tends to value. It tends to understand, or it’s okay to be going after something to achieve, a goal. And so rather than saying, “Oh, I’m going to this conference for companionship,” or “I’m going to this salsa class to find a spouse,” they’ll say, “Oh, well, I’m trying to learn how to dance,” which, again, at face value, would put them more in that goal-oriented category. But it comes down to whether or not it’s safe for them to admit it. I think that also does apply to the check-the-box learners that we also talked about that can fall under this activity orientation. Even if that’s all they’re there for—just to check the box and get whatever the certificate is at the end—they might not always feel comfortable saying that. They might give lip service to having some goal or some appreciation for the particular subject matter and what it might help them do, but really they’re there just to check the box.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:59] I think that’s why you hear a term like “networking” so often because networking feels goal-oriented. It sounds very pragmatic and businesslike. It doesn’t say, “I’m going there just because I want the social atmosphere,” basically, which I think your average person who values networking is looking for more than just social interaction. But networking makes it feel more goal-oriented, more practical.

The Motivations of Learning-Oriented LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:06:20] So those are the first two categories. That third category, of learning-oriented lifelong learners, Houle says that they have “two distinct self-conceptions. Most have long been aware of their own preoccupation with learning (they can cite illustrations from their childhood to prove it), and they recognize that they are different from most other people in this respect. But a few of the learning-oriented insisted”—this is, again, based on the 22 interviews that Houle and colleagues did—“that they are not continuing learners at all and that education is merely their way of having fun.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:54] I love that portion of this group. Yes, it’s just this is who they are, this is what they do, this is how they enjoy life, and they aren’t thinking of it as learning even though clearly it’s very oriented towards learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:07] In that bit that I just quoted, there is that phrase, they are “different from most others in this respect,” meaning their preoccupation with learning. And Houle really gives some emphasis to that and spends some time on it because he argues that society is, by and large, anti-lifelong learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:31] Anti-lifelong learning, indeed. He says that “those who [want to] encourage the growth of continuing education”—and this would, for example, be learning businesses; we’re all presumably encouraging the growth of continuing education—“must face the fact that many of the attitudes and values of American society are directly and specifically opposed to the idea of lifelong learning and that this opposition has a vehemence and spread of impact which is not apparent to those who do not feel it directly themselves.”

The Enemy Isn’t ApathyCelisa Steele: [00:08:05] He goes on to say—and I find this very interesting and important—“The enemy is not apathy, as many would like to believe, but outright opposition, and opposition from places where it counts most—from the family, associates, and friends who surround the person who feels an inclination toward learning.” I think this is very interesting because, personally, I too often perhaps don’t realize the bubble that I live within. And so I’m thinking, well, who in the world could be against bettering yourself through lifelong learning, continuing education, or professional development? But, as Houle cites in these interviews, often, for that adult who wants to pursue learning, that comes at the expense of time spent at home with family or time spent on the job directly. You have this sort of opposition that the lifelong learner has to grapple with. They have this innate desire, this goal-oriented desire, or this activity-oriented desire to learn. But there are forces at work that make it hard for them to engage, and that opposition can come from very important sources—your colleagues, your family, sources that are hard to ignore.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:21] Yes, I think there’s always, potentially, a sense or a vibe there that somebody who’s actively seeking learning is potentially trying to be better than other people in a way. It can be perceived that way. We’re not going to get into politics here, but I think there is—for example, right now in the United States, and I think this applies in other countries as well—a big divide between the educated and the less educated, and I think there is some of that tension that’s there. It’s a very real current that runs through society, and Houle was picking up on it at that point in time.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:58] I think it’s interesting for learning businesses to acknowledge that because again, as I said, if any listeners or learning businesses are like me and tend to think, “Oh, there’s only the positive spin to be put on bettering yourself through continued learning,” you might need to pause and think about what are the objections? What are the barriers that your learners might be encountering? And is there anything that you can do to help them combat those barriers that might be preventing them from engaging with your offerings?

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:28] Yes, I think this comes up in a very clear way around the budgeting decisions—budgets for any sort of formal investment in education or learning or even informal investments. People often have to fight for that money, and it’s often the first thing that gets cut when times get tough. And I think that does reflect an attitude towards learning that we can get by as we are, and, to further invest in our education and our learning, that’s a nice-to-have, not a have-to-have. I think Houle would say it’s a have-to-have, but he knows he’s up against people who don’t think that.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:07] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Learning Providers, Not Just Learners, Tend to Be Goal-, Activity-, or Learning-OrientedCelisa Steele: [00:11:43] One of the other takeaways from this chapter, “Step to the Music,” that we’ll touch on here is that Houle makes the point that “not just learners but also those providing the learning”—again, that means those of you listening to this, those of you working in learning businesses—those providing the learning as well as the learners tend to have one of those three orientations to lifelong learning. So they tend to either be goal-oriented, activity-oriented, or learning-oriented. And it’s important to perhaps recognize your own tendency, your own bias, where you tend to think, and make sure that you’re not only thinking, if you happen, for example, to be learning-oriented, not only thinking about, “Okay, how does this work for learning-oriented?,” but you’re also taking off your blinders and thinking about, “Okay, how do we also serve the goal-oriented? How do we also serve the activity-oriented?”

Adult Education Isn’t UniformJeff Cobb: [00:12:33] Yes, and you referenced earlier feeling like maybe you’re in a bubble at times, and so you don’t recognize some of these points of tension and opposition that are there. Houle says: “Anyone who believes all adult education can be fitted into a single neat pattern is either hearing only the reverberations of his own ideas”—basically in a bubble, navel-gazing—“or clinging to the uniformities of a day which is now past.” The “We’ve always done it that way” sort of stuff. Right on at the time that he was writing this, right on now in terms of the issues that can come up and how we think about ourselves as providers of learning and education.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:12] Yes, it’s interesting. He’s giving these lectures in 1960. As a reminder, the book is based on a series of lectures. Then he collected them, wrote them down, and published them in 1961. But you think 1961, and here we are recording in 2024, and he’s talking about how the field of adult education is complex and there’re competing theories and competing priorities in the field.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:36] This is completely relevant.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:37] Could have written that about today, for sure. At the end of the chapter, Houle writes this: “What is needed is a more concerted effort, by educators and such allies as they can enlist among the value-establishers of our society, to express the importance of continuing education as clearly and as universally as they can so that the message finally penetrates to all those different clusters and groups of people who make up the public.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:07] I love that phrase “value-establishers” because that’s essentially influencers now. You need your influencers to work with you. But, again, both then and now, value at the heart of it.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:19] Yes, and so this passage also, for me, speaks to the value of seeing learning businesses as part of what we call the third sector. We have the K-12 sector, we have higher education, but then, once you finish your formal education, you move into that third sector. But if we, as learning businesses, really recognize our role in that larger sector and that we have other folks who are working in that sector, then it begins to be believable that, collectively, we might actually be able to convey and convince others of the true importance of continuing education.

Chapter Three of The Inquiring Mind: “A Cataract of Consequences”Jeff Cobb: [00:14:56] That’s chapter two that we’ve just covered, which is “Step to the Music.” Let’s move on to the third chapter of this three-chapter, modest volume from Cyril Houle, and this one is “A Cataract of Consequences.”

Celisa Steele: [00:15:13] This epigraph, where the title comes from, has to do with medical diagnoses. And this is a little part of that epigraph: “Most medical scientists seem completely oblivious (or ignorant) of the fact that results usually come from many causes, not one…. We ought to use the ‘why’ in the plural and ask, ‘Whys is the patient in coma?’ not, ‘Why is the patient in coma?’”

Asking Whys Is WiseJeff Cobb: [00:15:38] I love that—the plural whys. Of course, what do you call it when two words sound alike like that?

Celisa Steele: [00:15:46] Homonyms?

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:46] Homonym, I guess, yes. W- I- S- E and W- H- Y- S. Wise and whys. I like the way that those correspond with each other.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:56] And so, then, after that epigraph, Houle opens the chapter with this: “Of all the questions that can be asked about continuing learners, the most important is ‘Whys.’” Again, we came to this text saying that we think it can help learning businesses better understand their market. I do believe that it can. And I think one of the important takeaways is that it’s not a simplistic understanding of your market, that there are lots of nuances. There are lots of whys.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:27] Yes. He then talks about three elements that are there for pretty much all lifelong learners that I think are driving those…

Celisa Steele: [00:16:37] Basically, the sorts of circumstances that need to exist for lifelong learners to be able to learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:42] Right. These are driving those whys in a way. There’s “the recognition of a need or an interest” that has to be there, “the will to do something about it, and the opportunity to do so.” So you have to have those three things lined up as a commonality, as the basis of all lifelong learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:03] Yes, that’s the commonality, and that’s what unites lifelong learners. But there’s a lot of fragmentation. We’ve talked about noise. We’ve talked about fragmentation in other episodes before. And so, Houle says, “The organized field of adult education is now fragmented into groups built around institutions, processes, and special approaches; it can gain coherence and unified strength only on the basis of common themes, one of the most significant of which is the nature of the adult learner.” To my mind, that gets back to those three elements: that the adult learner who recognizes a need or interest has the will to do something about it and the opportunity to do so. That’s the commonality. But then, even once they have that, then that array of choices, that fragmentation of “Where do I go to fulfill that need and to exercise this desire to learn?,” that is still confusing and difficult for the lifelong learner.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:01] We’ve talked about this a lot before—that whole arena of the third sector and the broader lifelong learning landscape. We have all of these different types of providers and institutions who are involved in serving adult learners. Not a lot of communication or collaboration amongst them, not a lot of coherence, and a learner is having to navigate that space. So the learner may recognize that need or interest and have the will to do something about it, but then figuring out how to connect that with the right sorts of opportunities continues to be a very complex thing.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:37] And then, towards the end of this chapter, the third chapter, which is the end of the book essentially—there is a section on the protocol for how they handled the interviews, but, in terms of the major content, this is the end. He goes back to a concept that he opened with in the first chapter, which is that “the ability and desire to learn aren’t shared equally by everyone, that there are people who identify as being lifelong learners, and there are others who, once they finish whatever education is ‘forced on them,’ they don’t ever really think about wanting to engage in more.”

Desire and Ability to Learn Aren’t Shared Equally, But They Can Be FosteredCelisa Steele: [00:19:14] He closes, though, by saying that even though “the desire and ability to learn aren’t shared equally by everyone, both that desire and the ability to learn can be fostered by good teaching, by careful guidance, by building and enlarging sympathetic enclaves, and providing a range of educational opportunities. These tasks are too great for partial and divided efforts. The inquiring minds of the past have produced most of the advances of civilization. Our hopes for the future must rest in large measure on our capacity to increase the number and ability of those who continue all their lives to share in the benefits and pleasures of intellectual inquiry.”

Celisa Steele: [00:19:51] This is where I feel like you need to cue the uplifting symphony music at the end because he’s making the point that lifelong learners, that’s where most of society’s major developments, major ideas, major inventions have come from. And so, really, what we’re doing in this field, if you’re supporting continuing education, professional development, lifelong learning, you’re significantly contributing to society, to the future of society.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:20] We’ve said it again and again—and probably even more than I recognize under the influence of Cyril Houle, we’ve probably been saying it—but that coherence, that collaborative vision across the many different institutions that serve lifelong learners, dialog between the leaders of those different providers to the sector, the different institutions in the sector, governmental vision behind it, it’s that other 50 years. This is a big thing, that so many people impacted by this society, impacted by this, we need to step up, in the way that Houle is suggesting here, to really support this sector of education.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:00] I think if you buy into what he is saying here and into his belief in the absolutely fundamental importance of lifelong learning, then that has dramatic impact on what you’re doing as a learning business. It is going to say things about what should go into your portfolio, what might have the biggest impact. It’s going to say things about partnerships and trying to look for ways to collaborate rather than compete. It’s going to impact your vision and mission. It could lead to some radical rethinking of how you approach your market.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:34] Definitely. Now, maybe a little bit of a down note to end on here is that this fascinating book that hopefully we now have you all lathered up to find and read is actually out of print at this point. You might be able to find a copy online or perhaps at a library. We hope libraries are carrying this. We’re hoping maybe we can incentivize some publisher out there, through our efforts here, to put it back into publication. But, while we do encourage you to read it—and, again, it’s under 100 pages if you can get your hands on it—we realize that’s not necessarily going to be easy. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to at least offer this book report because we do think it’s a foundational text that takes us back to the early days of the emerging field of adult education in the United States.

So Much the Same, But Some ChangesCelisa Steele: [00:22:21] And so much does remain the same despite the 60-plus years since this book was published. The fragmentation of the adult education field, the societal animosity against lifelong learning—I think those parts also still fit and feel accurate to me. I think the categorization of the learners into activity-oriented, goal-oriented, and learning-oriented also still rings true to me, and I think that is a useful way to think about learners that you might be serving.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:55] Right. And, of course, there has been some change. There’s been progress. We have a much better understanding of things like motivations to learn, the underlying psychology around learning, the brain in general, and how learning is now engaged in and delivered, what technology has made possible. All of that has happened, of course.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:17] But I think the real takeaway is that applying this kind of inquiry to our own learning businesses is really beneficial. We want to foster and support inquiry in our learners, but we should also live that out and do that same type of inquiry ourselves. It’s going to help us better understand the learners that we serve and not simply as marketing personas that could potentially work for any industry but really as types of learners, really thinking about how our market thinks about learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:57] The Inquiring Mind by Cyril Houle was written in 1961, but it’s a foundational text that can still provide learning businesses with a better understanding of the motivations of the learners they aim to serve.

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Related Resources* The Inquiring Mind, Part I * An Essential Guide to Andragogy for Learning Businesses

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbFor learning businesses, it’s important to truly understand the learners they aim to serve. To help with that understanding, in this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 418, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele turn to a text that’s over 60 years old but still incredibly relevant.

In The Inquiring Mind, Cyril Houle divides lifelong learners into three categories: goal-oriented, activity-oriented, and learning-oriented. Learning businesses that understand the motivations and activities of each category will be better positioned to serve those learners and provide them with value.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] In The Inquiring Mind, Cyril Houle divides lifelong learners into three categories: goal-oriented, activity-oriented, and learning-oriented. Learning businesses that understand the motivations and activities of each category will be better positioned to serve those learners and provide them with value.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:24] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:25] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] At Leading Learning, we focus on continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:39] Yes, and we say those phrases so often—continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning—that, like all platitudes, they can lose some of their meaning because of the frequency of their use.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:53] But, for learning businesses, it’s important to not gloss over those terms and instead to really understand what they mean because those terms are at the heart of understanding the audience you serve, that huge and mighty, if often unsung, throng of lifelong learners.

The Inquiring Mind: A Study of the Adult Who Continues to Learn and a DedicationCelisa Steele: [00:01:12] To help us with understanding lifelong learners, in this episode, number 418, we want to turn to a text that’s over 60 years old, but it’s one that we consider foundational in what was, back in 1961, the early days of the field of adult education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:31] And the specific text that we have in mind is The Inquiring Mind: A Study of the Adult Who Continues to Learn by Cyril O. Houle.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:43] Now, that book might not ring a bell the way that perhaps The Adult Learner by Malcolm Knowles might ring a bell for listeners. But Houle was an influential thinker and an influential actor in adult education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:00] That’s right. In fact, he taught and mentored Knowles, so he played a big role in helping to shape some of that thinking that might be a little more well known at this point. In fact, I’m fortunate I’ve got a personal connection to Cyril Houle, mainly via his son David Houle, who I wrote a book with a number of years ago—Shift Ed. That was my first commercially published book that I coauthored with David. With that in mind, we’d like to dedicate this episode to Cyril Houle but also to David Houle, both important thinkers and influencers in our work.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:38] This is the first time we’ve dedicated an episode, but I think it’s very appropriate here, 418 episodes in, to make that dedication to David Houle and Cyril Houle.

Biographical Snapshot of Cyril HouleJeff Cobb: [00:02:51] Indeed. Breaking some new ground here. We referenced when Cyril Houle was working, but let’s give a little bit more of a biographical snapshot of him. He was born in 1913 and lived until 1998.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:08] 1998. I will say that he spent 40 of the years of that 85 years of life there. He spent 40 of those years as a faculty member at the University of Chicago. That’s, I guess, back in the day when someone could go and spend decades at a single institution.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:24] It was a different world in academia back then, definitely. Houle attended the University of Florida at Gainesville, got a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree there in 1934, and was awarded a Ph.D. in adult education from the University of Chicago in 1940.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:43] He showed up at the University of Chicago in 1939, finished his Ph.D. in 1940, and then, like we said, stuck around for the next 39 years after that. The University of Chicago was where Houle and Knowles met and where they had that teacher-student, mentor-mentee relationship.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:02] And so, in what was really a lifelong effort to identify and analyze the whole field of adult education, its themes, sectors of influence, Houle published 14 books, 21 monographs, and at least 145 papers, chapters, symposiums, introductions to books, and other analytical pieces. In addition, he published two books on the nature and processes of governing boards. In fact, those who work in the nonprofit world may be familiar with that governing board work.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:36] He’s received a number of major honors. There’s a Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education. He also was deeply involved with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for a long time, and they now have a program that supports Cyril O. Houle Scholars in Adult and Continuing Education. In general, even though you might not have heard of him before this episode, he really is an influential thinker and actor in the field of adult education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:10] Really, really was a titan in many ways, one of those people who just looms large if you’re going to be in this field of adult education. We mentioned that he authored quite a few books and articles. Some of his most notable works include The Inquiring Mind, which was published in 1961. That’s what we’re going to talk about more as we focus in on in this episode and the next one, a study on adult learners’ motivations and behaviors, something obviously very, very important to our audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:43] He also wrote a book called The Design of Education, that was published in 1972, and that really offered guidance on how to plan and how to evaluate adult education programs. And then, in 1980, he published Continuing Learning in the Professions, which really looked at the ongoing educational needs in professional fields, which might sound like something that listeners are probably interested in, at least a large swath of Leading Learning listeners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:09] Yes, plenty, plenty to dig into here. We did mention he was associated with the Kellogg Foundation. He held a long-term consultancy role there from 1976 to 1995 and significantly influenced the foundation’s educational initiatives.

An Overview of The Inquiring MindCelisa Steele: [00:06:24] Again, generally a really important figure in adult education, particularly when thinking about adult education outside of formal degrees and after the formal phase. Again, just a really brief biographical sketch, but we just wanted to give you a sense of when he was working and the types of topics and work Houle was doing. So now we want to focus in on one of those works, one of those books: The Inquiring Mind: A Study of the Adult Who Continues to Learn. This book was based on lectures that he gave at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the spring of 1960. He based those lectures and then the book on his own review of literature that existed around the burgeoning or beginning field of adult education at the time and also based on 22 in-depth interviews with lifelong learners. That’s the data that he was pulling on for those lectures and then for the book.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:28] I’ll say it’s a pretty slender volume. We’re not talking about a huge tome here.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:32] It’s under 100 pages.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:33] Yes, very readable. I love Houle’s style. He’s got a very engaging style. It doesn’t really feel academic at all, even though he is very serious about this topic and digging into it. The book deals with self-directed learning, obviously a topic that Malcolm Knowles also focused heavily on. Houle doesn’t really use that term per se, but that’s really what it’s focused on in the three chapters that make up the book.

Chapter One: “Two Educations”Celisa Steele: [00:07:56] Yes, there are three chapters, as you just said, Jeff. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to focus on key points from the first chapter, which is called “Two Educations.” We’re going to focus on that in this episode, and then we’re going to do a part two of The Inquiring Mind in our next episode, number 419. Now, that first chapter, “Two Educations,” starts with an epigraph from Edward Gibbon’s Autobiography, and part of that quote is, “Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:35] Houle quotes other people; he also has a lot of material in here that’s very quotable from him, tweetable-type stuff. Or maybe it’s X-able-type stuff now—I’m not sure what you’re supposed to call it at this point. But I love in the opening, he writes, “The desire to learn, like every other human characteristic, is not shared equally by everyone…. [I]n a world which sometimes seems to stress the pleasure of ignorance, some men and women seek the rewards of knowledge—and do so to a marked degree…. The desire to learn seems, in fact, to pervade their existence. They approach life with an air of openness and an inquiring mind.” That obviously ties to the title. I know, for me, some of what Houle is saying in there certainly resonates right now, in the present time, all these years later.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:28] Yes, and the book, in large part, is an exploration of why some people are more inquiring than others, why they’re more likely to seek out learning opportunities and to continue to learn after their formal education is done. He’s opening that up with these two educations and that recognition that you just quoted, Jeff, that “the desire to learn is not shared equally by everyone.” So why not? Or what influences that? What leads to someone wanting to pursue lifelong learning? I will say that the strongest connection that he found was prior education: “The higher the formal education of the adult, the more likely it is that he will take part in continuing education. The amount of schooling is, in fact, so significant that it underlies or reinforces many of the other determinants, such as occupation, size of community, length of stay in it, and nationality and religious backgrounds.” That was a quote from that chapter as well. I think that’s interesting that he did try to look at some of the factors that might come into play, and the strongest correlation was with prior education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:37] Basically, learning breeds more learning when it comes down to it, which I think a lot of us instinctively appreciate. I think we have plenty of research out there that supports that, research mostly that’s happened since Houle. He was recognizing this early on. But we now know the incredible importance of early childhood education, elementary, secondary education, getting into post-secondary education, particularly in this world that we live in right now, really setting the stage for lifelong learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:08] I think it suggests that there’s a possibility, as a learning business, to really make sure that in the way you talk to your learners, whether that’s through marketing or once they’re at an educational event, to remind them that this is a continuation, that they have been learners, that they have been doing this all their life, and this is just the natural continuation. I think that could be something for more learning businesses to tap more consciously into—that direct appeal to their learners.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:11:36] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Three Types of Lifelong LearnersJeff Cobb: [00:12:14] I’ll note that in analyzing those 22 interviews that he did, Houle did find that, while the backgrounds of the learners were diverse, and they were diverse in many other ways, what they shared with their similarity was that they were all deeply engaged in learning, and they regarded continuing education as an important part of their lives, even though they may have had somewhat different ways of thinking about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:41] And that difference in how they think about this shared, common emphasis on continuing education and on continued learning, what he does then in that rest of that chapter is try to look at the difference in how they think about the lifelong learning that they’re doing. He says, “While they were basically similar, they”—meaning these lifelong learners that he did the interviews with—“did vary in terms of the major conception they held about the purposes and values of continuing education.” And then, as he and the other folks involved on his team analyzed these interviews, what they ultimately landed on was three groups, three categories of lifelong learners that they felt described those differences, the variation among those lifelong learners. The three groups are goal-oriented, activity-oriented, and learning-oriented.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:41] Yes, and it’s been probably close to a decade since the first time I read this book. The little copy I have I actually borrowed from David Houle. David, I will give this book back to you at some point soon. But one of the main things that I took away from the book, that I remember from it—it’s at the heart of it—is these three different groups of learning. I think they’re very helpful in enabling learning businesses, learning business professionals, to think through the large swaths of learners that they’re serving. That first one, goal-oriented, Houle describes as “those who use education as a means of accomplishing fairly clear-cut objectives.” These are the people who are doing the education because they want to get ahead on the job, they want to get a promotion, or they want to do something very practical, like learn how to replace a broken door latch on a dryer.

Goal-Oriented LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:14:34] For these folks, he notes that their approach to their ongoing education tends to happen in episodes because what happens is that learner has a realization of “Hey, I have this need to fix the broken dryer-door latch,” or “Hey, I want to apply for that job that’s going to be opening, and I know, in order to do that, I need to be able to say that I understand how to do public speaking” or something. They have that recognized need, and that leads to an episode of learning. They start with that goal in mind that drives them to identify a learning opportunity, an educational experience, and then they pursue it. It’s not a steady, continuous stream of learning; it’s more episodic, based on need.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:20] I think we all know these people, the ones in our database who came to the course three years ago or the conference three years ago and don’t show up again for another three years or haven’t shown up again yet at all, but they will eventually, as soon as this goal-oriented need arises again, and they need that education to satisfy that need.

Activity-Oriented LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:15:38] That’s the first of the three groups: goal-oriented. The second group is activity-oriented. Houle describes this group this way: These are learners “who take part because they find in the circumstances of the learning a meaning which has no necessary connection, and often no connection at all, with the content or the announced purposes of the activity.” Now that might not make sense just hearing that excerpt, but what he goes on to explain is that there are people who will seek learning opportunities because they’re lonely, or maybe they have an unhappy homelife, or maybe they’re looking to make friends or potentially even find a life partner. For these are the kind of people it doesn’t matter as much what the topic is, as with those goal-oriented. What they want is that activity orientation that’s going to put them around other people, where they can potentially make friends or potentially be less lonely or whatever that driver is for them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:40] I imagine this is probably also the people who show up, say, at a conference mainly for networking, just to be there among the professional scene and connect with people, and learning is somewhat secondary to them—even though we know that in those social interactions they are, in fact, learning a great deal.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:57] Another subgroup of the activity-oriented has to do with what we might call check-the-box learners. Houle describes them this way, that they take “courses simply for the credits themselves or for the diplomas, certificates, or degrees which may eventually be won by piling up the proper number and kinds of credits. Such people care little (often nothing) for the subject-matter itself and, at the end of a term, they may be found in a long line at the bookstore selling back the volumes which they had been required to buy and for which they now feel no further need.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:32] I like too that he puts this in the activity-oriented group because my initial instinct was the people who just want CE, for example—that’s a big part of those checkbox learners—that’s their goal, to get CE. But that’s really not true. I think most of those people don’t care about getting CE credit. They’re just going through the motions because they have to, basically. They’re engaging in the activity. They know it’s going to result in this credit, which they have to have to maintain whatever they have to maintain, but they don’t really care. They’re just going through the motions, basically, and, as we said, checking the box.

Learning-Oriented LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:18:03] The third subgroup is the learning-oriented. He describes these folks as “seek[ing] knowledge for its own sake.” For this group, he says that “education might almost be called a constant rather than a continuing activity.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:22] The fundamental purpose that lies in the activity for these people is just simply the desire to know. That’s how Houle puts it, that that’s what they are seeking. In my mind, if you’re in the learning business, if you love learning yourself, then this is probably the kind of learner that you’re rooting for. But also that ideal learner that we think and hope that we’re designing for and delivering learning experiences for…and I’m not sure if Houle really goes into how these break down in his mind in terms of percentages…

Celisa Steele: [00:19:00] Again, it’s 22…

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:01] It’s 22. It’s a very small sample, so it would be purely speculation. My personal speculation would be that this is a smaller portion than the activity-oriented and goal-oriented learners.

Not Pure TypesCelisa Steele: [00:19:13] The other things I would add here are that he does make the point that these three subgroups or categories of the learners—the activity-oriented, the goal-oriented, and the learning-oriented—aren’t pure types, but that you do tend to see an emphasis from a particular learner, and they tend to fall into one of these camps than the other. But it’s again not 100-percent clear, and some people might differ on where you might put a particular learner—to your point, even, Jeff—around check-the-box and where he puts those learners. One could potentially make an argument, or some of those check-the-box learners might also fall a little bit into that goal-oriented, or maybe they’re a little bit more on the goal-oriented end of that activity-oriented spectrum, if you want to go that route.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:01] I think, as always, so much depends on context and what the motivations of the learners are. I think we’re probably all different types in different times. For me, if it’s anything that has to do with becoming better at music, better as a songwriter, or something I’m personally passionate about, I’m going to be learning-oriented. I just want knowledge. I’m entirely motivated to do that. If it’s about how we’re going to fix something around the house, I’m probably much more goal-oriented because I’m not all that passionate about that. I just want to get it done.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:32] He does make the point too that the learning-oriented are more different from the other two types than the other two types are from one another, if that makes sense. The learning-oriented, because of that true focus on knowledge for knowledge’s sake, just the desire to know, really driving them, that sort of motivation is a little bit different than the goal-oriented and the activity-oriented, which, while different, both have a certain level of utility behind them. And so he does make that point that this group is a little bit different than the other two.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:10] Right. I know we’re going to talk about other chapters in a future episode here, but maybe we could tie a bow around this very important chapter of this book.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:21] At the end of the chapter, Houle writes: “If adult learners really fall into these three groups, this fact will be useful in understanding and guiding adult education.”

The Impact of Connecting with Your Learners as Goal-, Activity, and Learning-OrientedJeff Cobb: [00:21:33] Useful statement there because you can unpack that. For example, what if a learning business developed personas for each of these groups? Could you, for example, characterize your e-mail list, your members, your learners into these buckets? And what might you do with that?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:51] That might help you in terms of how you develop and deliver your marcom. What does marketing and communications look like? If you can identify a learner as primarily activity-oriented versus learning-oriented versus goal-oriented, might the message that you send be a little bit more tailored, a little bit more likely to get them to say, “Yes, that looks like an educational experience for me”?

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:17] Even if you can’t identify that at the specific learner level, mix up your messaging a little bit because you’re going to have all three types out there, broadly. So don’t send out an entire campaign that’s only goal-oriented or only activity-oriented or only learning-oriented. You want to mix that up some to try to hit those different motivations.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:37] Right. Because the strong likelihood is that you will always have a mix of all of these types of learners that you’re targeting for any particular educational offering and that you ultimately have participating in any particular educational offering. Like you said, Jeff, probably making sure that you’re balancing your messaging and your work around motivation to speak to all three of these types of learners would make strategic sense.

The Other 50 YearsJeff Cobb: [00:23:02] Right. One other thought or quote we’ll take from Houle in wrapping up this chapter, he writes that, “Adulthood offers to the average individual 50 years in which to learn how to solve his own problems as well as explore the wonderfully inexhaustible realms of knowledge.” Listeners may know that I’ve been fond of using this term, “the other 50 years,” that’s come up quite a bit. I actually don’t even remember potentially getting that from Houle, but I suspect I probably did or at least unconsciously took that from him.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:36] It struck me when I was reading that chapter recently, given that I know you do talk about the other 50 years. So, Jeff, I was wondering if that might have been the origin of where you….

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:47] Possible. Who knows?

Celisa Steele: [00:23:48] Yes, but I think one of the interesting things there is that this “other 50 years”—and, obviously, that’s a placeholder number; it might be less or more given any particular individual—but, if, as a learning business, you can form a relationship with a lifelong learner, someone with this inquiring mind, at the beginning of those 50 years, then there’s a lot of value that learner can get from your learning business, that you, as a learning business, can provide to that learner over those decades. That’s really exciting to think about having impact on a lifelong learner over decades.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:24] Yes, and that’s something we’ve also talked about a fair amount. We have a post somewhere about being in the career business, which is often what particularly trade and professional associations would be in, because you’re getting that person who’s entering a particular profession or career, and, if they stay your member, if they stay involved with you, then you’re going to have them for that 50 years or 60 years or whatever it is, and to start thinking about them in that way and start thinking about how they might shift in and out of some of these different learner groups across that time period. In general, I think it can help any learning business be more thoughtful, more strategic about how they’re serving lifelong learners.

More from Cyril Houle to ComeCelisa Steele: [00:25:02] That’s our look at the first chapter of The Inquiring Mind. The first chapter is called “Two Educations.” We will be talking about chapters two and three in our next episode, episode 419. We encourage you to come back and listen for more from this great thinker, Cyril Houle.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:31] In The Inquiring Mind, Cyril Houle divides lifelong learners into three categories: goal-oriented, activity-oriented, and learning-oriented. Learning businesses that understand the motivations and activities of each category will be better positioned to serve those learners and provide them with value.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* An Essential Guide to Andragogy for Learning Businesses * The Career Retention Business * Mend the Gap: The Opportunity for Associations in “the Other 50 Years” * 20 × 20 Vision for Lifelong Learning * Serving Education’s Third Sector

The post The Inquiring Mind, Part I appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Ginger JohnsonIt’s gotten incredibly easy to produce and consume content. That means the market value of content is approaching zero. And that means that learning businesses need to provide more than just content. Learning businesses that can provide connection are going to attract and retain passionate and engaged learners.

Ginger Johnson focuses her work on the power of human connection and the why and the how of connecting on purpose with purpose, and Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele talks to her in episode 417. Ginger does the work of connection through keynotes, workshops, and other connection experiences. She’s the author of Connectivity Canon, an inveterate dinner party host, and an enthusiastic, joyful human.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesGinger Johnson: [00:00:00] Are you, dear listener, are you really feeling strongly connected? Is there a purpose? Purpose is the mitochondria of the connection cell.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:12] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:14] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:22] It’s gotten incredibly easy to produce and consume content. That means the market value of content is approaching zero. And that means that learning businesses need to provide more than just content. Learning businesses that can provide connection are going to attract and retain passionate and engaged learners. Ginger Johnson believes that connection is everything, and we talk to her in this episode, number 417. Ginger does the work of connection through keynotes, workshops, and other connection experiences. She’s the author of Connectivity Canon: Why and How to Connect on Purpose with a Service Mindset, she’s an inveterate dinner party host, and, as you’ll hear in her conversation with Celisa, she’s passionate and enthusiastic about her work. Celisa and Ginger spoke in June 2024.

Connection Is the Joy of BelongingCelisa Steele: [00:01:24] You focus on connection. Why did you choose to focus on connection, and what does connection mean to you?

Ginger Johnson: [00:01:32] We only have what, three hours? Okay. Why did I choose to focus on connection? Several years ago, I was in a reinvention stage. I like change, Celisa, so I am good with it. Change is growth, and I was at a juncture where I wasn’t fired up about what I was doing with my previous businesses. I was waking up frustrated. I wasn’t enjoying it. There was more running into walls than there was running out in the fields. And so I said, “Okay, that’s my tell. I need to shift.” Then I went through a phase where I thought, “Okay, if it’s not that, then what could it be?” I gave myself the permission slip to discover, to explore, and I would be like a prairie dog. If you can imagine a prairie dog, they come up out of the ground like, “Ooh, wee!” They make those fun little sounds. They’re communicating. And then they retreat back inside, where they’re not quite sure. I did that a number of times—maybe it’s going to be this; maybe it’s going to be that. And then, when I finally popped out—of course, the last time is always the time—it was human connection. The second I said it to myself, I knew what it was. The next instant, I said, “Okay, what is it to the world? How am I going to teach this feeling, this ecosystem, this idea that really clearly lit me up instantaneously?”

Ginger Johnson: [00:02:56] That’s how I chose a human connection. It is attached with everything we are and everything we do as humans, and so I like the broadness of it. I also love the depth of it. Previous to being here to record this fantastic podcast, which is a highlight of my day, I delivered a keynote about the “Joy of Belonging,” and, if you put those letters together, it spells “job.” So, if we’re thinking about our job as the joy of belonging, belonging is the ultimate outcome of connection—that’s one thing I teach. I’ve been teaching it way longer than it’s been trendy. But that sense that we feel—I got to believe you know how this feels too, Celisa—that when you’re somewhere, and you just know you’re in the right place, that’s code for belonging. It feels good. It is good. You want to linger. You want to stay. You want to revel in that moment. Those are memories you’re building. When we’re in places where we don’t feel like we belong, we feel very disconnected. There are some different elements going on. That’s equally important to learn how to acknowledge, so you can keep moving where there is connection.

Connecting As Learning Business LeadersCelisa Steele: [00:03:55] You talked about the fact that connection is such a broad but also deep area to focus on. I’m thinking that there are at least three angles that Leading Learning Podcast listeners would be thinking about when they’re thinking about connection. One of them is around their role as leaders, as they’re trying to connect with the folks on their team, as they’re leading that part of their organization focused on that learning portfolio, connection is going to be part of that. I would love to have you talk a little bit about how you see effective leaders leaning into connection or creating that connection.

Ginger Johnson: [00:04:35] Yes, it’s very simple. Here’s the great thing—connecting is simple. It is not complicated. Sometimes there are some multilayers, like a great croissant. It’s really very simple. The ingredients are simple. One visual, one tool I teach too, if you will, is imagine ripples, like the target symbol: self, team, community. Self is at that nucleus point, the very center. Are we connected with ourselves as a leader, as a follower, as whatever our position? I know you specifically asked for leaders. Is the leader…are you, dear listener, are you really feeling strongly connected? Is there a purpose? Purpose is the mitochondria of the connection cell. If you know anything about science, you know that mitochondria power our cells. I learned this in biology, and I will never forget it.

Ginger Johnson: [00:05:19] When we have that connection with purpose, with ourselves, that’s the very first. Then it goes to our team. Ourselves and then our team. We must be connected to ourselves first. The people who are kicking around or pinballing around life, Celisa, they’re good people. If you are one of them, and you’re listening today, you’re a good person. Get clear on your purpose. Often when there’s disconnect, there is a purpose disconnection. So purpose with self and then purpose for the team. Does the team know why they’re assembled? Do they buy into the vision? Are they all in? Are they excited? Are they a bunch of kids on the playground like, “Yes, this is the thing,” or are they running for the fences? That purpose starts with yourself, then it goes to your team, and then it goes to your community.

Ginger Johnson: [00:06:00] For the learning and education world, we want to look at that as the teacher isn’t the almighty. The teacher isn’t the end-all. The leader/teacher is not the only one who can teach, which I’m going to make that generous assumption that everybody listening here knows that. Tapping into that self/team/community, how do we make that a continuum, like a slide guitar? How do we help ourselves say, “I’m open”? I teach a lot of different concepts. We’ll keep this really simple. “I’m open. I’m willing. I’m positive. I’m objective. I’m suspending judgment.” “That’s interesting. Ginger just shared that thing. How could we use that?” The self/team/community, yes, it ripples out. It also ripples back in, just like a reflective ripple on a pond. Eventually, it hits the shore and bounces back. Especially with something like professional development, learning, and education, in this realm, oh, that’s so important because, if the ripples only go out, we don’t know what the impact is. The leader can’t measure that. You can’t wrap your head around it because it’s like, “I have no idea where that thing went.” But, if we focus on a ripple that’s going to reflect, then we are connected, and it synergistically gets better and stronger. So self/team/community is one of the first places I would start.

Connecting with the Learners We ServeCelisa Steele: [00:07:13] You’ve already jumped to the next place I was thinking about where connection would come into play, which is with that broader audience. It is with the learners that the leader is trying to serve through their offerings. When you’re a leader, and you have these daily interactions with coworkers or team, that seems to lend itself to connection happening one way. When you have that broader community, when you have that audience of learners who you might not even really ever see—if you think about something like an asynchronous e-learning course—it seems like, then, how connection happens or is fostered is probably a little bit different in that broader community. So (a) do you agree? And then (b) tease out what you see as some of the skills to potentially tap into connection when it’s a little bit broader and less direct that you have that interaction.

Ginger Johnson: [00:08:10] I was a middle school teacher in my 20s (a few years ago), and one lesson that is directly applicable to what you’re asking me right now is that the student and the teacher—in this case, the leader—need the best environment for learning. It’s going to be when the student and the teacher are in sync—and not in sync of knowing the same things. They’re in sync, realizing that this is a partnership. Education is not a lecture. Education is growth. Education is transformation. When we only say that education is a checkbox, a quota, or a requirement, don’t expect that to go very far, my friends, because you’re checking a box. The means to the end is the box check. I’m not saying that’s terrible, but I am saying that there’s a different way to approach it.

Ginger Johnson: [00:09:03] If you really want true growth as opposed to check-in-the-box—like the $8 billion America spends on inclusion training, which has, by research, shown that it’s largely ineffective, well, a lot of that is box-checking. We’re doing the thing because we think we have to. We’re jumping through the hoop because we were told to do it. But, when we do this by choice—I think that’s one of the biggest nuggets here, Celisa—when we are really choosing to be the learner, when we are really choosing to be the leader, we realize that there’s a synergy, that there is an alignment of purpose, so that the connection can happen. Look, I’ve done Webinars too. Webinars can be hard because you don’t get the live—you can’t see; there’s no chat. I find that platform of delivery, I’ll say, to be very challenging. Can you do it? Yes. Can it be effective? Yes. And that is different than using a different platform where there is interaction capability. That is huge.

Ginger Johnson: [00:10:01] Don’t shut off those avenues if those are part of the tools because that’s the water cooler talk. That’s the hello in the hallway. That’s where you and I whisper together because there’s something that somebody just said that really resonates. That’s the connection that we’re fostering there. And, as the teacher, as the leader, we want to foster that. I’m not talking about interruptions or people being rude. I’m talking about realizing and knowing your students so that you’re responsive and not reactive. The student’s role, then, is to say, “How can I best respond?” I know that a lot of the people listening and a lot of people you serve, Celisa, are in that zone. How do we make this offering effective, knowing that you can’t control the student, but you can be in command of some of the other elements? There’s a lot to it; I know that. But, if we start with the idea that the leader and the student—the teacher and the student—you want to be aligned with what is the purpose of this and how can we best go forward? That’s a really good jumping-in point.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:06] A lot of what you said resonates with how I tend to think of things. You think about the average adult learner; they come with a lot of prior experience, a lot of expertise, and so I think acknowledging that and leveraging that can help with that sense of connection.

Ginger Johnson: [00:11:22] Absolutely. Ask your students, “What do you want to learn? What do you want to know?” Because I remember, as that middle school teacher, watching my students—the fifth- through eighth-graders. What a time! Nobody sticks their hand up and says, “I want to go back there.” The great thing is that it’s a laboratory. It’s a laboratory. So think of your growth, your education, your programs, your professional development, think of it as a laboratory. It’s a big experiment. Release the pressure from yourself. Give yourself a permission slip, like I write in my Connectivity Canon book. Give yourself a permission slip to say, “I know what this is, and I know a little bit about this, and I know enough about this that I can provide help for people. Then I’ll keep learning.” Give yourself that grace and space, as I like to teach, and get excited about it.

Ginger Johnson: [00:12:08] Students can tell when a teacher is bored. Nobody I know wants to go back to those classes. Oh, yes, that’s when the box-checking comes in. “Well, okay, I’ll just finish the thing because I bought it, because I filled in that blank.” When a teacher, when a leader, is really focused on how their students are showing up, and, to your exact point, we all keep bringing more forward because we’ve lived more life, what can we use? What can we leverage? To use your word. I love that you used that word. What can we acknowledge and leverage so that the learning, the growth is all more powerful for everybody? It’s richer. It’s deeper. It’s more exciting. It’s more energetic. It’s more promptive (if that’s a word). “Oh, I want more. Yes, what else do we got? This is great. What else is there?” Then you know it’s really working. Then you know you’ve connected with yourself, with your team, your students, and the connection is multi-way. It’s never a two-way street. It’s always a roundabout.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:13:12] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Connection and EngagementCelisa Steele: [00:13:49] Part of what we’re talking about is making me think about the concept of engagement, which is really big in the learning world. How do you get learners to be engaged, stay engaged? I’m wondering if you have thoughts on what the relationship is between connection and engagement. It feels like there’s maybe some overlap, but, yes, what do you think about them?

Ginger Johnson: [00:14:12] Oh, my gosh, I’m really glad you asked this. It’s also a hot topic in the professional speaking world, which is part of the world I occupy, and event planners are like, “Engage the audience!” But they don’t tell us more. Teachers want their students to be engaged, but they leave that hanging on a cliff. There is an enormous, super highway between connection and engagement. First of all, you can’t make somebody be engaged. You can’t. I can’t make you do anything more than you can make me do something. So the “gotta wanna” is going to come in. How do I want to get into that zone of “Oh, I really want to do this. I got to do this”? It’s very self-actualizing. It’s self-inspirational. The connection between connection and engagement definitely is that leader cognizant of who their learner is, and how are they tapping into different ways methodologies, practices, ideas, graphics, exercises? How are they really helping the students fully participate? It’s the tail wagging the dog to a certain extent. The student is the dog. The teacher—the leader—can be the tail. We want it to be more of a different equation.

Ginger Johnson: [00:15:32] That engagement is necessary. It has to come from ourselves first. We have to want to do it. And we can’t force anybody. I remember that very clearly. You know this too. We can put things up; we can make things available; we can put courses together; we can offer events, so forth, and so on. If people either don’t know how to engage—meaning they don’t have a model; they haven’t been nurtured; they haven’t been mentored. “Hey, Ginger, we’re going to this thing. Here’s how I would recommend you pay attention, that you participate.” Participation might be a better word than engagement—before we get to engagement—because, if you ask people to participate, they know more of what that is. Engagement can be listening. Engagement can be a little more static. Doesn’t mean that people aren’t engaged, but “participation,” “contribution,” some different words would probably help tee up engagement more. This is what engagement looks like. It means you are contributing in the chat. It means you speak up in the group and give people examples, so then they know what their behavior is that will help them get more out of the learning and put more of themselves in the learning.

Engagement May or May Not Be VisibleCelisa Steele: [00:16:37] There’s a definition of engagement that we like to use. Part of the reason I like it is because I feel like it speaks to this idea of there being three aspects to engagement: the cognitive, the emotional, and the behavioral. I think what you’re just saying there is it’s easiest to see the behavioral engagement. It’s easiest to see when someone types in the chat, raises their hand, or speaks up. Sometimes it may not be the most important; it may be arguably the emotional or the cognitive is more important, but that’s harder to see. It’s harder for a learning business to go, “Yes, we have them engaged emotionally.” That’s a little harder to say, “Okay, what’s the metric for that?”

Ginger Johnson: [00:17:17] Right. That’s also why surveys are both a bugaboo and brilliant. If done well, they can really be a crystal ball into efficacy, into participation, into what else are people telling me they need. If they are poorly done, they are a complete and total waste of everybody’s time. In fact, they can be negative because it really erodes faith of somebody listening, paying attention, communicating. “Ginger didn’t respond last time, so I’m not going to bother. I don’t know where that thing went. I didn’t hear anything. Nothing happened.” You can insert the platitude there. So you’re 100-percent right. Behavior is easier to see or sense. Emotion is harder. At the same time, that’s a good challenge for a leader or teacher. How are you going to find out? What are you going to do? Are you going to talk? What are you going to do? There are lots of choices. Picking your choices to match how the audience can respond best—you probably know this better than I do—that is truly essential for finding out if what we’re doing is, to simplify it, working.

How Learning Businesses Can Help Their Speakers and Facilitators Connect with LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:18:41] You mentioned that you’re a speaker. You do a lot of speaking. And I know that a lot of our listeners are on the hiring end. They’re looking for facilitators. They’re looking for speakers that are going to be part of delivering their educational offerings. I would love to get your thoughts on what it is that someone hiring a speaker or facilitator—what sort of information can they give that speaker to help set them up for success or to help lay that groundwork for connection?

Ginger Johnson: [00:19:14] Oh, I love that you asked this question. There’s a big difference between professional speaking and speaking as part of your profession. I’m a professional speaker. I put energy in investing in my craft. I love it. It is my profession. It’s my career. So your question. How can you tee up the speaker to deliver the materials effectively? Is that basically what you’re asking me?

Celisa Steele: [00:19:36] Yes.

Ginger Johnson: [00:19:37] Okay. I could give you 50, but I’ll give you three. I’ll start with three. If people want more, they can reach out to me. Number one, my favorite question to ask is, “What transformation do you want?” To transform is simply to change. So, if I ask people, “What transformation do you want?,” another way to ask that, Celisa, is to say, “How do you want people to feel when we’re done with this, when this is complete?” That is vital. It’s absolutely vital because people can get a great score, so to speak, but not give a damn. Ineffective. It’s not going to last. It’s not going to stick. They’re not going to be excited. They’re not going to share it. However, if we ask people, “How do you want to feel?” “Oh, I want to feel energized.” That’s a very common response I get. “I want people to feel excited.” Now those are also really big, nebulous ideas. So then we go farther. “What does excitement look like?” “Oh, it means people are high-fiving each other in the hall, or that they’re calling each other and telling each other about…”

Ginger Johnson: [00:20:39] We need to put some quantitative on the qualitative. I had a company that I did qualitative research for a dozen years. It’s absolutely mind-blowingly fascinating. We tend to chase the question, but we don’t chase it far enough. So finding out what does that actually look like? How does it manifest? How does it show up? Then what might be the ripples that follow? Do we get an immediate hit now on the next course? Or do we get people who request the next topic? Then you can see. Then it becomes more tangible. I think all of it is tangible. This is what I study, and this is why I’m paying attention differently. Ask your speakers to ask you, “What do you want people to feel? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to be inspired to do? Do you have questions about the material?” Because there are sometimes assumptions that the teacher, the speaker, or the leader have all the “answers.” If you’re listening to this, I’m holding up my fingers because it’s not about answers. It’s about responses. It’s about engagement. There’s that word again. When people engage, then that comes home to roost. Engagement is like a boomerang.

Ginger Johnson: [00:21:49] We want people to engage, so let’s go ahead and toss that boomerang. Give it a really nice, robust throw. And do the work, the spinning, and, if it comes back in a way you want it to come back, then you know you have closed the loop. Ask your speakers if they’ve done anything similar. That does not disqualify if they haven’t because some of the best people to deliver are people who have never delivered your material. It’s fresh. They have all kinds of questions. They’re excited about it. They’re slightly nervous about it. They want to do a really good job. That’s important. Ask them what fires them up about this material because the people who have a purpose, who can find a personal attachment to what you’re asking them to deliver, they’ll do better. The people who are tired or just not frothed up in their own way, then it’s probably time to examine that or find out what’s going on and either release or refresh. So there’s a lot, and I gave you more than three, but I’ll pause there. There’s a lot. Overall, think about speaking as the speaking to connect. That’s the way I simplify it, and I help different organizations do that sometimes too. But focus on speaking to connect. Ask your speakers questions that get to that.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:01] I appreciate the idea of engagement as a boomerang, and I have friends from college who made boomerangs for a time.

Ginger Johnson: [00:23:09] Oh, you’re kidding!

Celisa Steele: [00:23:10] And so I spent a lot of time trying to throw boomerangs. It’s a challenge to get them to come back. So I like that—that engagement, to do it right, takes some skill, takes some practice, takes some effort. I like that.

Ginger Johnson: [00:23:24] Is it a lot of throwing out there and going and getting them and trying it again?

Celisa Steele: [00:23:31] Yes. And then the interesting thing too is, because they were all handmade, they were slightly different. You maybe perfect this one; it’s coming back most of the time. But then you pick up a different one, and you’ve got to adjust a little bit. So, yes, I like the analogy. I think it works. There are a lot of layers to it. It resonates for me.

Ginger Johnson: [00:23:48] Wonderful.

Personal Approach to Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:23:50] This is the Leading Learning Podcast, and one thing we like to ask all of our guests, given that, is about your own practices, habits, and sources for your own lifelong learning. Tell me a little bit about how Ginger Johnson likes to learn.

Ginger Johnson: [00:24:08] Wow. I have invested robustly in myself, Celisa. I’ve learned every single time I’ve invested in buying a course, in hiring a coach, in going to the event, whatever it is. I enjoy really proactive learning. I enjoy active settings. That is reflected significantly in my own style. I’m a mover around the room. I’m getting people up and going. We know it’s proven that, when we move our body, we learn better, we learn differently, we take better care of our brains, so I’m always looking for those kinds of opportunities. What’s going on? Who’s talking about what? Who do I already respect? Who am I interested in learning more from? Who is somebody I don’t know, and they have a topic, a spot, or an event?

Ginger Johnson: [00:24:56] I’ve got a good friend right now who’s actually trying to get me to go to somebody she really follows. I looked up briefly who this person was. She learns from them too; I should clarify that. I thought, “Ooh, that sounds great.” She asked me to a specific event, and that event was not available to me, but I asked her, “See if you can find something else.” Because of the company you keep when you’re learning. Do you like to learn solo and then share? Do you like to learn solo and then keep it? Do you like to learn in a party and share it? How do you use your re-entry, as I call it? What do you do when the thing is complete—whether it’s an online course, a five-day event, a retreat, a sales meeting, doesn’t matter what it is? What are you going to do to progress that forward? Is the worth in the participation? That does have intrinsic value. Absolutely. Is it “I might take it back to my teammates, and I’m going to share these three things”? I like being around other people who are excited about their learning. How their personality is is not the point, but how they’re interested in learning—you can pick that up pretty quick. There’s that behavior a little bit again. I’m looking for places, spaces, teachers, ideas that continue to fuel where I’m going. So, if you have any suggestions, I’m open.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:13] I like your emphasis on the peer piece of it because you’re right that there’s so much that you can get, even energy-wise, from the other learners in the space, not to mention, then, the experience and everything else that they’re bringing. But, if they come with that high level of engagement, then that just makes it a more…it seems like a richer, easier-to-learn-type experience.

Ginger Johnson: [00:26:39] Yes, instead of doing that whir, whir, whir, it’s like, whoop! Yes, it’s going up. You’re right, the energy. I’m glad you brought that word into the conversation. That is critical; that is tangible; that is vital. If we’re fired up about what we do, then that has enormous value. That stays us when it’s tough, that excites us when we need a refresh, keeps us going when we’re still super pumped. Yes, the energy’s…. I want to get to that point, and I’ll wrap this one up. I am really clear about being with people who are in the positive energy space—their headset, their mindset, their purpose. I stay away from people who are not in that space. They’re not bad people. They’re just absolutely not my people right now.

Pay Attention to What MattersCelisa Steele: [00:27:21] We’ve talked about connection. We’ve talked about connection in the context of learning and as a learning business leader. Anything else that comes to mind that you would like to make sure that we share with listeners before we wrap up?

Ginger Johnson: [00:27:36] I would wrap up with this thought. In professional development—which is also the term I use, I love that you use that as a company and an organization—professional development is never a once-and-done. It doesn’t matter if it’s a single workshop, and it never happens again. If we’re truly promoting growth, if we’re truly setting the stage, the environment, providing the space, the grace for growth, then that will continue. So really taking a look at what is the longevity? What are the legs? How will this connect another dot to something else? What’s the lily pad from one lily pad to the next? What is that? And how do we then enjoy learning about what’s working, what people are responding to, and responding to what we need to improve, what we need to change? We could probably talk for hours on this. Let’s keep it simple is where I’m going. Keep it simple. Make it simple. Keep it simple. Pay attention to things that matter. Let the rest of the stuff go, and just keep connecting with yourself, your team, and your community.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:56] A keynote speaker, an author, and a joyful human, Ginger Johnson focuses her work on the why and the how of connecting on purpose with purpose. She can design keynotes and connection experiences for your organization. Ginger would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, but be sure to add a note that you heard her on the Leading Learning Podcast so she knows the source of the connection.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Engagement Is Everything * Revving Up Revenue with Sean Soth * Leadership, Happiness, and Positive Psychology with L. Michelle Smith

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbIf you’re looking to improve the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, focus on engagement, not content. Content is no longer king. Engagement is everything.

In episode 416 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele talk about why the importance of content and even context is waning and why a focus on engagement is a savvy move for learning businesses committed to creating and delivering value.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] If you’re looking to improve the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, focus on engagement, not content. Content is no longer king. Engagement is everything.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:18] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] Jeff, do you remember that idea of content being king?

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:31] Yes. Content is king. A lot of people don’t know this, but that usually gets attributed to Bill Gates. He used that phrase in an essay titled, appropriately enough, “Content Is King,” and that was published way back in ye olde days of 1996 on the Microsoft Web site—ancient history. But Gates emphasized the importance of content on the Internet and predicted content would be the key driver of revenue and success for businesses in the digital age, and, to a certain extent, he was right.

Content Is King…or Maybe Context IsCelisa Steele: [00:01:06] But then along came a new regent, someone to assume the throne. We started hearing context is king.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:14] Yes. That was very popular on the marketing speaker circuit for a while, just to be contrarian and offer an alternative once everybody was reciting that mantra that content is king. That phrase has been attributed to a lot of different sources over time, but one of probably the most notable early mentions comes from Gary Vaynerchuk, who’s an entrepreneur, social media expert, and all-around highly visible guy when it comes to both content and context. He emphasized the importance of context in digital marketing and social media, and that was back around 2012. We’re definitely dealing in old stuff here around content is king, context is king. Vaynerchuk frequently discussed how delivering the right message in the right context is crucial for effective communication and engagement in the digital age.

Engagement Is EverythingCelisa Steele: [00:02:09] Yes, and I would argue that it seems like neither context nor content is king today. Instead, engagement is everything.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:20] I think that is true. You certainly hear a lot of buzz, a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth out there around engagement. Everybody’s looking for engagement. I don’t think that means that suddenly content has no importance. It doesn’t mean that context has no importance. And, by the way, the context thing is, in a way, spun out into this focus on experience. Everything’s about the experience now, which I think is not fully getting at the true meaning of context because it comes up with things like, “We’re going to put people in an escape room” or something like that to make it exciting and dynamic, which I don’t think is what Vaynerchuk really had in mind when he was talking about context.

The Monetary Value of Content Alone Is Approaching ZeroCelisa Steele: [00:03:00] Let’s talk a little bit about why we think content is no longer king if it ever was, and why context is no longer king if it ever was. On the content side. I’ve heard you mention before, Jeff—and this is not necessarily your original idea—but you were saying what others are seeing, which is that the value of content is moving to zero. Maybe back when Bill Gates published his post on the Microsoft Web site around “Content Is King,” at that point, back in 1996, it was a little harder to find the right content, but it’s getting so easy now to create content, to publish content, to then find that content that others have created and published. And so we’re awash in this sea of content. This is all the noise that we talk about. People are overwhelmed by the content, and they’re looking for that signal in that sea of noise, and so content in and of itself is not as inherently valuable as it once was.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:08] Yes, definitely, as you say, not a thought that’s in any way original to me. You hear this more and more. It’s just something I like to say a lot, particularly in the right context to talk about content. It’s not that content has no value. Certainly, you still have to have the right content, the right stuff to get to. But its market value, its monetary value, is rapidly going to zero—already is zero in many instances. We’re not talking about just blog posts and social media. We’re talking about things like courses that people want to be able to charge for and are having a very hard time charging for. And, really, it’s Economics 101, which, for anybody who didn’t go through Economics 101, it’s the whole supply-demand, and, when you have an oversupply of something, it impacts the demand. People may still want it, but they’re willing to pay less and less and less for it when there’s that glut of supply out there.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:02] And then, just in the last year plus, not quite two years, we’ve had, on top of what was already increasing ease to create, publish, and find, now we have generative AI come along making it that much easier to create and also to find content because you can use ChatGPT essentially like a search engine to help you find content that is going to speak to whatever your need is in the moment.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:32] Yes, there’re two sides to that. If you’re a writer these days, if you’re somebody who’s made your living, particularly by doing marketing-oriented writing, it’s getting tougher and tougher. We engage writers who are telling us that they’re feeling this, that they’re seeing demand for their services go down because AI can create, in the right hands, reasonably good quality content that people can’t necessarily distinguish from a human, and, increasingly, the search engines can’t either, in spite of whatever Google or anybody else might say. That’s one side of it. The other side is the curation side of it, which often is a role for learning businesses, for thought leaders, for all sorts of people who make their living in being able to help people find the right information and to provide context. And, as AI gets better and better at doing that, it’s becoming a great curator. It’s starting to understand context better. So you have this incredible automation of both content and context.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:06:38] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Engagement Over Content, Context, and Experience (But Not Without Those)Celisa Steele: [00:07:14] We’ve just been talking about why we don’t think content is king any longer, and we touched on, at the beginning, this idea of that shift to context. Jeff, you made the comment that sometimes context and experience get tied up together, but we also don’t think that context is king anymore or experience is per se. Again, as with content, you still have to have it. You still want to have a good experience. You still want to have that right context for the content, but that in and of itself also isn’t sufficient. Sometimes the emphasis on experience almost gets changed because that word can mean different things. Sometimes what ends up happening with experience is it’s the ice sculptures, the rock and roll band, and the lovely passed hors d’oeuvres rather than the experience tied to the learning and the importance of making use of whatever time you have together, whether that’s online or in person or synchronous or asynchronously. What is that experience that enfolds the content? That’s more important to our mind than the escape rooms, the ice sculptures. More fun, yes, but not necessarily contributing to learning per se.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:34] Right. When it comes down to it, they’re made for great catch phrases. But content was never really king. Context was never really king. These were means to an end. You want good, compelling content out there. You want to understand context well because you want to engage people ultimately. In a way, engagement has always been king. Or maybe engagement isn’t really king, but we’re at least at a high….

Celisa Steele: [00:08:59] Engagement is everything.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:00] Engagement is everything.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:00] We’re getting rid of this idea of the regent….

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:02] Engagement is everything.

Three Dimensions of Engagement: Cognitive, Emotional, and BehavioralCelisa Steele: [00:09:04] Engagement is everything, and we should talk about what we mean by engagement. We’ll share a definition that we like to use. It’s a slightly modified version of a definition from the Glossary of Education Reform. That glossary focuses more on K-12 education. They talk about things like student rather than learner, but, in essence, it’s their definition with just these minor modifications. They say that learner engagement is “the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that learners show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation that they have to learn and progress in their education.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:44] Right. We’ve talked about this definition before in Webinars and sessions that we’ve given. We like it because it recognizes that there are three dimensions of engagement. First of all, cognitive engagement—that’s evidenced by the use of words like attention, curiosity, and interest in that definition.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:06] And then there’s also emotional engagement—you hear that in the words optimism and passion in that definition.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:14] And then behavioral engagement, which gets encapsulated in that key verb show—that it’s visible. You can see that engagement is happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:23] We really like that definition because it pulls together the cognitive engagement, the emotional engagement, and the behavioral engagement, all of which are really important if you want to have a highly effective learning offering for the market that you serve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:40] You can probably gather, even from that definition, that engagement does involve content, it does involve context and/or experience (however you want to parse those), but it’s better than, and it’s more than either one of those alone. In fact, it’s even probably greater than the sum of the parts.

Engagement Speaks to ValueCelisa Steele: [00:11:01] Engagement speaks to value, and we’re big on value here at Leading Learning. If you’re optimistic and passionate about something, that’s because you value that thing. You’re going to direct your attention, your interest, and your curiosity towards things that you value. If you have engagement, it already speaks to value, and you’re providing something that the learners value.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:28] Engagement also gets at uniqueness, or at least distinctiveness. Your attention and interest are directed towards things that at least you feel are unique, or at least less than the run-of-the-mill, usual things that you encounter. They’re worth paying some attention to, and they’re worth your interest because they do stand out from the ordinary.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:52] Importantly, that definition that we offered of engagement covers action—engaged learners do something. They show their engagement. They sign up for courses, they show up for courses, they actively participate, and they apply what they’re learning. You have that emotional, the cognitive, and the behavioral engagement, and that’s why we’re saying engagement is everything because, if you have all of that, this is the recipe for highly successful, highly impactful learning offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:27] I think we are in a time now—and, again, you mentioned AI earlier, Celisa—where there’s a lot of worry about what content to produce, how to produce that content fast enough, how to repurpose that content. And, certainly, learning businesses do need to focus on that. Again, it’s not that content has no value. We’re just saying that the market value is getting increasingly questionable. Of course, learning businesses are also, in our experience…or I’ve talked to a lot of professionals who are very worried about the contextual side of it. What is the right type of experience? How do they engage learners in the right way at the right time? Again, we do have to look at that. But, in terms of where we’re trying to get with all of this, it’s to engage our learners because, if we’re not engaging them, we’re not going to get them there in the first place, we’re not going to keep them there, we’re not going to get them to come back, and then of course, because of that, we ultimately are not going to achieve the learning aims and the impact that we aim to achieve with everything we do as learning business professionals.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:40] If you’re looking to improve the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, focus on engagement, not content. Content is no longer king. Engagement is everything.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Elevating Engagement with Amanda Kaiser * Tool Talk: The Learner Engagement Loop * 3 Conditions of Learner Engagement * The Science of Engagement with Clark Quinn

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbFinding the right balance of online and offline learning to have in a portfolio is one of the critical concerns facing learning businesses in our post-pandemic world because getting that mix as close to ideal as possible is key to securing a learning business’s reach, revenue, and impact.

In episode 415 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele offer nine criteria, accompanying guiding questions, and a scoring rubric that learning businesses might use when aiming for that right online/offline balance.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Finding the right balance of online and offline learning to have in its portfolio is one of the critical concerns facing a learning business in our post-pandemic world because getting that mix as close to ideal as possible is key to securing a learning business’s reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:24] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:26] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:34] Finding balance is a recurrent theme for me and for many. There’s the much-talked-of life/work balance. There’s the balance between strategic, deep thinking and operational, get-it-done time. There’s the balance of effort and time for rest.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:51] And, in the learning business world, there’s also the balance of online and offline offerings, and that’s what we want to focus on in this episode, number 415. We know from conversations with learning business leaders, observation of what’s going on, and our own experience offering both online and offline experiences that cracking the nut of the right mix of online and off in a portfolio isn’t easy.

COVID’s Impact on the Online/Offline Balancing ActCelisa Steele: [00:01:20] While balancing online and off has been an issue ever since online learning took off, the trickiness of balancing the two has become even trickier post-pandemic. On top of that, there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to the right balance. Some organizations are back to pre-COVID attendance at their in-person education and conferences. Others are struggling to get folks to attend in person—and, in the meantime, losing money on food and beverage, hotel room blocks, and all of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:54] Yes, so it’s probably worth laying a foundation here with some of that context that surrounds this now before we take a closer look at how you might balance things. First of all, we did see that tremendous shift to online learning during COVID-19. It was obviously already there. But, for folks who had not gone fully into that world, it really forced the shift for learners and for learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:23] Right. Even holdouts, whether on the learner side or on the learning business side, even those folks who hadn’t tried or spent much time with online learning, suddenly were essentially forced to buy into online learning and to try it out. If they wanted to learn, that was pretty much the only option for a time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:42] Some organizations got caught out that they didn’t really have the technology in place. Maybe they had some basic infrastructure, but when it came time to really get serious about offering online learning, they needed to either put an LMS in place or come up with better ways to handle the technology end of things. So a lot of organizations, a lot of learning businesses were really scrambling.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:03] And, because of that scrambling, sometimes the quality of the offerings wasn’t always of the highest caliber.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:10] That’s putting it politely.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:12] But there was a lot of leniency for a time. I think learners were hungry for connection, hungry to continue learning, and so, if the option was something slightly less buttoned-up and perfect online, they were willing to go with it. I think, though, we are now past that point of learner leniency.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:34] That’s right. We are also at a point of a return to in-person learning. We no longer have the restrictions that were preventing that during the COVID time. We know many organizations are returning to face-to-face events, and some are struggling with that. Some aren’t getting the attendance levels that they used to, which is something that’s part of what sparked this conversation—that is, how to actually navigate that. There’re really varying levels of experience. Some are seeing a complete return to those pre-COVID levels.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:06] Or even higher.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:06] Even higher because people were so eager to get back together. But then others are finding that, well, our audience discovered that online learning actually works, and we’re going to have to do more with it going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:18] Right. And so, in terms of returning to in-person, there are some of what are perceived as benefits to in-person or things that can be done better in-person, like networking, hands-on experiences, potentially experiences that really yield deeper engagement. There’s certainly a bias toward thinking that those are better handled in person. But in-person tends to come with higher costs, more logistical issues, and potentially ongoing health concerns for some attendees around what it means at this point to gather in one room with many other people.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:58] Right. Another factor that I feel like there was more of a buzz about, maybe a few years ago, than I hear now—maybe it’s still out there, and I’m just not hearing it as much—but just the environmental concerns, having, holding green meetings. There’s so much air travel, so much waste that goes on with in-person meetings. Those are among the challenges, the potential downsides of in-person.

Nine Criteria to Consider When Working on the Online/Offline Learning BalanceCelisa Steele: [00:05:20] That’s a little bit of the background and the context. We had COVID pushing everything online for a period. Now that in-person is a viable option again, this question of what is the right balance, what’s the right mix between online and off is bubbling up. We hear a lot about it. And so what we wanted to offer is nine criteria that your learning business might be thinking about when you’re trying to decide what is that right mix. We’re going to offer these nine criteria and some guiding questions. You can use this essentially like a rubric. There can be a rating for each criterion, and that can yield an overall score. We’ll talk a little bit more about that after we get through the criteria.

Audience PreferenceJeff Cobb: [00:06:03] We should note at the beginning too that, of course, we always have a transcript. We have a show notes page for our podcast episodes. Listen now, absorb what you can of this, but then you will have that as a point of reference, something you can use for your own review. Or we’d love for you to use these types of resources as a discussion item, as a social learning object with your team, with your staff, with your organization. We’ll start off with criteria one, which is audience preferences, behaviors, and needs. We’ve got that p word, preferences, in there, so we’re going to be careful about how we handle that one. We often hear from organizations, “We went out and asked them what do they prefer in terms of, in this case, online versus face-to-face?” Of course, you often can’t trust stated preferences.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:52] That’s right. Some of the guiding questions here are, or you can ask, “What are the preferences of our target audience for this offering?” Again, Jeff, you just said that preference, though, is going to be not totally reliable. You also want to make sure that you’re either asking about behaviors or that you’re actually observing behavior. You can ask them, “How many online offerings have you completed in the past 12 months? Or “How many in-person events have you completed in the last 12 months?” There are ways to get at not preference but actual behavior.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:27] This is a big part of what we do when we survey. We’re really trying to get at those behaviors, or what might be referred to as exhibited preferences, things that, as you said, Celisa, we can observe. We can see that they’ve done this, not that we’re asking them. This is what they prefer.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:41] And so, often, here, you’re going to also want to be asking, “Have we conducted surveys, or have we gathered feedback that will tell us about the behaviors and the preferences?” And then, importantly, “When have you gathered that data and that feedback?” Because I feel like, at this point, pre-pandemic data is of limited use.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:01] Yes, that’s a big flag to a lot of organizations. If the last time you did this kind of surveying was pre-pandemic, it’s time to go back out again.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:10] And then, related to this idea of exhibited preferences, you can also look at what data you have around past attendance and past engagement levels in your online offerings compared to your offline offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:24] So you might be doing a rating scale sort of thing. We know our friend Will Thalheimer does not like these types of scales.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:31] Likert scale.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:31] Likert scales. But we do find them useful in certain instances, and we think they’re useful in this instance. You could do a 1-to-5 scale with your own check on this. What are strong exhibited preferences for online? What are moderate preferences for online—neutral or mixed preference? Moderate preference for offline? Strong preference for offline? And engaging, to what degree do you see the behavior exhibited across that spectrum?

Content AlignmentCelisa Steele: [00:08:58] Right. You simplified and said preference, but we’re really meaning that exhibited preference. So really trying to look at past behavior as much as possible. And then those five categories that you just ticked off, Jeff, essentially, then have numerical ratings from 1 to 5. The numerical rating will be important when we come to the end and are looking at using this as a rubric, using these different scores on criteria for that. But the second criterion has to do with content alignment, and the guiding questions you want to be asking here are “Is the content highly interactive or hands-on, requiring or certainly indicating a desire for face-to-face interaction?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:43] And then, along with that, “Can the content be effectively delivered through digital means, such as a Webinar, a self-paced e-learning module, or other types of typical online delivery?”

Celisa Steele: [00:09:55] Again, you would use those guiding questions to assess that content that you’re trying to decide, whether it would be offered online or off. And you can use, again, a 5-point rating scale. 1 would be best suited for online. 2 is suitable for online but might need some adaptation. 3 can be delivered in either format—online or off. 4 suitable for offline, but maybe with some adaptation. And then, fifth, best suited for offline—or number 5, I should say.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:26] I think it’s important in this scale to challenge yourself a bit because I think a lot of times we default to, “Oh, that can’t be done online.” Well, think about it. Think about whether, if you could have the right adaptations, whether you might be able to deliver a valid and worthwhile learning experience for whatever objective you’re trying to achieve online. We should probably say too, as you’re applying these scales, these rubrics, this might be you, as the head of your learning business, thinking through these things. More likely, it might be a team sitting down and looking at these and saying, “How do we rate ourselves on these different scales?”

Celisa Steele: [00:11:00] And, if you do it as a team, we recommend that—you can be together, and you can be walking through the criteria and the guiding questions—but we recommend that you let each person rate individually and then share those scores collectively, and then maybe you come up with a group rating. But, if you, especially as the learning business leader, state your preference and say, “Well, I think this is clearly a 1,” odds are that others on your team then might go, “Yes, yes, 1.” Whereas, if you instead allow time and space for everyone to think and assess on their own, then you might actually find out, wow, we all have different opinions, and then that could lead to some good discussion of why do some people feel like this is best suited for online, and others feel like it’s best suited for offline.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:41] Yes, I guess you would call it a best practice around research. We already said we don’t ask people to state their preferences because we just know we can’t trust that. And, whenever we’re doing anything that’s going to involve group input, which is often very valuable, we want to do everything we can to avoid groupthink and get people to do their individual thinking and document it before they come together as a group.

Resource Allocation and CostCelisa Steele: [00:12:03] The third criterion has to do with resource allocation and cost. Some of the guiding questions under this criterion are “What are the cost implications for online versus offline delivery?” So you want to be thinking about venues, travel, and accommodation versus technology infrastructure and digital content creation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:26] And then another one in this area is “What is the potential return on investment (or ROI) for each format?” Of course, that may require doing a little forecasting, some financial projections. I’ll point out here, this is one of those areas where, if you can deliver it effectively online, and the audience wants it online, that can be a great thing from a return-on-investment standpoint because your margins, your incremental profits online are typically going to be much higher than they’re going to be with face-to-face.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:53] And so, then, the rating scale for this criterion again, 1 to 5. 1 could be online is significantly more cost-effective. 2, online, somewhat more cost-effective. 3, the cost differences are minimal, essentially the same cost, to delivering it online versus offline. 4, offline is somewhat more cost-effective. And then, 5, offline is significantly more cost-effective.

Technology InfrastructureJeff Cobb: [00:13:17] Three criteria so far. We’ve talked about preferences and behaviors. We’ve talked about content alignment as the second one. And we’ve talked about the third one as being resource allocation and cost. Criteria four is going to be technological infrastructure, and this is also a capacity question.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:36] That’s right. Three, around resource allocation and cost, that falls under capacity. This has to do with your human resources and what investment you might already have in place in some of your tools. Number four really puts the spotlight firmly on the technological infrastructure required for this. So, again, that falls under that capacity domain that we talk about in the Learning Business Maturity Model. Some of the guiding questions here are ”Do we have the necessary technology and support to deliver high-quality online learning experiences?” And answering that question could point you to the need to invest in new or additional technology or additional support, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:22] And then another question “Is our audience comfortable and proficient with the required technology?” I see organizations make a lot of assumptions there. It may be that their audience is not as technically proficient as they actually are. So avoid assumptions. Make sure you truly find out. Our rating scale there is going to be 1, our technology supports an excellent online experience. 2, our technology supports a good online experience. 3, our technology supports online and offline equally. 4, our technology is mostly oriented to offline experiences. And then, 5, our technology is only oriented to offline experiences.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:15:12] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Safety ConsiderationsCelisa Steele: [00:15:51] And then the fifth criterion has to do with safety considerations. We’re thinking about safety relatively broadly here. But one of the guiding questions is around “What are the current safety risks, and how might they impact in-person events?” We’re thinking of things like weather. We heard recently from someone whose annual conference was in Houston when the tornadoes went through, and several hotels in the area lost power and things like that. Luckily, it didn’t impact their conference, but that’s the kind of concern that you might need to take into account. There are also health concerns. Obviously, we started the episode talking about COVID-19. If something like that happens again, there can be true risks to gathering in person. There might also be the potential for political unrest, depending on where your in-person event is situated. So being aware of the safety risks that bringing together a group of people to learn could potentially entail.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:53] And then a question to go with that is “Are there safety concerns among our audience?” Are people tuned into any of these concerns? How much do they care about them? How much do we really need to be taking these into account? It’s important to know.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:06] And so the rating scale here, 1 to 5. 1, that there are significant safety concerns, which would favor online delivery. 2, some safety concerns that would favor online delivery. 3, minimal safety concerns, so either format would be feasible.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:25] Then 4, some safety concerns favoring offline. And 5, significant safety concerns favoring offline. Some of the things we have in mind here with some or significant safety concerns are, for example, if you’re running, say, labs that involve dangerous chemicals or that involve things like power tools or using electricity, things that need to be supervised, monitored, and guided properly. You don’t want to just have an on-demand video saying, “Hey, try this welding tool out” without having the right person there to support that. So those would favor offline circumstances.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:00] You have to weigh your safety concerns because, to your point, Jeff, some safety concerns, like perhaps a pandemic, will point towards online. Other safety concerns, as you were saying, like with chemicals or power tools, might favor offline. You’ll need to think particularly about your offering and where that points you in terms of where the safety risk is lowest.

Engagement and Networking OpportunitiesJeff Cobb: [00:18:20] That was number five, safety concerns. Criterion number six is engagement and networking opportunities. And a question you would ask here, one of them is, “How important is face-to-face interaction for this particular course or conference or name your type of learning experience?”

Celisa Steele: [00:18:40] Another guiding question is “Can we replicate—or can we even enhance—those kinds of interactions using online tools and online strategies?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:49] I think this is another one where we need to stretch ourselves and think about what really is possible, both online and offline, in terms of the engagement and the networking, and not make any assumptions. I think we automatically make an assumption that more networking is going to happen offline. But I’ve recently been to conferences, and I know that there’s a significant number of people there who may never talk to anybody the whole time they’re there, but, if they were in an online situation, they might actually have a lot of engagement, a lot of interaction. So we have to be thinking about those things. The rating scale here. 1, engagement or networking are easily replicated online. 2, engagement or networking somewhat replicable online. 3, engagement/networking equal in both formats.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:34] 4 engagement and networking somewhat better offline. And 5, engagement and networking somewhat better offline.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:41] Significantly better.

Accessibility and InclusivityCelisa Steele: [00:19:42] Excuse me. Significantly better offline, yes. So that’s the sixth criterion. That brings us to seven, which has to do with accessibility and inclusivity. And guiding questions here include “Which format makes the course or conference more accessible to a wider audience?” And so you’re going to be wanting to consider things like geographic reach. You’re going to be wanting to consider disability accommodations. You want to consider time zone flexibility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:11] Yes, these are really important. I’m on a board right now of an organization that has an international reach, and those geographic questions—and also socioeconomic questions that can go with them—are big because we offer programs that are relatively expensive and tend to be geared towards American and European audiences. But we have large constituencies in other parts of the world that may not be able to travel to the face-to-face versions of those events, may not be able to afford what we’re charging for some of those events, but have a real need.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:44] The rating scale for accessibility and inclusivity goes from 1, online is significantly more accessible; 2, online is somewhat more accessible; 3, accessibility is equal for both formats; 4, offline is somewhat more accessible; and 5:, offline is significantly more accessible.

Learning Outcomes and FeedbackJeff Cobb: [00:21:05] That’s accessibility and inclusivity—very important to keep very front of mind. And then criterion eight—maybe one of the ones that’s closest to my heart—is learning outcomes and feedback and thinking about those in the context of offline and online experiences. A key question here might be “How have learner outcomes and satisfaction levels differed between online and offline formats in the past?” Hopefully, this is something you know.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:39] Right. Again, the past, though, probably needs to be a relatively short past.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:44] That’s true.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:44] You might need to be looking at just post-pandemic numbers there to get an accurate read or as accurate a read as possible. And then, even in what you said, Jeff, in that question, we grouped outcomes and satisfaction levels together. Ideally, you’re actually separating those out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:01] Yes, definitely.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:01] You’re really looking at learning outcomes differently than you’re looking at satisfaction levels because I think we all know that you can sometimes get a very highly rated experience where people don’t go back with much to apply.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:14] Right. There’s the “Did you like it?” question, and then there’s the “Did you actually learn anything?” assessment.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:20] You want to be looking at both and, we would say, putting more weight on the outcomes rather than on the satisfaction level, on the smile sheet level of feedback.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:30] Definitely. And, related to that, “What feedback have we received about that effectiveness of each format?” Like you said, Celisa, we’ve got to make sure we’re not looking too far back on that.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:42] The rating scale here is 1, online consistently yields better outcomes. 2, online often yields better outcomes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:52] 3, outcomes are similar in both formats. 4, offline often yields better outcomes. And 5, offline consistently yields better outcomes. Yet again, I will say this is a place not to make assumptions. I think there still tends to be this bias that learning is going to happen better in offline environments, but there is substantial evidence that learning can be equal or even better in online environments. So you have to walk into this with that understanding.

Environmental ImpactCelisa Steele: [00:23:23] And then the final criteria that we’ll mention today is environmental impact. Jeff, you mentioned near the beginning of our conversation this idea of green meetings, which we felt we maybe heard more about in the past than we have of late. But, in general, considering the environmental impact we think is important for learning businesses to be doing. Guiding questions are things like “What is the environmental impact of each format, meaning online versus offline?” And so you’re going to want to be looking at factors like carbon footprint, energy consumption, and waste generation. How much trash are you producing?

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:00] And then, of course, ask, “How can we minimize our environmental footprint while delivering high-quality educational offerings?” I’m going to sound like a broken record, but this is, again, not an area to make too many assumptions because online is not necessarily off the hook totally when it comes to environmental impact. A lot of server energy is required to be the backbone of the Internet that’s running all of these interactive experiences. That’s becoming truer as AI becomes a bigger component of learning experiences. That said, probably in the balance, online is typically going to be more environmentally friendly, but you need to weigh it on our rating scale.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:41] And so that ranges from 1, online format has significantly lower environmental impact. 2, online has somewhat lower environmental impact. 3, the environmental impact is similar for both formats.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:54] 4, the offline format has somewhat lower environmental impact. And 5, the offline format has significantly lower environmental impact. With number 5 in particular, I think, if it’s easy to get a group of people together locally—not really have to do much to do it—that’s a no-brainer in terms of environmental impact versus the amount of energy that might have to be expended with servers and everything else to stand up something online. But my guess is that’s probably the exception more than the rule in this area.

Using the Criteria to Help Make Decisions About What Learning to Offer Online and What to Offer OfflineCelisa Steele: [00:25:24] Those are the nine criteria that we brought to the table today. If you use the scoring that we talked about with each question, then what you can do is sum up the scores for each to get a total. If your total is in that 9 to 18-point range, that’s going to be indicating online pretty strongly. 19 to 27, that’s going to be moderately favoring using an online format. 28 to 36, that’s neutral or mixed, so probably either format could work. 37 to 45, that’s going to be moderately leaning towards offline. And 46 to 54, that’s going to be strongly favoring offering it offline.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:10] We’ll stress that, as with any rubric like this, your overall score probably shouldn’t determine your choice. Judgment has to be applied, obviously, within your particular context. But it can point you in the right direction. And an approach like this gives you a structured way to think about this decision with others, discuss it with others that are involved in the decision, or even just on your own. It gives you that more structured way of thinking about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:39] We encourage you to make this your own, to adjust the criteria. Maybe not all nine of what we mentioned feel important or relevant to your learning business. Maybe there are others that you feel are missing and that you would want to add. And, of course, you can also adjust the ratings along with the criteria to fit your learning businesses as much as possible and tailor this to your needs. That rubric and those criteria that we just went through really speaks to making product-by-product decisions, perhaps product line-by-product line decisions. But, beyond that, there’s also the question of the overall balance of online and offline offerings in a learning business’s portfolio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:23] Yes, so you want to evaluate your current balance of online versus offline offerings. You want to ensure that you’ve got a diverse mix that’s going to meet the varied needs, behaviors, and preferences of your audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:39] You’re going to want to think about what can you do to make your approach as defensible and flexible as possible, so that, if things change, if the situation changes, how might you be able to pivot quickly between formats? I think that’s something that a lot of organizations did learn during COVID, about how can we take, essentially, the same materials and potentially deliver them through a series of online-synchronous, instructor-led sessions? We can also then do that in person when we are able to meet in person. But thinking about how do you develop in a way that allows you to pivot as much as possible?

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:20] Yes, this is, I think, the core value of content, the intellectual property, the sort of stuff of any course, in and of itself—we’ve had this discussion before that it’s tending to or trending towards zero in terms of market value. It’s really the experience that you put around that content. When you’re talking about offline versus online, you’re structuring different experiences, and you can do that around the same body of content. Depending on choices you make—instructionally, structurally, and everything else—you can take that same core content and have a fantastic offline experience, have a fantastic online experience. They may have different objectives to them, they may be aimed at different audiences, but that’s the kind of flexibility and adaptability that you have when you’re really considering this online versus offline.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:09] Really focusing on that flexibility and adaptability probably makes the most sense when your score is more in that mid-range, where either format could probably work. That might be the types of offerings where you really want to make sure it is easy to move between the two. You might even suggest, perhaps, a hybrid approach where some aspects of the learning experience are happening in person but others are also happening online. So it can be an interesting way to think about the middle ratings. If your scores aren’t clearly pointing you towards online or offline, there can be this focus on adaptability and flexibility and also the potential for a blended solution.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:52] We should stress this is not a one-and-done deal. Like just about everything in the world of learning, this is a process, not an event. You need a continuous feedback loop around your portfolio of offerings. You’re going to need to regularly gather and analyze feedback from learners to help you adjust that balance between online and offline and improve your offerings. Of course, be prepared for those big changes that come along, like—we talked about earlier—COVID was.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:23] And then you’re also going to need to plan for sustainable investments. Be thinking about what capacity you already have and where you might need to add capacity, in terms of online platforms or resources, different staffing needs, or different contractor relationships. You just want to make sure that you are in a position to be able to execute on the appropriate formats in your portfolio and that you’re really allocating resources effectively to help you maintain that portfolio that’s going to have impact, be balanced, and be attractive to the learners you want to serve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:12] Finding the right balance of online and offline learning to have in its portfolio is one of the critical concerns facing learning businesses in our post-pandemic world because getting that mix as close to ideal as possible is key to securing a learning business’s reach, revenue, and impact.

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Related Resources* Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer * The New Blended Learning * Hybrid vs. Blended Learning: The Difference and Why It Matters * Why and How to Build Your Blended Learning Playbook

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Jeff De CagnaOn January 1, 2025, we’ll enter the second half of the turbulent 2020s and come that much closer to the Threatening 30s, to borrow the terms of our guest for episode 414 of the Leading Learning Podcast. Organizations of all kinds have a vested interest in seeing the future as clearly as possible and taking action—action to bring about the best possible future for those they serve.

Leading Learning Podcast co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Jeff De Cagna about this and much more. Jeff De Cagna is executive advisor for Foresight First, which helps association boards set a higher standard of stewardship, governing, and foresight, and a board’s duty of foresight has been Jeff’s focus for the last 10 years.

Jeff and Jeff talk about foresight as an intentional process of learning with the future and about intentional learning as a process of sense-making, meaning-making, and decision-making. While Jeff De Cagna focuses on working with association boards, much of what he has to say about foresight and our duty to our successors can apply more broadly to leaders and other staff in learning businesses.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff De Cagna: [00:00:00] Basically, there are three choices that we have, which is to do nothing, do something, or do everything we can.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:10] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:12] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] On January 1, 2025, we’ll enter the second half of the turbulent 2020s and come that much closer to the Threatening 30s, to borrow the terms of our guest. Organizations of all kinds have a vested interest in seeing the future as clearly as possible and taking action—action to bring about the best possible future for those they serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 414, Jeff talks with Jeff De Cagna about this and much more. Jeff De Cagna is executive advisor for Foresight First, LLC, in Reston, Virginia, and he helps association boards set a higher standard of stewardship, governing, and foresight, and a board’s duty of foresight has been Jeff’s focus for the last 10 years.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:09] Jeff and Jeff talk about foresight as an intentional process of learning with the future and about intentional learning as a process of sense-making, meaning-making, and decision-making. While Jeff De Cagna focuses on working with association boards, much of what he has to say about foresight and our duty to our successors can apply more broadly to leaders and other staff in learning businesses. The Jeffs spoke in May 2024.

Helping Boards Become MoreJeff Cobb: [00:01:45] Can you talk a little bit more about what your work with boards actually looks like? What do you do when you engage with a board?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:01:52] It’s really about helping boards become more. What I mean by that is that every board, no matter where it is on its trajectory, can be more than it has been historically, more than it is today, perhaps even more than those who are serving on the board imagine that it can be. And that’s essential in today’s environment. We really need our boards to be at the highest possible level of performance, given the nature of the challenges that they face. So what I’m trying to do is helping to shift the board’s language toward the future, trying to shift their thinking toward the future, and trying to shift their actions toward the future, really having them lean their orientation toward where we’re going versus perpetuating, if you will, what the organization and what the board have been doing over the course of its history, trying to shift that mindset, trying to shift those habits of mind in a new direction.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:48] Something that jumped out to me when you were talking about the shifts that need to occur is a language shift. Can you give an example or two of what kind of shifts in language have to occur with boards in your work?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:03:01] Sometimes they’re significant in the sense of getting the board to understand the impact of orthodoxy, for example. Orthodox beliefs—the deep-seated assumptions we make about how the world works. We have built up a whole way of talking about our organizations that is embedded in our orthodox beliefs. But the problem is that orthodoxy often does not reflect where we are headed. It reflects where we have been. And so we have to challenge that belief system by asking are these orthodox beliefs we hold about membership, about board work, about the way we create value for stakeholders, the relationships that we have, are those beliefs true? Were they ever true? And, if they’re true today, that’s fine. If we accept that they are true—and I mean true in a sense of do we have good reasons to believe that they are true; there’s evidence for them.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:03:55] But then the second question is, is it helpful to hold those beliefs? Are they guiding us toward the future? A big challenge for every board in 2024 is to sort through the belief system of the organization, which then defines the way we talk about it, and ask, okay, what’s the orthodoxy? Which, by definition, in this environment, is detrimental because it’s holding us back. It’s limiting us. It’s connecting us to a past that doesn’t actually exist in the way we thought it did and is not really appropriate to where we’re headed. And then, what’s the justified belief? What is it we can say, yes, this is true, and this is the kind of belief we want to hold on to as we look toward the future of the organization? We can shape our future on the basis of that belief. We have to sort through all of that.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:04:41] And, by sorting through that belief system and challenging, reckoning with those beliefs, we can actually change the language of the organization. Also, other smaller things go into this, and they’re tied to orthodoxy, but I’ll just give you one example. Reminding boards that being on a board, in an association specifically, is not a volunteer role. It’s a voluntary role, and the difference is that, being a volunteer in an association, most volunteers don’t have fiduciary responsibility. They come to the task and participate without having to carry that particular set of responsibilities or those duties with them. That’s not true for boards.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:05:23] Boards do have the duties of care, loyalty, and obedience, so there is a difference there. But the other, more fundamental difference, as I see it, is no one ends up on a board, again particularly an association, by accident. It’s voluntary. No one’s holding you there. You have the ability to leave at any time. That implies a willingness to do it at the highest possible level/ Because you’re choosing it, just like anything else you choose to do, you want to do it the best possible way. Those kinds of things—some subtle, some more explicit—are part of changing the language that boards have. And there are a lot of other things like that. But those are a couple of ideas of the approach that I try to take.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:05] I like that it’s a lens that brings that sense of intentionality to what you’re doing as a board member, as a part of that board.

What Is Foresight and the Duty of Foresight?Jeff Cobb: [00:06:14] Let’s turn to the concept of foresight and the duty of foresight, which I know are really central, they’re core, to your work with boards. I also want to explore how it may apply beyond boards, but let’s start with the concept first. Can you define what you mean by foresight and by a duty of foresight?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:06:38] I like a relatively simple definition of foresight, which is that foresight is an intentional process of learning with the future. And what that means is that we are trying, through foresight, to better understand what the world could look like. Sometimes people will equate foresight with prediction, or they will equate foresight with forecasting. And, certainly, in foresight, there are people who do make predictions, and there are people who do forecasts. I’m not saying that these things don’t happen, but, to draw a relatively simple differentiation among those things, if I were to say to you that on January 1, 2029, this will happen, X will happen, that’s a prediction. If I were to say to you that on January 1, 2029, there’s a 75-percent chance that X will happen, that’s a forecast.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:07:28] What we’re really talking about in foresight, as far as I’m concerned, is what could the world look like on January 1, 2029? We’re not trying to predict it. We’re not trying to forecast it. We’re asking a question around what the world could look like. And we want to understand how the world could look in different ways. Could it be a more favorable world for our organization? Could it be a less favorable or unfavorable world for our organization? Could it be an unthinkably bad world for our organization? Those are usually the three ways, the three frames of futures that I try to get boards to think about—the favorable, the unfavorable, and the unthinkable—because they need to confront all those plausible futures.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:08:10] By situating themselves in those time horizons and asking the questions around what those futures could look like, and whatever the time horizon is—whether it’s 60 months, 72, 84, or whatever the time horizons are—they’re trying to ask the questions around what the world could look like. What are the issues that we might be grappling with there? What does the landscape look like? What does the context look like? And then, after devoting some attention to that conversation, bring it back to today and ask a different question, which is, what do we need to do as a board to be more effective decision-makers, to navigate toward a favorable future and navigate away as best we can from an unfavorable, unthinkable future, but at a minimum to be able to anticipate and prepare for all three and more of those plausible futures so that we are actually in a position to learn with the future as it unfolds?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:09:02] The idea is that we do that foresight work. We bring it back to today. We start making decisions. And then we look for the indicators—the signposts or the signals—that tell us we’re headed in a certain direction and try to adjust and course-correct as best we can as an organization. That’s a relatively simple way of looking at what foresight is, and then, to build on that, but the duty of foresight started out as the idea that boards should devote themselves to learning as much as possible about the future. I imagine we’ll talk about this as we go. In today’s environment, I really see the duty of foresight as a requirement on the part of association boards specifically to stand up for their successors’ futures. Someone’s got to be able to take responsibility and say that the people who are coming to our organization over the course of the next 60, 72, 84, 96, 120 months and beyond, the rest of this decade into the 2030s, someone needs to stand up and say, “We’re going to try to do everything we can to stand up for the futures of those people that we don’t know personally, who are going to be part of our community, part of our profession, part of our industry, part of our field.” Because right now no one else is doing that.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:10:21] Our stakeholders and our successors are out there on their own, pretty much trying to figure out what comes next. So as organizations that have always cared about how people live together, how people work together, how people collaborate with one another, about the well-being of one another, I think that, for our boards, the duty of foresight has a responsibility to stand up for the futures of their successors. Again, not just those who will come in the next couple of years, but those who will never be known to them personally because that’s the way it is supposed to work. We’ve always believed that our predecessors had our best interests in mind, and now it’s an opportunity for us to demonstrate that we have our successors’ best interests in mind. The work of foresight is very much tied to the duty of foresight, but the duty of foresight is that commitment and that requirement, and the work of foresight is how it gets supported.

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The Role of Learning in ForesightJeff Cobb: [00:11:53] Can you talk a little bit more about how learning factors into foresight, and what kind of learning journey does a board often find itself on as a result of engaging in this process?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:12:06] Boards have to make choices about where they’re going to focus their attention because all of this comes back to a question of attention more so than anything else. How will boards devote their attention to the areas where they think they can have maximum impact? And then make that the areas that they really do a deeper dive of learning—and that deeper dive, that intentional learning, as opposed to incidental learning, which we all do every day by having a newsletter come into our inbox, or someone sends us a video or we read a quick article online/ We’re all doing some kind of incidental learning every day, but that’s not enough for any of us, given the nature of the challenges that we’re confronting these days, but especially for boards that are having to make hard decisions. And those decisions are only going to get more difficult. They need to have a deeper process.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:12:53] For me, intentional learning is a disciplined process that is based on a cycle that I have been using, and there are other learning cycles out there, but the one that I have used consistently because it’s relatively straightforward and helps boards navigate their way through it with reduced complexity—I won’t say no complexity because it’s inherent, but a reduced level of complexity—is to look at learning, intentional learning, as a process of sense-making, meaning-making, and decision-making. The sense-making process is about gathering information about things. Do we understand this?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:13:28] I’ve been doing a lot of work with AI in recent months and years. Do we understand enough about what AI is to be able to talk about it? Do we understand what a large language model is? Do we understand some of the issues that exist with LLMs that we have to navigate? Do we understand different techniques that are also related to this? What’s the difference between generative AI and machine learning? And that sort of thing. Boards need to have some measure of literacy in any topic to be able to talk about it, and that’s the sense-making process, our understanding of it.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:13:59] Of course, as you well know because of your deep immersion in learning, people look at sense-making, meaning-making as the same thing. They’re integrated, I agree. But I think, in this case, I like to break it out so that we can see the differentiation and the steps, the phases, and the process. If we cognitively, intellectually gather up information and try to understand at that level, then we can move into more of a meaning-making process, where we’re teasing out what are the human implications of what we’ve learned? What are the ethical implications of what we learned? What are the strategic, reputational, and other kinds of implications? What does this all mean to our organization, to our stakeholders, to our successors? This is the place where we can really start to have more long-term thinking in the meaning-making phase of a process.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:14:45] Then we take all of that, synthesize all of that sense-making and all of that cognitive and the affective, and tie it all together into our decision-making process, and make better decisions on that basis. But, then, of course, by making decisions, we now are doing things that lead us to more sense-making, more meaning-making, and more decision-making. So it becomes a cycle of activity. And then the final thing is, of course, there’s another loop around that, which is, we always have to evaluate how well we’re doing at each one of those phases. How good are we at sense-making? How good are we at meaning-making? How effective are we at decision-making?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:15:23] There’s another level of learning that goes into this, where we’re reflecting on our practice in each one of those phases so we can improve our performance. That’s also an element of the learning process as well. That’s the way that I try to help boards think about their intentional learning, something that we all do quite naturally. We just don’t name the phases of it. I think that is how I see the difference between an intentional learning process being central to the foresight work and to the duty of foresight versus the incidental learning that we’re doing every day in a very casual way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:59] A number of things jump out at me there. First of all, that distinction between incidental and intentional. I think I’ve always been cognizant of that. but I don’t think I’ve ever used quite that language with it. And that does help with understanding different ways in which learning operates. We all need to be doing both, obviously. We all are hopefully doing both in our lives. A lot of what you said there brings to mind some of the more learning knowledge theorists that we’ve had on the show before.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:28] Harold Jarche, whose work you may be familiar with, talks about sense-making, making meaning. He has all of his frameworks and approaches to that. Clark Quinn was on recently, and he characterizes learning as a process that essentially brings you to the point of being able to make decisions. That’s what it’s about. You have to learn enough to be able to get to that point. That’s really what you should be aiming for when you’re creating learning experiences—ultimately empowering people to be able to make decisions through that process.

The Next Definition of ForesightJeff Cobb: [00:16:57] I know you referenced this a little bit, but I want to call out that you’ve been focusing on this, at least in this named “foresight,” “duty of foresight”-type version, for a decade now. We’re celebrating an anniversary. That’s part of the reason you’re on the show now. You did shift the definition a little bit, and you mentioned the learning has always been there. There’s now more of this notion of standing up. Are those the main distinctions between how you have defined it up until, I believe, 2022, and then you shifted the definition to what it is now?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:17:30] Yes. For the first, roughly, I’d say, eight and a half years, the definition was very stable. The duty of foresight is a commitment to learn as much as possible, by boards to learn as much as possible with the future. Then the pandemic happened, and, for a lot of us, it required—I was going to say “forced.” I don’t think it forced me, but it did definitely move me to want to reflect back on what I had been talking about and writing about before the pandemic occurred—everything I wrote in the 2010s—and looking back on that.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:18:05] I realized that the duty of foresight needed to adapt to the world that we were in, following or as a consequence of the pandemic. I spent a lot of time in 2022 thinking about how the definition needed to change, and that’s when I adjusted it in September of 2022, and I call it the next definition of the board’s duty of foresight, and it starts out with the idea of standing up for successors’ futures.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:18:29] I wrote it in a way where it would read like any of the other duties that boards carry: the duties of care, loyalty, and obedience. It reads in exactly the same way. I’m not an attorney, but I have been a director, an officer, and have worked with boards for a long time. I wrote this in the same way that I would write the definitions for the other duties. And intentional learning is still there. We’re standing up for successors’ futures through intentional learning, through short-term sacrifice, and through long-term action. The intentional learning aspect remains part of it. I think it actually raises the stakes for learning, even though it’s not a definition totally framed around learning or exclusively around learning. Learning remains quite critical, but also the idea of short-term sacrifice, which does not mean sacrifice for a short duration, but means sacrifice today versus waiting, versus not sacrificing for the future, but being willing to give up what we think is not critical or we think might be detrimental or is not going to serve our successors.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:19:32] We’re willing to make those sacrifices and repurpose our resources or redirect our attention to other kinds of actions that would have greater benefit for those that we would be wanting to help in the future, the successors we’re trying to serve, and always having that long-term view, always maintaining the perspective of how are we going to…? How will this play out? Or how could this play out? What are the potential implications? What are the foreseeable consequences of our decisions? And making sure we’re considering those choices. The definition has expanded its frame a little bit to accommodate that.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:20:08] And I think that the reason why I wrote it the way that I did—this updated, next definition, which I refer to as the “next” definition because I know there’ll be another one; I know that at some point in the future there’ll be another definition, so it’s just the one for now; it’s not the one for all time—but I think that I wrote it in a way to remind us that not all duties that we carry—and particularly for boards, where, in the case of boards, it is viewed as all duties are grounded in law; the duties of care, loyalty, and obedience are in statute there, in case law; they’re in regulation—not all duties are grounded in law. In this case, this is a duty grounded in our shared humanity. We have a responsibility for one another. And so that’s where the duty of foresight comes from. It is a choice that boards make. It’s not required of them. They’re not compelled to do this. But I hope that they are impelled to do it because they feel a shared sense of humanity with those who will follow them and want to serve those people, those human beings that they will never know, so that they can leave it better for them than how they found it. That’s inherent in the way that this next definition is framed to expand that sense of responsibility and that commitment beyond just the scope of “We’ve got to do the learning.” The learning is in service of a larger purpose.

What’s Different When a Board Focuses on Foresight?Jeff Cobb: [00:21:41] As I mentioned, I have served on boards. I do serve on boards. I imagine a number of our listeners similarly do. When you walk into your traditional board meeting, you’re expecting certain things. They all go a certain way, those types of meetings. I’m wondering what it’s like after Jeff De Cagna has shown up and worked with the board, taking them through getting the concept of the duty of foresight, what does it then look like to serve on a board? And I’m thinking very practically. I show up for the quarterly board meeting, the annual board meeting, or whatever it is. What’s happening in the room that’s different? It may be the agenda, the activities that are going on. What’s different about serving on that type of board?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:22:26] It’s all grounded in next practices. It’s about what combination of next practices we’re going to put in place. And those next practices are approaches and ways of doing things that are intended to challenge orthodoxy, intended to reinforce or strengthen core convictions for why boards exist and what their purpose is and the habits of mind. I think that, depending on the combination of next practices that a board would implement, the way that I see it is the traditional structure of an agenda that mirrors more something like Robert’s Rules of Order, it’s not what you would see in that situation.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:23:08] It’s much more about how do we use every minute of that meeting, every moment that we have available, for maximum benefit, maximum value of attention, maximum focus on where the organization is going. I want to help boards devote as much of their attention as possible to the future. If you use a ratio that is often shared with me of [70:20:10], where people say, our board spends 70 percent of their time on the future—we can talk about what they mean about the future versus what I mean, but that’s a starting point—and then 20 percent on other things that have to be handled in that time. And then 10 percent is the slack that allows them to adapt to whatever might come up that they are not necessarily aware of at the moment, but it’s available if they need it.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:23:59] I’m like, “That’s a great starting point, but I want that 70 number to be as close to 100 percent as possible.” Now, I may never be able to get all the way to 100, so maybe I’ll have to be satisfied with 95:5, but I would love to think that what’s happening is that the conversation is oriented toward, “This is where we’re going. These are the futures that we’re going to have to contemplate, and how do we make those choices? We’re going to be doing our intentional learning—sense-making, meaning-making, decision-making. We’ll be doing that process repeatedly during our meetings. We’ll be confronting orthodoxy.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:24:35] Our conversations are going to be qualitatively different. We’re going to be using different words and different phrases, different language to talk about things, all in service of trying to move the organization forward. And we’re not going to be devoting nearly as much of our attention to the traditional activities or the traditional kinds of agenda items, and we would redesign the agenda completely to enable that. We would move a lot of that work to committees and let them do the heavy lifting of some of that underlying, very important governance work, but not stuff that necessarily needs to occupy as much of the board’s attention, just simply the board making sure that it maintains proper oversight of that and doing what it needs to do, but not redoing committee work, but enabling committees to do it using consent agendas and using other approaches, and so on.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:25:28] I think it’s a fundamentally different kind of experience, and I do think about it in that way, that what we really want to design for our boards—and I’ve written about this both before and since the pandemic, about the idea of designing director experience that begins at the time that people are identified for potential board service, their recruitment and selection, and then their seating and their service on their board, and their development while they’re serving. All of this experience should be designed in a way to maximize the meaning of the experience for directors and officers and to maximize their capacity-building. This should be a deep capacity-building experience for them. I think the way we do that is by shifting completely the nature of what these conversations are like and enabling them to have different long-term conversations grounded in the duty of foresight, grounded in the core convictions that I encourage boards to adopt, and the habits of mind that I encourage them to cultivate.

The Duty of Foresight Beyond BoardsJeff Cobb: [00:26:36] Your work is focused primarily or entirely on boards, but then, obviously, whatever boards do in the boardroom ultimately has to extend through the organization and out into whatever the constituency being served is. How does the duty of foresight extend beyond the board, say, to the executive team, to the staff, or the organization, or even out to the stakeholders in general?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:27:07] Yes. So the way that I think about it is it’s really three levels. There’s the duty of foresight, which we’ve talked about. There’s the work of foresight, which we’ve talked about a little bit. How do we build futures? How do we use the methodologies of foresight, whether it’s scenario building, environmental scanning, or backcasting, or any of the tools that are available? And then there’s the consistent practice of foresight. How do we know that we’re doing it, over and over again? We’re going through our learning cycle related to foresight—sense-making, meaning-making, decision-making—doing it repeatedly and building that consistent practice.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:27:42] I think that the duty of foresight is something that belongs to boards, and the reason for that is because they’re really the only one—and, again, I’m speaking in the association context—they’re really the only ones in our organizations who sit at the center of the Venn diagram that includes responsibility, authority, and opportunity. They’re the responsible parties for their organizations. They have the authority under the bylaws and under law to make decisions on behalf of their organizations, and they are the ones who will meet, we know, frequently. Every board’s going to meet two, three, four, or more times per year. So they sit at the center of that. There’s no other group that has the same combination of responsibility, authority, and opportunity in any organization. Not staff, not committees, not consultants. It is the board that has that set of features, if you will, a set of commitments. So I think the duty of foresight needs to reside with them.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:28:42] Having said that, I think any CEO, any senior, any C-suite team working with a board, it’s fair to say that the duty of foresight extends to include them as the most senior staff decision-makers, without the fiduciary duties that come with board service. But they can certainly choose to say, “Look, I’m going to adopt this as part of what I do too because I’m working with the board, and the board is doing it, so I’m going to do it as well.” I think that would also be true for other staff that are working in the organization. But, again, it remains a choice. So I think that, certainly, staff at every level and contributors within and beyond the boundaries of our organizations have roles to play in the work of foresight.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:29:24] We want as much diversity as possible in these conversations. We need to include as many different voices and, as I said, not just within the association but beyond it as well. One of the great approaches, a next practice that I think associations can pursue is the idea of building foresight networks and one or more networks of contributors from across and beyond the association’s boundaries who can bring perspective on the issues that the board is trying to investigate. Boards can’t do all the heavy lifting of the learning on their own. They need assistance, they need support, and they need that diversity of perspective. Foresight networks can help them with that. It can be one foresight network that covers a lot of different areas, or they could be individual foresight networks for different topics if you want a deeper dive.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:30:11] But, regardless of the structure, those networks—informal in nature, focused on learning, and inclusive—can really assist. That’s a way for a lot of contributors to become involved. And the final thing I would say is that the idea of a consistent practice of foresight is something that is really bolstered by the board’s acceptance or the choice to adopt the duty of foresight because they become the champions for everything that happens from there. When they say, “We are committed to the duty of foresight; we are making this choice,” it enables the entire organization to orient its thinking in that way.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:30:47] And, because this is foundational to the idea of stewardship in the methodology that I pursue, the idea that we have to leave it better than how we found it, it is an opportunity for boards to nurture and to create that shared sense of stewardship across the organization, where everyone who is a part of the organization can make a contribution to stewardship, even if that contribution is relatively small. Even if the duty of foresight, as I believe, really resides with the board, there’s a lot of opportunity for other stakeholders in the organization to be involved—and actually more than opportunity. We very much need them to be involved in this work to ensure that it really addresses the full range of what is plausible and the full range of what is necessary to navigate through these challenging conditions.

The Role of Foresight in Leading People, Professions, and MoreJeff Cobb: [00:31:47] One of our core concepts at Leading Learning is—well, it’s in the name, leading learning. So not just being reactive and turning out traditional learning content based on what the market seems to want, but looking ahead and setting the pace for what and how that field or industry you serve needs to be learning in order to progress. Sometimes that may mean leading people down paths that they aren’t eager to go down, or they don’t even know are there yet. It seems like this whole concept of foresight would be applicable here, maybe at a higher level, not necessarily the whole duty of foresight concept. I’m not sure. So I’d welcome your perspective on that.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:32:32] Even if you don’t go deeply into learning about the methodologies of foresight, I think we can all be more open to learning with the future. And I refer to that as developing a “foresightly” perspective. It begins with discarding orthodoxy, and it continues to clarifying our orientation toward the future and displaying humility, like the ability to say, “I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that, but I’m going to look into it. I’m going to investigate it. I’m going to formulate a question, and I’m going to explore that question.” It starts out with those, and then it continues to nurturing our curiosity.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:33:09] We are all curious because, at one time in our lives, the world was completely not understandable to us. We had no concept of what was going on, and we built that concept step by step as we go through our lives. How do we get back to that innate sense of curiosity through our question and pursue it and then go further than just the incidental learning that we have to do and get into pursuing discovery, that deeper dive, really following through our cycle of learning? And then the final one of these habits of mind that I talk about with foresightly perspective is one that sounds a little bit different than all the others that I just mentioned. Discard orthodoxy, clarify orientation, display humility, nurture curiosity, and pursue discovery, and embrace serendipity.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:33:53] Embracing serendipity is not necessarily about being open to chance, which is the way we tend to colloquially think about serendipity. It’s recognizing that we can find something valuable even when we’re looking for something else. And that, by doing all the other things that I’ve just mentioned, all the other habits of mind, we can, in fact, discover things that we didn’t realize were important and then see value in them and recognize them. In some ways, for me, that’s what the duty of foresight was.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:34:25] I wrote my original article in 2014 about BlackBerry with the intention, really, of trying to understand how a company that had been so successful in innovation—because that’s where I was focused in 2014, on innovation—how could a company like BlackBerry that had innovated itself into a position of being the world’s preeminent technology company, not just mobile devices, but from technology as a whole, all of a sudden becoming an afterthought, where it was almost sold to private equity just two years before I wrote my article and now operates as a software security company, but is not a factor in anything at all? No one talks about it except as a cautionary tale. How could that happen? I started out wanting to understand the implications of failure and innovation, and, as a result of my research and work, I found something that I didn’t realize was there, which was a concept that I came to refer to as the duty of foresight.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:35:25] In many ways, serendipity was central to what happened to me in that way, and I think it’s very much a part of the way we’re going to navigate our way into the future, where we won’t have all the answers. We won’t be able to establish a playbook for how we’re going to get to the next decade and the years and decades ahead. We have to be open to the idea that there’s something that we’re going to find, but we have to prepare ourselves to find it. I think if we all can do that, if every one of us can build those habits of mind, I think that’s a huge step forward. And, of course, if people want to go deeper, they can learn the tools, approaches, and methodologies of foresight itself. They can build their capacity in that way. But just simply on a human level, if we can do those six things consistently, I think we can all be more open to learning with the future, and it’s going to give us a lot more opportunity to explore the issues and challenges that we’re facing in a fresh way, in a way that is less connected to the orthodoxies of the past and more open to recognizing the possibilities of the future.

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:32] I think the BlackBerry example illustrates in such a jolting way how these unknown, unseen threats that are sitting out there can completely change things, and trying to prepare for them does have to be a constant practice.

Areas of Concern and Potential Disruptors to Learn with NowJeff Cobb: [00:36:50] When you look out at the future now, obviously, you’re not predicting; you’re not forecasting. But there are things on the horizon out there in what you’ve characterized as the Turbulent 20s we’re living in right now. And then we’ve got the Threatening 30s coming, that you’ve called them. What are you seeing as some of the biggest areas of concern or potential disruptors that we do need to be learning with the future on right now?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:37:17] When I wrote about the Threatening 30s toward the end of 2023, it was out of a genuine concern that maybe we’re not recognizing the fact that the threats of the 2030s are already here. And, of course, there’s going to be new threats that emerge. But the threats are already present, and no one likes to, I certainly take no pleasure in writing a series of articles titled “The Threatening Thirties,” but I wanted to get people’s attention as best I could to say, “Look, we’ve got to recognize what we’re facing in a different way. We really must not console ourselves with the idea that everything will work out in the end because it always has.” I think that the plausibility of that way of thinking is probably at its lowest point in our recent history.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:38:03] Again, I’m not excited to say that, but I feel a responsibility to say it because I think it’s important for us to understand where we are as we approach the midpoint of this decade. As of January 1, 2025, we’ll enter the second half of the Turbulent 20s, and we’ll be on a collision course, I would say, inevitably, with the beginning of the 2030s. Whether you see it as social deterioration across our society—not just this inability for us to talk to each other, but the fact that there’s a lot more public bullying, and there’s a lot more anxiety in our environment. People just seem to be on edge quite a bit. There’s that aspect of things.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:38:44] We see so much how technology is reshaping our lives at work and in other phases of our lives and not always for the better. I certainly think how we’re grappling right now with artificial intelligence—on the one hand, a technology with tremendous potential, but also a set of technologies with tremendous problems, and ones that we’re not necessarily dealing with effectively as individuals, much less at other levels of our society, with government, and so on. Or whether it’s the ongoing concerns around the economy and the growing divide between those who have and those who do not have and the inequality that’s inherent in the way of the structure of our economies right now, not just in the U.S. but in other parts of the world. Certainly, I don’t think there’s any other way to say it but the ticking time bomb of the environment and the climate crisis and the concern now that some of the most catastrophic effects that we were hoping would be delayed, and there would be time to mitigate them, are actually happening, and that 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels may not be a viable target anymore.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:39:49] We may be trying to figure out how to live in a world of 2° C, which will be a very difficult world to live in for all of us, and other aspects of climate deterioration are a concern. And then the ongoing deepening political divides that seem to exist, not just in the United States but around the world. And the rise of authoritarian governments. Within a matter of a few weeks, 450 million people in Europe are going to vote in European Parliament elections. We don’t really know how it’s going to look after those elections, whether or not more extreme, authoritarian-oriented political parties will have more influence in the next European Parliament, and what the implications are of that. That’s just in the context of half the world’s population voting this year in elections around the world. Some have already voted, and others to come. But what will that look like? And how will things like AI influence that negatively? We’re really operating in an environment that many people refer to as a polycrisis environment.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:40:50] And that’s the way that I’m writing about it and talking about it. Multiple crises. We have two wars going on right now. Multiple crises all happening at once, the aggregate impact, they’re influencing each other. They become far more connected, and their impact is influencing us in a profoundly detrimental way. These threats are already here, and we’ve got to be adaptive to them. I’m not suggesting that associations are going to be the ones to solve these problems. They clearly have to be solved in other ways, but we have to be contributors to addressing them in some fashion, and we cannot ignore their impact on what’s happening in our organizations. We’re facing considerable challenges, and I think that we’ve got to be adaptive to this reality right now. I think the duty of foresight is a way of thinking and a set of approaches that go with it to help us navigate this environment more effectively, to be more anticipatory in our approach, and make better decisions sooner, so that we cannot be waiting until things are unrecoverable. We do not want to delay our thinking about how to prepare for this very challenging future.

How to Practice the Duty of Foresight on a Personal LevelJeff Cobb: [00:42:06] We always like to ask guests that come on the show about their own approaches to lifelong learning, and I know we’ve asked you about that before. So I want to reframe the question a little bit this time. In many ways, you’ve already answered this throughout our conversation, but I’m wondering about this idea of the duty of foresight as something to be practiced on a personal level. And it sounds like, from what you’ve said, that it is something to practice on a personal level, potentially. So I wonder how do you apply it personally in your own life and learning?

Jeff De Cagna: [00:42:44] Well, as a foresight practitioner, I’m always thinking about how I want to think about the future, how I want to learn with the future, and what learning I need to do. I’m sure you feel the same way about your job; one of the great things about having the kind of job that we have, when you work for yourself, and you’re really focusing intently in a particular area, is that I get up every day and I say, “I don’t know.” There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t say, “I don’t know” because I’m always dealing with something I don’t know anything about. And the beauty of that is I get to learn about it. I can ask a question, and I can explore it. And so, for me, intentional learning has become very much a part of what I do every day in my work, and that’s exciting.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:43:22] The way that I think about the duty of foresight in my own work—because right now I’m not serving on a board—so to bring the degree of integrity in the way that I think about the duty of foresight that I see that as something that really belongs to boards, but what I try to do, the way that I try to express that or my connection to that is the preoccupying question of my professional life, which is, “What will our successors say about us?” I’m always asking that question if I’m getting ready to have a conversation with someone like you, Jeff, or on a podcast, or if I’m doing a presentation, or if I’m writing an article. I’m always asking the question, “What will our successors say about us?” And that’s guiding me in my thinking.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:44:07] It’s a question that I ask of boards as well. When we’re having a discussion, it’s always one of the first slides in my presentation: What will our successors say about us? And it’s different from the conversation about legacy because legacy is generally about the stories we want other people to tell about us, in which we feature as the heroes, typically. What will our successors say about us is not about the words we say. It’s about the actions we take. What will we do to try to leave it better than how we found it? That’s what I’m trying to do. Certainly for myself, in terms of, am I doing everything I can to try to help my clients get to where they need to be? But, really, it’s for the boards themselves to say, okay, when we’re no longer here in this room, what will our successors say about what we did in 2024 to serve them, to leave it better than how we found it, to ensure that they have every opportunity to be successful? I think I may have said this earlier, but, if I didn’t, I’ll say it now. I think that, basically, there are three choices that we have, which is to do nothing, do something, or do everything we can.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:45:20] I don’t think of the first two as viable options. We can’t do nothing. We have to do something. I think, actually, we have a responsibility to do everything we can. The way that I’m thinking about, I’m always pursuing intentional learning in my work, and I think we all need to do that. It’s necessary in this world that we live in. And the challenges that I described earlier that we face, we’ve got to better understand what we’re confronting and figure out how we’re going to participate in trying to confront it.

Jeff De Cagna: [00:45:49] I think that if we ask ourselves, “What will our successors say about us?”—again, we’re thinking about the people that we will never know personally, so we won’t be able to talk to them. We will only be able to do things, and they’ll make an evaluation, a judgment at some future point about whether or not what we did served them, whether or not we served ourselves, or something in between. I think that’s where we have to go. That’s the thing we can all do, all ask ourselves that question, and then try to shape our actions accordingly. I think the best way we can do that is by making foresight a priority. And, certainly, when serving on a board, really looking at the duty of foresight as an essential choice for the future, choosing the future over the past, which I think is crucial for us in 2024 and beyond.

Celisa Steele: [00:46:46] Jeff De Cagna is executive advisor for Foresight First, and he helps association boards set a higher standard of stewardship, governing, and foresight.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* The Evolving Market for Lifelong Learning * Putting Foresight – and Artificial Intelligence – First with Jeff De Cagna * Focusing on the Future of Learning with Arlene Pietranton of ASHA

The post The Duty of Foresight with Jeff De Cagna appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbFor learning businesses that want to thrive in the evolving lifelong learning market, identifying metatrends and unpacking what they might mean in terms of risks and opportunities is crucial.

In episode 413 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele offer ten metatrends they see when looking at how lifelong learning is shifting to keep pace with change.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] For learning businesses that want to thrive in the evolving lifelong learning market, identifying metatrends and what they might mean in terms of risks and opportunities is crucial. That’s why we offer these ten points for your consideration.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:29] The pace of change in learning markets remains brisk, and the pursuit of learning is not just a goal—it’s really a necessity in today’s world.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:39] Keeping that context of fast-paced change and learning as a necessity in mind, we want to look at the evolving market for lifelong learning in this episode, number 413. And we have ten points we think are critical for learning businesses that want to prepare well for the future.

Turmoil in Higher Education Will Create OpportunitiesCelisa Steele: [00:00:58] So let’s dig in. Number one is the turmoil in higher education will create opportunities.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:06] There is indeed a lot of turmoil these days in higher education. A lot of questions about the short- and the long-term value of traditional college degrees—those are increasingly being called into question. The number of people looking for alternatives is growing.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:26] I think that not just the value of those degrees, but will the schools even be around? I feel like, in the news, I’m seeing report after report of campuses closing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:36] I saw today that they’re closing at a rate of one campus per week right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:40] Wow.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:41] I can’t remember what the source was on that. It could be one of those apocryphal Internet things, but it feels like that probably could be true based on what we’ve seen out there.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:50] Schools, colleges, universities are dealing with very existential questions themselves, on top of the consumer questioning of the value of the degrees that are coming out of those institutions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:04] As a result of that, we said this is going to create opportunities. That means certification programs, assessment-based certificate programs, standards-based digital badges, competency-based education—those are all likely to be areas of significant growth. In fact, we’re already seeing significant growth in those areas for learning businesses providing continuing education and professional development.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:30] Essentially, learning businesses can offer a compelling alternative to those traditional college degrees that tend to cost a lot of money, tend to take a long time to earn, and maybe don’t actually provide that return on the investment. You have this really attractive array of alternatives to those traditional degrees that learning businesses can double down on and place a good bet on those being really attractive to learners in the marketplace.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:00] We’ve even posed the question before. The way we framed it was, “Could associations replace college?” Could any sort of learning business—anybody who’s providing these sorts of continuing education, professional development, alternative learning experiences—replace college? We asked this rhetorically several years ago but ended up revisiting it not all that long ago because it isn’t seeming all that rhetorical anymore. I don’t think degree programs are going to disappear. I don’t think colleges and universities are going to disappear. There is a lot of value that they still provide. At least for the time being, the data still says that a college degree is worth something like $1 million more in lifetime income for the people who earn them. But a lot of that’s based on old data. We’re seeing a lot of things shift, and, yes, we’re going to see some new paradigms. And, as we said, that turmoil is going to create opportunities.

Every Learning Business Is Potentially an International OrganizationCelisa Steele: [00:03:53] The second point we have to offer is every learning business is potentially an international organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:02] Which is largely a result of what technology has made possible and then the way that the economies and trade have evolved over recent decades. In spite of all of its flaws and the critiques of the United States right now, people globally still consider it as the gold standard in most instances for educational credentials. So, if you are a U.S.-based organization—we realize not all of our listeners are, but a large percentage of them are—you’re in a position now because you’re able to reach the world to take your education out globally—and, if you do it right, to really be respected as a potentially international provider of education, even if you’ve typically been state-, regionally, or nationally based before this.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:50] Again, things like certification programs, assessment-based certificate programs, standards-based digital badges, all of those things, along with the related educational experiences that support them, have significant value in those global markets. Again, compared to someone who’s outside of the U.S. coming to the U.S. to pursue a bachelor’s degree or even a master’s degree, if they can remain in their country and complete a certification or get a standards-based digital badge, that can be very attractive. As you said, Jeff, tech is making this international play much easier. Self-paced e-learning—that’s incredibly friendly to all time zones. This idea of if the learner can engage in her own time and space. I think that artificial intelligence is a type of technology that’s going to make the move to international even easier because you’ll have tools that can make translation and localization faster and cheaper, allowing you to potentially access markets that aren’t even primarily English-speaking, if your materials are in English primarily.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:06] Right. We focused a bit on U.S. providers, but all of this applies no matter where you are in the world, where you’re sitting. You can leverage technology as your tool to help you reach that global audience. We’ve got that turmoil in higher education creating opportunities. We’ve got the opportunity for every learning business to potentially be an international business. Those are the first two.

Learners and Employers Increasingly Seek Continuous CompetencyJeff Cobb: [00:06:28] And then the third one is that learners and—critically—employers increasingly seek continuous competency, or what we’re labeling continuous competency.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:39] This global learning economy in which we now live requires that workers continually replenish their skills and knowledge. Jeff, you have this phrase “the other 50 years,” which is this idea of once people complete whatever college or higher education degree they might get, there’s still a long period of time, on average around 50 years, from that point in time until when they might die. There are still all those years of work where they need to be upskilling and reskilling and trying to stay current in order to be able to do their job. That creates this need for continuous competency, as you said. This idea of let’s not just have the one-offs, let’s pay attention to learning as a process and not just those events, and let’s figure out how to continuously retool and stay up-to-date.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:36] Yes. This goes back to the…well, not even so much the turmoil in higher education but just that higher education model in general—this idea that you go to school, get a degree, and then you’re set in terms of at least the formal learning you need to do for the rest of your life. And that’s never really been true. We’ve had data for a long time saying the shelf life of the knowledge you get from degrees is low, plus we’ve always known, at least intuitively, that informal learning throughout a career is really critical, and that’s starting to get more recognition now. It’s definitely the case that, if you want to thrive, it’s really no longer optional to keep learning during those other 50 years. It’s why terms like “upskilling” and “reskilling” have become such buzzwords, why we have so much focus on that these days. That’s just not going to go away. In fact, it’s probably going to shift and change quite a bit as we start to figure out where does human capability and human learning fit in relationship to machine capability and machine learning? We’re going to have to be continually figuring that out. And learning businesses exist to serve the people who are trying to navigate those other 50 years and help them with figuring this out.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:08:51] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Relationships with SMEs Are DifferentCelisa Steele: [00:09:28] Number three that we just talked about, learners and employers increasingly seek continuous competency. Number four, relationships with subject matter experts are different. And this ties to the fact that SMEs have more opportunities than ever for producing and delivering content on their own. Again, this gets back to tech and what tech has enabled in so many ways, where there are many more tools that make it essentially a WYSIWYG approach to designing, developing, and creating learning experiences. Subject matter experts don’t necessarily need learning businesses as a channel, as a way to get access to learners the way that they did in the past.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:14] Yes, you can look at companies, sites like Udemy, for example, which are huge marketplaces for courses now. Any individual expert can go and create a course that’s going to provide them with a channel directly to learners. It’s also going to provide them with a business-to-business channel because Udemy’s got a large corporate presence now as well. So subject matter experts have a lot more options. And then, at the same time, learners really are demanding more of subject matter experts, presenters, teachers than they ever have before. Most subject matter experts have never really been trained to be effective teachers. They’re usually experts in whatever field, industry, topic area that they specialize in, but that’s very different from knowing how to teach people effectively what you know.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:03] For us, this points to the need for learning businesses to invest in helping their subject matter experts improve, in helping them be excellent in how they deliver not only the content but how to deliver it effectively so that the learners are able to take it away and apply it to their lives and their work. There’s a real focus on the relationship between learning businesses and subject matter experts needing to be more collaborative and recognizing that the subject matter experts are bringing certain resources and skill sets into the learning business, and then the learning business can help in other ways, often primarily around this idea of what do we know about learning science? What do we know about andragogy? How can we help make sure that the content that subject matter experts are presenting is delivered effectively?

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:59] And we do have an offering to help with that. Many listeners will be aware of our “Presenting for Impact” training for presenters to help them create more effective presentations for Webinars, online courses, those types of things. That’s available for free. You can easily find it on the Leading Learning site. Just look in the navigation there for “Presenting for Impact,” but we’ll also be sure to link to it here in the show notes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:25] I’ll throw in one other thing here, as it’s occurring to me. Probably every one of these points, we can state the point, and then, as a wrap-up, say, “Just add AI, and see what happens when AI is added.” AI is also going to change this because what a human subject matter expert is needed for is going to be different. It already is different, I think, than it was one to two years ago. And another one to three, three to five, or five to ten years, that’s going to keep changing. What role do subject matter experts, human subject matter experts play in learning environments? What does that mean for the SME, the subject matter expert? What does it mean for the learning business? What does it mean for the learner? That’s territory that learning businesses are going to have to lead the way through.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:07] There’s another aspect there. I thought what you were going to say at first, Jeff, around AI is also the fact that AI can be used to help your subject matter experts improve…

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:20] Correct.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:20] …their delivery. We know of one learning business that is leveraging an AI coaching tool to try to help its presenters make better presentations. This is taking some of the burden off of the learning business in terms of having a human resource there to coach the presenter, but they’re using an AI tool that can help the presenter become more aware of pauses or stumblings, as I am stumbling here now. That’s another aspect of how AI could help in this relationship between learning businesses and subject matter experts.

Learning Businesses Need to Understand How Learning HappensJeff Cobb: [00:13:55] Definitely. So that was number four, relationships with SMEs (subject matter experts) will be different. Number five is learning businesses need to understand how learning happens.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:09] They do need to understand how learning happens, and it can be easy, perhaps, to focus more on some of the logistics or operational sides of running a learning business—scheduling the courses, planning the conferences, making the e-learning. But learning businesses also need to cultivate a deep knowledge of effective learning principles. The market out there for lifelong learning, professional development, and continuing education really is much more sophisticated. For most learning businesses that we hear from, it’s also much more competitive, and so there’s a real need to be excellent, both in terms of the operational, logistical pieces but also in terms of how to be effective in terms of helping learners to learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:04] I will say, too, that, in our experience, most learning businesses need more education staff. They need more of those instructional designers, the programmers, or whoever’s going to actually be building the things. And they also tend to need a higher caliber of education staff. So there’s a quantity and a quality aspect to this. Part of that means that you need to invest in the education talent that you have on staff. One area that may need more attention, in at least some learning businesses, is investing in in-house subject matter expertise so that you aren’t necessarily reliant—or wholly reliant—on outside subject matter experts to help you develop and deliver your content.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:52] Yes, and none of this, we should say, is to ding or to diss current education staff. A lot of people end up in those education roles, particularly in organizations like trade and professional associations, kind of accidentally. They may not have come out of an L&D background, an instructional design background, a learning science background. A lot of people end up coming over from marketing or membership or other roles. People fall into associations by accident in the first place, we know. So, yes, it’s a matter of training the staff that are there, bringing them up to speed, but then also starting to consciously hire in some of those professionally trained instructional designers and other staff and, as you just said, Celisa, investing in that subject matter expertise.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:35] An analogy that we use sometimes is what Netflix has done with original programing. Like Netflix, you used to get stuff from every place else and put it out there, much like an education staff might just be gathering presentations from subject matter experts and packaging them into a conference or packaging them into a series of Webinars. But then Netflix has moved from there into going into highly original award-winning programing in that home entertainment market, winning awards for it and everything else. It’s redefined them as a provider of their particular type of media. I think a lot of learning businesses would benefit from a similar sort of transformation.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:19] You’re right, Jeff, definitely don’t want to diss anyone in terms of talking about…. Perhaps what I said may have made it sound like a current education staff might be lacking. That’s not necessarily what I meant, but I think that this ties to the third point around learners and employers increasingly seek continuous competency. The learning businesses also need to live that out. As a learning business, if you’re going to walk the walk, you want to be supporting your education staff in developing new skills, in coming to a deeper understanding of topics like instructional design or learning science, and so making sure that you’re investing in that and helping them to continuously become more competent in their roles.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:03] Yes, I think that point five is around pursuing excellence in both your understanding and your execution of learning and the facilitation, the creation of learning experiences. But that needs to be paired with our point number six.

Learning Businesses Need Sales and Business Development SkillsCelisa Steele: [00:18:18] Which is learning businesses need sales and business development skills. We’ve already talked about increasing competition, and, in that increasingly competitive marketplace, it’s difficult for learning businesses to thrive solely with business-to-consumer sales of their products. It’s going to make sense for a lot of learning businesses to be able to sell in quantity to other organizations (into corporations, health systems, or governmental agencies). And then, as part of doing that, in many instances, learning businesses are going to benefit by being able to deliver customized solutions, taking content that they already have but modifying it a bit to fit that corporate buyer, for example. And then, as part of that customization, they’ll be able to charge a premium price for that deliverable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:15] Right. I think whether you’re going for this more business-to-business approach or even with a current business-to-consumer (maybe selling to individual members) approach, business development skills can really help you to create and grow partnerships that help you take those further—better enable you to get into organizations, better enable you to reach audiences beyond what might be in your current database. So having the skills to find and to develop meaningful partnerships, along with being able to sell both to those partners and to organizations, all of that is a level of skills in both selling and business development that most learning businesses don’t possess right now. Most learning businesses, in our experience, have marketing skills because that’s really what they’ve been using—marketing tools to get the word out and get people to click on e-commerce transactions and things like that. But that’s different from really selling, really doing human-to-human-type business development.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:15] I do think that while business development roles have historically not been particularly prevalent in learning businesses, I do feel like there’s a recent-ish focus on business development. There’s a relatively new association—Professionals for Association Revenue—that is focused on business development and sales in large part. I do think that there’s an understanding that these are important skill sets, and so, once you realize the importance, then it’s a matter of figuring out how to either hire in those skill sets or cultivate those skills in the staff that you already have.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:54] Yes, and we’re partnered with PAR (the Professionals for Association Revenue) in a number of ways. But we’re also seeing this in other parts of the learning business landscape that we’re serving—commercial firms who are looking more for those larger sales into organizations to leverage their intellectual property. Or, in the academic continuing education world, much more emphasis now on working with employers—selling into employers, selling into states and government districts with the educational offerings, as much as or more than the historical focus on enrolling learner by learner, individual by individual.

Demand for Demonstrable Impact Will GrowCelisa Steele: [00:21:35] Our seventh point is demand for demonstrable impact will grow. I think this is probably a bit of a no-brainer, but there are some factors contributing to this demand for that ability to show that an educational experience is having impact. Part of one of those factors is our scarcity of time, or we just tend to feel time-poor. If we’re time-poor, we want to make sure whatever time we’re going to spend learning is going to provide some results. Another aspect is the fact that there are so many free or very low-cost learning experiences that, if you really want a learner to open up their wallet and pay you for an experience, particularly if it’s, perhaps, a premium-priced offering, you really need to make that case about why learning this way is going to benefit them. They want that evidence that there’s some real value in that time and money that they’re going to spend with you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:40] Yes, and our past research and ongoing work with clients suggests that most learning businesses aren’t measuring educational impact to any significant degree with consistency. Not doing follow-on assessments of any type to determine whether the learning has been retained, whether it is being applied, or, even outside of that hard data, just consistently collecting testimonials, statements from learners saying that they got the educational value out of it, that it has made a difference in their job or their career, or those sorts of things. There are many ways to get the evidence of impact out there, and it really needs to be built into the standard practices of every learning business to do that.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:24] Yes, it can be numbers-based. It can be more of the softer approach around the testimonials that you mentioned, Jeff. You can also somewhat combine the two with something like the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method, where you take a little bit more of a buttoned-up approach around, in some ways, blowing up and going deep on a testimonial from someone who really did experience impact. You’re really looking at why was it impactful. There are ways to do that, as you said, and ways all along, from hard to easy, from numbers-driven to much more story-based. I think that the medical field may be offering some examples that could potentially be leveraged in other areas. They’ve been focused in the medical field on things like quality improvement and performance improvement for a long time, and so looking at what they’re doing there might give you ideas, even if your learning business isn’t in the medical field.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:23] Yes. It seems to be a lot more data in general in medical and health more broadly, but particularly medical. I think it’s worth following, paying attention to the work of someone like Dr. Brian McGowan, who’s been on the podcast many times, who’s very focused on getting that good analytical data out of learning experiences and certainly being able to show that the impact has been achieved.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:45] Yes, Brian is a great resource. We’ll make sure to link to at least the most recent podcast conversation that we had with him in these show notes.

Knowledge Management and Learning Are MergingJeff Cobb: [00:24:54] That was number seven around needing to address that demand for demonstrable impact. It is out there. Again, our survey data, our discussions with employers and learners show that it is indeed out there. Number eight is that knowledge management and learning are merging.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:14] Yes, I think that we’ve seen evidence of this merging repeatedly in consulting engagements. And I think that, as part of a deeper understanding of learning that we have now and how learning happens and how we can support it, organizations want to empower individuals not just to participate in formal education experiences but also to be able to do some of those just-in-time, point-of-need kinds of things. Even being able to find documents, discussions, or videos that are going to help them answer a targeted question and doing that at the point that they really need it, that’s huge. That’s on the knowledge management side. It’s whatever resources the organization has, being able to tap into those efficiently at the point of need, and that can also then go along with the more formal education. But I think folks are recognizing that formal education, those courses, those contained courses, for example, that’s not sufficient.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:17] Yes. We make this point because, traditionally, particularly in larger organizations, knowledge management has been seen as a silo of its own. Basically, all of that management of different content—objects, documents, videos, all of that sort of thing—different software to deal with that (you have things like SharePoint), which are related to knowledge management. What we’re saying is it’s an artificial separation. Both the learning and the design of learning and the management of knowledge and the design of knowledge experiences, those need to become of a piece as we go forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:53] And, again, this is the place where we add AI to this point.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:57] Yes, just add AI.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:59] You can imagine with custom GPTs that are built off of an organization’s internal resources, that being able to support learners at that point of need is going to probably become easier and easier. And it’s a role then that something like a ChatGPT, but built custom for an organization, may be able to play a significant role going forward.

Blurring and Blending Define the User ExperienceJeff Cobb: [00:27:22] Definitely. So that’s number eight, knowledge management and learning merging. And this really is related, I think, number nine, blurring and blending will define the user experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:37] Right. With that knowledge management and learning we were just talking about, you already are tying together different types of platforms than what you might think of as a “learning platform.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:50] And different mindsets, really.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:51] And different mindsets as well. You can layer on top of that the ubiquity of cell phones. We have social media where we can learn things. We have chatbots and these custom GPTs now. All of that is really leading to “always on” learning, that you can learn at any point in time and anywhere. All of this is blurring those lines. We have things like flipped learning that we talked a lot about in the past decades, and I don’t necessarily hear that term so much anymore. But flipped learning is about blurring the lines between the classroom and what you might do through technology prior to ever showing up in the classroom. What all this points to is that a learning business needs to have a plan for connecting with learners where they are—and where they are is many places. You’ve got to be aware of all those places where learners might be needing help learning from you and try to figure out how can you be there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:55] Yes, I think about my own activities as a learner in how I do things, and I’m always flowing between. I’ve got things I’m typing into Evernote, which I’ll do on the laptop, but then I’ll also do on the phone. And then I’m accessing Feedly for my RSS feeds, and, of course, then there’s whatever’s going on in e-mail. And I may watch this video and learn something and then go back to Evernote and put something in Evernote about it or bookmark something in Feedly as a result of it. It’s a flow, really, and I think helping learners to navigate that flow is important. I think, increasingly, curation is very important because there is just so much out there, and anybody who can help me get to that next resource much more efficiently, effectively and then use it in a meaningful way is going to be very valuable to me as I am going through this blended and blurry learning experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:48] We did say “blended,” and that points to this idea of online and offline. I think a lot of that changed or shifted with COVID, and it became much more common to have those blended approaches. And now, as we’re post-pandemic, there’s still a little bit of a shaking out to happen in terms of the right balance. But I think there’s a new-found appreciation for what can be done in person and what can be done online. If you’re going to gather in person, make sure to make it meaningful and valuable, that it was worth the time for people to come together, and then make use of technology to help people prepare for or follow up after those meetings. We’re in this state of still trying to shake out what that right balance is, what it looks like. But all of that, again, points to this blurring and blending, and I think things are going to only get blurrier and blendier as we move forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:48] Yes, I think, at this point, if you’re designing a face-to-face experience of any sort and you’re not building into that process as a standard practice now “Let’s think about which parts of this could actually be done online, on a phone, whatever, without having to show up at this event. What would support it before? What would support it after? What would help to improve the actual face-to-face experience?” You have to be thinking of that now when you design. And I think the flip side is probably true too. As you focus more and more on designing online experiences, asking yourself, “At what point would it make sense for whoever we have engaged online to come together face to face in some meaningful way?” Because you’re probably going to find some great new face-to-face opportunities in thinking that way about the learning experiences.

RISC Is More Essential Than EverCelisa Steele: [00:31:44] We are now at number ten.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:46] Number ten.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:47] The last of the points that we brought to the table today. And this is RISC is more essential than ever.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:54] We needed to throw an acronym in here at the end just for good measure. So the RISC we’re talking about is not your typical R- I- S- K risk; it is R- I- S- C, and that stands for Rapid Intelligence with Strategic Confidence. We think that’s going to become increasingly critical. Let’s talk a little bit about what we mean by that.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:19] Yes. What we’ve seen is that the folks who really knock it out of the park are learning businesses who are able to detect market trends and see those early and then respond in strategic ways. If you can see what’s coming or what’s right around the horizon and then position yourself to have the resource that’s going to help someone as that trend crests, then you’re going to set yourself up for success. You’re going to be providing those learners with important content and resources, and it’s going to then bring in that important revenue for your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:58] This is really the idea of foresight that we’ve talked with Jeff De Cagna about. Is that going to come out before or after this episode?

Celisa Steele: [00:33:06] It’s going to come out after this episode.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:07] It’s going to come out after this episode, so you’ll have to look to the future to have some foresight into finding out what Jeff De Cagna is saying about foresight. You can easily find that by just typing in “Jeff De Cagna” and “foresight”—but, really, this idea of learning with the future. You’re doing the work to track what’s going on out there in the market, and you’re using that to inform you and give you some confidence around making some strategic decisions, some things that you’re going to pilot, some things that you’re going to try. When we’re talking about monitoring the market, we’re not talking about rocket science here. It’s things like your analytics from social media and from e-mail. It’s getting feedback from running surveys with SurveyMonkey or whatever it is. It’s tuning into those member and customer conversations that you’re seeing in discussion forums or in social media and other places. Taking advantage of all these agile market research methods that are now available to us as businesses of any type.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:08] Right. And the RISC (that rapid intelligence with strategic confidence) has to do with…yes, you need to be listening, and you need to be understanding what are the trends, what’s being talked about, what are the opportunities? But, then, of course, you have to translate that into action. As you said, figure out what is it you want to pilot or try out, put out into the market, and see how it responds. I will say that, essentially, what we’re doing with these ten points that we brought to the table, that’s part of this detecting market trends. These are ten things that we think are shaping the market of lifelong learning. It’s tuning into these and then thinking about, “What does this mean for my learning business? What does this mean for what’s in our portfolio? What does it mean for what we might need to add to our portfolio?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:50] Yes, we’re trying really to practice what we preach because this is the kind of approach that’s represented in our Market Insight Matrix, for example, which is a tool that we regularly recommend organizations to use as a way to put a framework around that rapid intelligence gathering and testing that goes with it. It’s a good companion to this whole idea of RISC.

Metatrends and Persistent TrendsCelisa Steele: [00:35:14] Now, a little bit of a reveal here at the end, Jeff. We actually first wrote about these ten points some time ago. I’m not sure how long ago, but it was on the Tagoras blog—back when Tagoras had a blog, before Leading Learning even existed. I do know it was at least pre-2016 because we revised these points a little bit in 2016.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:36] Yes, it’s been quite a while, and these same points remain relevant, basically, which you could take as maybe we’re not making much progress against them, but I think, probably, what’s more likely is that these are persistent and perennial right now. They characterize the age that we’re living and working through. At some point we’ll have to sunset some of them, but it feels like they’ve all been highlighted by the changes that we’ve seen in technology and that we continue to see with things like AI coming along, the changes we’ve seen in our understanding of learning science and what works there. The shift in the nature of work, employment, and the global economy. In general, those are all things that were building coming into the 21st century and are continuing right now, and we’re still trying to work our way through them as learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:36:30] So these are our ten points. As a reflection question, we encourage you to think about what would you add, or what might you change in that list? This is a great question for you to consider on your own or with your team, if you have one. Or pick up the phone and call a colleague, or meet for a coffee to discuss.

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:49] Maybe we should tick off the list real quick so that people can think about it. One was the turmoil in higher education will create opportunities. Two, every learning business is potentially an international organization. Three, learners and employers increasingly seek continuous competency. Four, relationships with SMEs will be different. Five, learning businesses need to understand how learning happens.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:18] Six, learning businesses need sales and business development skills. Seven, demand for demonstrable impact will grow. Eight, knowledge management and learning are merging. Nine, blurring and blending define the user experience. And ten, RISC (R- I- S- C) is more essential than ever.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:49] For learning businesses that want to thrive in the evolving lifelong learning market, identifying metatrends and what they might mean in terms of risks and opportunities is crucial. That’s why we offer these ten points for your consideration.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* “Presenting for Impact” * Tool Talk: The Market Insight Matrix * Tripling Learning Effectiveness with Dr. Brian McGowan * “Why and How to Build Your Blended Learning Playbook”

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbWhat does a world that learns better look like? It’s an intriguing question for learning businesses to consider because learning businesses have an opportunity and a responsibility to build a world that learns better, and it’s that question that Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele explore in episode 412.

The question has a philosophical bent, but trying to answer it can have very practical implications for learning businesses in what they choose to do operationally and offer in their portfolios. It’s the kind of question that can move you beyond the usual approaches and constraints and free you to imagine and envision different possibilities.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] What does a world that learns better look like? Learning businesses have an opportunity and a responsibility to help envision and realize that world.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:14] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:24] What does a world that learns better look like to you? I was recently interviewed by the IACET podcast, and that was a question I was asked that I personally found truly interesting.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:37] Yes, I think it’s an intriguing question too, and it shows us the power of a good question. It’s essentially about the future of learning, but I think the framing takes me a slightly different direction than a question about “the future of learning,” phrased that way, might take me. This feels a little more philosophical and a little less futurist.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:00] We do like a little philosophy here at the Leading Learning Podcast, so we want to focus today’s episode on that question: “What does a world that learns better look like?” And we’re calling the episode “Building a World That Learns Better” because Celisa and I and those of you listening, we all have a role to play, a contribution to make in bringing about this world that learns better.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:25] Of course, we think this is an excellent question for you to consider on your own and with your team. What does a world that learns better look like? It’s the kind of question that can get you out of the usual approaches, the usual constraints, and free you to imagine and envision.

What Does It Mean to “Learn Better”?Jeff Cobb: [00:01:45] I think anybody who knows us well knows that we’re probably going to kick this off by defining our terms. So let’s break that question down and start with what does it mean to “learn better”?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:00] For me, “better” suggests learning both more efficiently and more effectively. If you were going to learn more effectively, that emphasizes to me the quality—the quality of learning outcomes, the quality of the learning experience itself. Then learning more efficiently focuses on optimizing the processes and the resources that are involved in learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:26] Both of those are important. You don’t want to optimize learning if it’s not very effective. And, not to cast stones, but sometimes it does seem like that’s what happens in learning businesses. How can we cut hours of effort off the time it takes us to produce one hour of e-learning? But then there’s no real thought to how effective that e-learning is (or isn’t)?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:52] If you do have effective learning, then optimizing is important. If your learning business can create additional highly effective learning experiences because you’re focused on efficiency, then that’s hugely impactful and important. If a learner can get the skills and knowledge that she needs faster because you’ve optimized the content—you pruned it ruthlessly to the essential—then that’s also very valuable in our time-poor society.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:21] So that’s talking about more efficiently and more effectively. But what does learning that is more effective and more efficient actually entail? What’s going to make it more effective and more efficient?

6 Ways to Make Learning More Efficient and Effective (AKA Better)Celisa Steele: [00:03:35] We came up with six ideas that make learning more efficient and effective that we’ll touch on. You might want to think of others and think about what does it mean to you for learning to be more effective and efficient?

ApplicationCelisa Steele: [00:03:49] But one of the first things that came to mind for us was application because unapplied (meaning unused) skills and knowledge aren’t particularly valuable—they aren’t particularly valuable to the learner; they aren’t particularly valuable to the learner’s employer; they’re not particularly valuable to society. There needs to be that application piece; the skills and knowledge need to be applied.
RelevanceJeff Cobb: [00:04:15] Then there’s relevance, which is something we hear a lot about, particularly when that applies to adult learners. You need the experience, the learning to be relevant to that learner. Personalization is a part of this—the more specific and more personalized, the more likely the learning experience is to be relevant and, of course, the more likely it is to be applied. Also, if an experience is personalized, tailored, then there’s no excess, which saves time and mental energy (reducing cognitive load). Going back to more efficiently and effectively, relevance helps to drive that.
RetentionCelisa Steele: [00:04:54] Another thing that’s wrapped up in efficient and effective learning is retention. This is what is going to allow learners to apply skills and knowledge over time. They have to be able to retain that information in order to be able to apply it and to be able to call on it in that moment of need. So retention is another key part, in our minds, to effectiveness and efficiency.
Continuous ApproachJeff Cobb: [00:05:22] Application, relevance, retention, and then continuous is another element of effectiveness and efficiency for us. We view learning as truly lifelong. It’s a process, not an event. We’ve talked about that many, many times before. I’m sure we will talk about it many, many times again. As we apply over time, we get better, hopefully.
AccessibilityCelisa Steele: [00:05:46] Another aspect of efficiency and effectiveness is accessibility. Here we’re thinking about learning that’s accessible regardless of factors like socio-economic status, geographic location, physical ability, schedule realities. You can probably think of some others to fill in here. But the idea is that, for learning to be effective and efficient, it really has to be accessible.
Ethical ApproachJeff Cobb: [00:06:14] The list we’re providing right now, we’re not saying this is exhaustive, but the last element of that effective and efficient learning that we’ll mention is that it’s ethical. Learners understand the implications of knowledge and skills and then use them responsibly for the betterment of society. Those creating learning do it in ways that consider things like environmental impact, airfare, and the power that computer servers can take up. They consider things like human resources—the employees at convention centers or hotels in your room block. You take into account the whole context in which learning is happening and helping the learning both to be an ethical experience and to hopefully promote ethical experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:08] And to be applied ethically.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:09] And to be applied ethically.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:09] There are many facets to the ethics aspect of this. Those are six things that we had in mind when thinking about learning being more effective and more efficient—i.e., learning being better. We’re talking about application, relevance, retention, the idea that it is a continuous process, the idea that accessibility is there, and that ethics are taken into consideration, on the side of the learner consuming the product, also the learning business creating and providing that product, and then how it’s applied broadly as well. In our minds, a world that learns better would take those six things into account.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:07:56] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Learning Is Broader Than Formal Experiences, Broader Than Professional DevelopmentJeff Cobb: [00:08:34] That points at how we think about learning, which is more broadly than learning often gets thought about, often gets talked about. We’ve discussed this before, that learning is broader than education. It’s not just about courses, classes, or conferences. Again, it’s a process, not just an event—that’s a big part of the learning being better, but also just having what we consider a better perspective on learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:06] It also points to the fact that what might be needed to support learning may not be one of those narrowly defined forms of education—a course, a conference, a class. But what might be needed is mentoring, job aids, or simply examples of how to do something or examples of policies and procedures. When you have that focus on learning, which goes back to the application that we mentioned earlier, you have to think much more broadly about learning and consider all the options that might help you help learners do what they need to do better.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:48] This goes beyond professional learning too, particularly in our world—the world of learning businesses—we tend to think about professional learning, career-oriented learning. But, even in those professional contexts, you need to bring a much wider lens to bear on learning. Even professional learning happens in a larger context. People in any learning situation need to hold themselves much more fully open to learning than often seems to be the case when you look at what’s going on in our world. That does apply professionally—we all have to be aware of what’s changing in our chosen profession and be prepared to learn and adapt. But it does also apply more broadly to how we learn in life in general.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:40] A key to all of this is this idea that we do have one life, and so, sure, we have what we’re doing professionally, but there’s really a very thin wall, if any wall, between what we’re doing professionally and what we’re doing personally and what we learn in some arena that might not “apply” directly to our professional life. There still may be learning to be taken from that, and that does actually help us in how we perform our jobs and do them better. We try not to get particularly political on the Leading Learning Podcast, but, regardless of your political perspective, it seems pretty clear that we’re living in a time where there are a lot of factions, a lot of division, a lot of groups who feel like their group has the answer.

Why Striving for a World That Learns Better Is ImportantJeff Cobb: [00:11:31] Yes, it definitely seems to be a lot of that out there. But no one has the answers when it comes right down to it. We all have to be continually learning together to figure out collectively what works. This is one of the reasons why learning is so important. It’s why the whole concept of a world that learns better is so important.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:54] Right. Because I think a world that learns better isn’t defined by learning about particular topics or subjects. It’s about critical thinking and broadly being able to go out in search of knowledge, which involves a certain level of open-mindedness and being willing to explore and be swayed and review data and see where you land and all of that. In a world that learns better, all of that is possible, and that hopefully then keeps us all a little bit more open to what we might decide to do and what we might believe is “true” (or not true).

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:33] Yes. We said at the beginning we’re taking a philosophical perspective here. Philosophy is literally the love of knowledge. Some would say it’s the love of truth. It’s the seeking of truth, which is what learning fundamentally should be about. To a large extent, that sort of perspective on learning can probably only be fostered when we’re young, which points to why early childhood education is so important. K-12 is so important. But I believe we both share this view that organizations that serve adult lifelong learners do have both an opportunity and, I’d argue, a responsibility to foster greater openness to learning among the people they serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:21] I do believe that as well. I do agree with that. I think that we both also believe that, ultimately, the responsibility really is primarily the learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:32] True enough, yes.

Learners Have Primary Responsibility for Their LearningCelisa Steele: [00:13:33] We’ve talked about, written about the learners’ responsibility in places before. We don’t want to suggest that a learning business can do this on their own. The responsibility for learning is primarily on the learners’ part. But we can do more as learning businesses, or we can do, certainly, some things, as learning businesses, to reinforce that idea of ownership, that the individuals need to be empowered and act empowered in their own learning. Essentially, that’s a deep sense of engagement on the learners’ part—they’re invested in making sure that learning happens. They’re there to make sure that they get that from any learning experience that they’re going to spend their time in. We need to give them that sense of ownership, that sense of engagement—foster that sense of engagement—and then do what we can to support learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:30] Yes. When you talk about something like a culture of learning, I think a culture of learning is where that is the implicit and the explicit message of learning among the group of people that you’re serving. And you’re right—we can’t force people to learn. We can’t just say, “Be motivated,” and they’re going to be motivated, or “Be engaged,” and they’re going to be engaged. But we can strive as learning businesses, as teachers and facilitators, to try to establish a context that helps to elicit the motivation, that helps to elicit the engagement that hopefully is there in the learners who, as we’ve said, do ultimately have to take responsibility themselves because we can’t force anybody to learn—people have to step up to their learning in the end.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:22] It’s essentially about mindset. We’re trying to prime learners for that sense of ownership, that sense of profound engagement. And that’s where we, as learning businesses, can focus our efforts and hopefully then set those learners up for success.

Learning Business Can Support Learners, Foster Engagement, and Encourage a Learning MindsetJeff Cobb: [00:15:45] We’re in a time right now where a lot of adaptation is required, both on the part of learners and on the [part of the] learning businesses and the subject matter experts and teachers who serve them. We’ve seen the pace of change be incredible over recent decades. The world has always changed, and everybody thinks they’re living in the times that’ve had the most change. But the amount of change that’s related to knowledge, to cognition, to the human mind has been so significant in the past two to three decades and then, in the past few years, with what has begun to become much more apparent with artificial intelligence—particularly generative artificial intelligence. It reminds us of the role of learning generally. If you’re paying attention, you have to start thinking about where does human learning now fit in relationship to machine learning and to artificial forms of intelligence going forward?

Celisa Steele: [00:16:48] This reminds me of the comment I made at the beginning around the fact that sometimes what’s needed to support learning isn’t a course or a class. It might be that job aid, an example, or a mentor. When we look at this human-versus-technology, human-and-technology balance, the same interplay is at work. There’s a certain amount that we as humans do have to learn, that we do need to be able to retain and apply. But one way we can be smart learners, part of one way we can learn better is by leveraging technology appropriately. I’m thinking fairly broadly of technology—certainly generative AI, yes, falls under that technology umbrella. But even the technology of having that process that you can refer to or that job aid, that can also fall under that broad umbrella of technology. So, thinking through, “What is it that I actually need to have in my brain, and what is it that I can perhaps leverage through outside tools? I can still be able to do what I need to do, but I don’t necessarily have to have it memorized in order to be able to use it effectively.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:05] I feel like we’ve talked about this concept of a world that learns better in two main ways. One is around the performance of learning—that efficiency and that effectiveness. How do we become better learners? But then, as we’ve just been discussing, there’s this mindset aspect to it—this openness to learning, this curiosity about learning, this realization that how learning happens, the need for learning. The ways we’re going to learn are changing and are changing rapidly—and having an awareness of that and embracing it. As we’ve already said, all of us feeling a responsibility to be effective learners going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:50] Part of that in this evolving world is knowing what you do need to learn and what you don’t need to learn. There’s a little bit around the subjects and the topics there. One example of that is something like prompt engineering. When ChatGPT first hit the scene, in those few months after that, there was a ton of content being produced around how to write effective prompts. That was a big focus and became this key skill that people suddenly seemed to need: how to write a good prompt for generative AI. And yet generative AI continues to evolve, so the need for prompt engineering is probably on the decline.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:40] I’m thinking of what Ethan Mollick has said—I know in an interview with Ezra Klein, maybe in other places—but this idea that generative AI is most likely going to get smart enough to understand what you want from it. This need to carefully craft a prompt is going to go away. That’s going to have been a very short-lived skill. That’s one small example that points to, in our world, where there’s so much that can be learned, part of what the learner has to do and part of what a learning business can help support a learner in doing is choosing which areas don’t make sense to focus time and attention on.

Your Assignment, Should You AcceptJeff Cobb: [00:20:18] Maybe we should wrap this up with some learning assignments to have listeners take away and do some of their own work around this question.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:29] We encourage you to take time to reflect on that question that was central to this episode: “What does a world that learns better look like for you?” Then, if you have a team or if you have colleagues who are involved in this field as well, discuss it with them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:50] Walk up to somebody in the hallway and ask, “What does a world that learns better look like?” They’ll probably have a quizzical look on their face at first, but I bet you’ll engage them pretty quickly. And then be thinking about—for you, for the work you’re doing—how can you help create that world that learns better?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:08] Yes. Once you have that vision of what a world that learns better looks like, how can you help create that? And what would it look like if you focused your learning business on helping to create that world learn better? What would you do? Maybe what you’re already doing, maybe some aspects of it, maybe some new things. What would you stop doing? If you really took that lens of creating a world that learns better, what would that tell you about the activities that you do in your learning business?

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Practice Makes Profit: The Business and Learning Case for Practice * On Learning Well: A Practical Look at Metalearning for Learning Businesses * AI Adoption: Barriers and Accelerators

The post Building a World That Learns Better appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Geoff SteadWe’ve reached a point in history where it’s essentially a given that learning products will make use of technology to deliver, support, or deepen learning.

Geoff Stead has dedicated his career to building learning tools that sit in what he calls the messy middle between the power of new technologies and real human learning needs. He’s currently chief product officer at MyTutor, and he’s co-author of Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI.

In this episode, number 411, Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele talks with Geoff about the changes he’s seen in how technology supports learning. The discussion encompasses mobile learning, the seismic shift that is generative AI, just-in-time learning, his optimistic view of the future of learning, the potency of low ego and high curiosity in collaborations, how he thinks about innovation, and common barriers to and accelerators of innovation.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesGeoff Stead: [00:00:00] Where do I see learning? It’s meet-ups. It’s podcasts. It’s people asking Google or asking AI the answer to things. It’s all these roots growing out the side of the plant.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:26] We’ve reached a point in history where learning and technology are very often a package deal. It’s essentially a given that learning products and services will make use of tools and technology to deliver, support, or deepen learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:40] Geoff Stead has dedicated his career to building learning tools that sit in what he calls the messy middle between the power of new technologies and real human learning needs. He’s currently chief product officer at a learntech business in the UK called MyTutor, and he’s co-author of Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:03] In this episode, number 411, Celisa and Geoff talk about the changes he’s seen over the course of his long career in how technology supports learning. The discussion encompasses mobile learning, the seismic shift that is generative AI, just-in-time learning, his optimistic view of the future of learning, the potency of low ego and high curiosity in collaborations, how he thinks about innovation, and common barriers to and accelerators of innovation. Geoff is both thoughtful and experienced, as you’ll hear in his conversation with Celisa, which took place in late April 2024.

A Long Career As a TechnologistCelisa Steele: [00:01:53] Could you say a little bit more for listeners about the types of work that you tend to do?

Geoff Stead: [00:01:58] I invent and build learning products. It’s probably the simplest, cleanest way to say that. But, actually, my role as a CPO is more senior. In reality, what I tend to do is build the teams and set up the culture and inspire them and set the direction, and it’s actually the people who are way more up to date with tools and tech in my team who do the building and the making. I’ve dived into language learning. I was leading a language app called Babbel in Berlin for a while. I’ve done a lot of inside-company, L&D-type tech-build training. I’ve worked in language assessment. Online tutoring at the moment. I’ve mostly moved between larger start-ups (sometimes called scale-ups) and big organizations and moved between those trying to understand different aspects of learning and tech in human behavior, trying to find smarter ways to use emerging tech to deliver better learning impact.

Geoff Stead: [00:02:52] Along the way, hopping between those two different types of organizations, I’ve built a bit of a specialism in helping businesses recapture their innovation spirit or help them pivot in times of difficulty. Start-ups tend to go through this difficulty as they scale up, and it doesn’t scale anymore. Or large organizations who’ve got successful at one thing struggle with waves of change and how you adapt to that. And, along this journey, always with the lens of learning and technology, I’ve quite often ended up running innovation labs, coaching leaders on how to bring in innovation into a team or reset the culture a bit. So I’ve accidentally built a specialism in that innovation area, but probably learning tech is where my heart is.

Changes and Trends in the Use of Technology to Support LearningCelisa Steele: [00:03:35] I definitely want to talk more about innovation, so I’m going to bookmark that to come back to. You do bring deep experience as a technologist, and so I’m curious to know, in your time using and studying and developing technology, what key changes have you seen and what trends are you seeing in how technology is supporting or might support learning?

Geoff Stead: [00:04:01] Lovely question. The thing with the tech is, quite often, there’s a hype about the new, like what’s coming next—AI or whether it’s VR or goggles or whatever’s coming. Sometimes the things that…the real lessons I learned have been true through my whole career. It’s not always the tech that’s the real lesson. I was, in hindsight, quite lucky where I started. I started very early in the learning technology era, pre-Web, very beginnings of Web, and I focused with adult learners who had low skill, learners in the UK. Literacy, numeracy, help finding a job, people who the mainstream had let down. They weren’t at university. They weren’t at college. They were sometimes not employed. They might have dropped out of school.

Geoff Stead: [00:04:50] This, in hindsight, was the perfect place for me because I got inspired about using tech for impact, using the learning moments to make a change. I was left obsessing about not what you delivered but what happened to the users who used the thing that you made. So it’s not about the content; it’s about the new skills that you’re helping them develop or what they do next with that skill. Did they get a job? Did their confidence improve? Were they able to read at an appropriate level? And so the idea that technology is used in conversation with learning, that they’re both equal partners, and they jostle for a space rather than it just being a broadcast mechanism.

Geoff Stead: [00:05:32] I think that’s probably true still of how I think about tech today—the latest wave, obviously generative AI—but I’m still thinking of how it’s a conversation and how you build a bridge between your needs as a human and the power of the tech. Obviously, these are not my original ideas. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants like Seymour Papert or Paolo Ferrari—all these great thinkers who were doing this even before I started. But these ideas probably stay quite true.

Geoff Stead: [00:05:59] And then, if you fast forward, I’ve been on several amazing tech wild rides. The Web, we take it for granted now. It was phenomenal when it first came out—that you could publish something, and everybody in the world could read it, and there was an openness of platforms. You could use open-source content. The content was open sourcing, like Wikipedia, and availability of information was quite an amazing moment. And media streaming—how cheap it is for us right now to create a podcast, to record it, to distribute it, to be heard around the world. The standardization that allows that. It was inconceivable 20 years ago, and it’s all part of the wave around us. All of these things that have been…they’re huge, in hindsight, even though you maybe didn’t appreciate it as they were coming along.

Geoff Stead: [00:06:46] Mobile was big for me. I was a very early adopter in apps for learning—pre-smartphone, pre-iPhone—where there were handheld devices that used Wi-Fi only, and we were building very, very early apps for that. Again, that was learning outside the mainstream, adult learning. Our first app was driving theory tests, but we did quite a few apps that were around performance support for companies. I rolled out multiple apps in the UK and across Europe around performance support type of things in the very, very early stage. That got me to the U.S.

Geoff Stead: [00:07:21] Myself and some of my team were headhunted by a big Californian tech firm called Qualcomm and brought over to do the same thing internally, inside their organization, to try and think about cutting edge of mobile and learning or performance improvement apps and what those might look like. And so we ended up building an entire employee app store filled with apps that we’d made, that other people that we could convince to make them in the company made. If we could bully suppliers to create mobile versions of the Web sites that we were licensing from them, that would go into the app store. It was great fun because it was a total break with the idea that L&D is about courses, structures, and predefined things. It was the opposite.

Geoff Stead: [00:08:03] It was saying just-in-time information can be a wide range of use cases, but you need it on your phone immediately. Even if there are security concerns, we’ll find ways of bridging those. We’ll find ways of understanding the security concerns and putting in place ways that were allowed. So we had 40 apps or so available for any employees in the company, and they were a wide range. Some were quite serious, like literally look up information about current projects across the organization that were quite difficult to find on the internal Web sites because they were very siloed, but we’d gotten the data approved.

Geoff Stead: [00:08:39] Some were kind of nice karma. Qualcomm was making quite early augmented reality features on their chips, which weren’t really in mainstream phones yet, and we were building playful augmented reality apps, just that employees felt cool about themselves. We made cheesy photo booths that you could get a picture of yourself taken together with one of the founders or one of the C-levels in the company. Even though you were in Asia somewhere and the Qualcomm officers and founders were based in California, you could have a picture standing next to them. Silly things like this. Celebratory things. We, together with a bunch of artists, made an augmented reality artwork that was a Guinness World Record, the largest one, right the way down the side of an enormous building, done in secret over the weekend. We had it pre-made and secretly went on Sunday and revealed it. When people arrived at work on Monday, there was this enormous artwork that you could walk down with your phone, and bits would pop out. It was telling bits of the history of the company and how they’d got there and pieces of the company history. Sorry, I’m getting a bit excited.

Geoff Stead: [00:09:40] The main thing is we were thinking about learning as an ecosystem of sources of information, which was great fun. That was my mobile era, I guess. And then, after that, I got quite intrigued by the consumerization of learning. The fact that we were creating stuff that was useless unless somebody wanted to install it on their phone. It was optional. They didn’t have to. And, if they did install it, it was partly useless unless they came back more often. And so we got quite interested in how people like Duolingo—some of the consumer businesses—work at helping you come back and return and stick with learning and what those levers feel like. We did quite a bit of work on that at Qualcomm. But then I ended up joining a big language app business called Babbel in Berlin, Germany. They are exactly like that, similar to Duolingo. They have an app, which, if you want to learn a language, you pay a monthly amount. It’s mass-consumerizing learning.

Geoff Stead: [00:10:37] You want to do it; that’s why you start. But people drop off quite fast, and we really wanted to understand how you use the levers of mobile engagement, nudging, to help people come back and study a bit longer or stick with it for longer so that they do learn the language. It’s not just a dream that died out; they stick with it till it really works. Yes, those sorts of behavioral nudges, gamification levers. What was very cool there was we had a massive user base, millions of people logging in, learning different languages, and so we also got very good at understanding the data that underpins what’s going on and trying to get a sense of learning patterns, what works. At that stage there I was very excited about the whole user behavioral economics. What helps you stick with learning? What are those levers? I’m still surprised that this isn’t more mainstream in learning, in people working on training and learning tools because they’re really powerful levers—the different nudging behaviors, setting healthy habits, levers. You really can help people achieve their learning aim more easily if you give them these little nudges.

Geoff Stead: [00:11:39] While I was there, we also got very big on thinking about learning as an ecosystem. So I joined Babbel; they had a single app and were selling a single app. By the time I left, we had podcasts, games; you had live lessons, and we were selling to enterprise as well as direct-to-consumer. And we managed to change the way we thought about what we did as a business so that it was about lots of channels and helping people achieve their aim via lots of channels rather than it being about selling an app. I think that was a really nice holistic framing.

Geoff Stead: [00:12:12] And then one more chapter. I’m telling you all my life history here. And now MyTutor, which is an online tutoring platform. Until this point, I’ve mostly been creating the digital parts of the learning. It’s a standalone digital learning experience, mostly one person, but we know that tutors really help, or having a mentor can really help. Having a human in the loop really helps. What I’m doing at the moment is trying to understand that intersection between human and tech and a live-taught class with tech around the side and what that might look like, which leads me to the gen AI (generative AI) wave of hype that’s current at the moment.

Geoff Stead: [00:12:54] Without a doubt, I think that’s the most seismic thing I’ve seen in quite a long time. I think we don’t quite understand what it’s going to do yet, but, all the touch points I’m seeing, it’s doing massive things. It’s got the potential to do massive things. It’s a significant performance enhancer in the workplace. There are some great studies, if you’re unaware of it. Ethan Mollick has one around the jagged frontier, where he gave a whole lot of BCG consultants AI to support their work and other ones not AI and tried to understand the differences. Very strong correlation with the ones who are using AI doing better work and faster, like 25 percent faster, 40 percent better quality. But also interesting, a leveler—the people who were the lower performers got a more of a boost—they were 43 percent of a boost, whereas the more senior ones got a smaller boost, 17 percent of a boost. It’s interesting. It’s a fascinating tool in helping people perform better at work and trying to think that through. So that was a rather meandering wander, but I just thought it would be quite a nice way to look at some of the changes in tech and tie that up with stuff that I learned as I went through.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:09] Thank you very much. It’s very interesting to hear about those different chapters in your own experience—which technologies were top of mind in each of those chapters and how they fit together. I hear in all that you were sharing a real focus on what I might put under the umbrella of impact. Are you actually helping the learners to do something? Are you providing those nudges that are going to get them to come back and continue to engage? And technology is a potential partner in doing that and supporting that. So that real focus on the impact rather than the technology in and of itself or the “course” in and of itself and really thinking more broadly about how do you support humans in learning and in applying what they’re learning?

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:15:00] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

An Optimistic and Enthusiastic View of the Future of LearningCelisa Steele: [00:15:37] When you think about the future of learning, what’s your view? What’s your perspective on the future of learning?

Geoff Stead: [00:15:41] You might guess it from my general enthusiastic nature, but I’m a real optimist about learning, the power of learning, our needs as humans to keep learning and to keep discovering. What’s the future of learning? It will find a way. We have to adapt—you find a way of adapting. You have to learn new things—you find a way of learning new things. The question is, is it with or without official endorsement? Is it in traditional channels? Or is it not in those traditional channels at all? I think that’s the more interesting area.

Geoff Stead: [00:16:12] If you think about the world we’re in at the moment, what’s happening in people’s regular lives, environment, in your organizations, companies struggling revenue-wise or trying to adapt at the moment, there are so many challenges around us, and lots of them have learning as a possible solution. Help your team improve better. Help your business pivot and go in a different direction. Help me succeed as a professional by dealing with some gaps in my skills. So learning is a fairly key demand. And, at the same time, there’s amazing tooling available right now—globally, the tech, AI stuff. I can access a human trainer, a mentor. They can be sitting in India; if they’re an expert in my area, and I can connect; they can coach me.

Geoff Stead: [00:17:01] There’s incredible tooling around, which brings a level of global accessibility to learning too. Actually, it’s a positive story. There’s demand. There are lots of ways of creating reach. What are the things? What are the kinds of things that I think are coming or are the most powerful? Mentoring, generally—AI-human hybrid, some sort of use of ways of connecting me to somebody who cares about me and wants my skills to get better. Simulations. Again, gen AI does this well, but there’s other tooling that does it quite well as well—360 video, or there are tools that help you simulate work or experiences, practice some skills, and build some stronger skills in a context. I think really powerful, broadly, performance support, being able to, on my phone at a moment, talk, write, take a picture, get some feedback on that thing, that task I’m trying to do right now. Again, you mentioned it before, you called it out, but a focus on the outcomes or the impact that you’re trying at that moment.

Geoff Stead: [00:18:05] A lot of the innovation happens around the edges, so, when you asked that, I was reflecting on my own career. And where do I see learning? It’s meet-ups. It’s podcasts. It’s people asking Google or asking AI the answer to things. It’s all these roots growing out the side of the plant. It’s innovation around the edges. I think that’s often where you see the new tools or the new approaches. You see them approaching from the side.

Geoff Stead: [00:18:34] I have to talk a bit more about generative AI if you’re thinking about the future because it really is something quite unique and quite special. And I think one of the opportunities is, weirdly…the smartest people who are building it, the real language experts or AI experts, they don’t know why it’s doing exactly what it’s doing, and they’re not experts at how you apply it. They’re experts at the language model, but not at how it’s used. And so there’s this gap between the inventors and possible users. It’s evolving very fast, and that space in the middle is potentially a super exciting place for anybody in the learning/training area to have a look because there’s a gap there. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and people aren’t quite sure how to use it. And nervousness.

Geoff Stead: [00:19:24] So few people are stepping into the gap that even just spending a couple of days immersing yourself in it will probably make you an expert in your area. It feels to me that gap in the middle is an amazing space to try and get involved and understand the power that’s coming and your particular use case or subject specialist area and try to understand what that looks like. Conversely, if you don’t do that, any of your competitors anywhere in the world can because most of these tools are globally available. So it’s there at the moment, and there’s not enough people stepping in, but I don’t think that it will stay as an open space forever. I’m intrigued by the fact that it’s unusual in being a super powerful technology that people don’t really know why and how it does the things it does and how best to apply it. There are a lot of bad examples of people trying to apply it; it didn’t quite work. And there are some really powerful examples, but it’s a very emerging area. So that gap in the middle feels like an exciting place to try and learn a bit more and understand.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:22] Yes, I really appreciate that you call out that gap. I personally hadn’t really thought of generative AI as…. It makes sense, though, when I reflect. It’s this very powerful tool, but we’re not exactly sure what it’s a tool for or how to best use that tool. And so digging into that, yes, does seem like an area of a lot of opportunity and excitement, potentially.

Learning Through Collaboration and WritingCelisa Steele: [00:20:45] You are a co-author along with Sae Schatz and Julian Stodd, and we’ve been lucky enough to have both of them on the podcast in the past. But the three of you co-wrote Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI, and the most recent episode where we had Julian on, we focused on that book and some of the key concepts. To go in a little bit of a different direction with you, I would be curious to know what was it like to write a book with two other people? What did you learn from that experience in that collaboration process?

Geoff Stead: [00:21:21] Reflecting back, I loved it. It was a really interesting experience, helping me frame my own thinking. I’m not a writer. It’s the first book I’ve written. I begrudgingly have written a couple of papers under great duress at various stages in my life, but I mostly try to avoid it. I’m more comfortable speaking, drawing, and enthusing. Writing was a new experience for me, and co-writing with some other people was a new experience for me, and I really loved it. I think we all had fairly low egos and high curiosity, and we all had different strengths and specialisms, and that worked well because we were accountability partners to each other.

Geoff Stead: [00:22:04] We would have a fixed phone call every week, the same time for an hour and a half, and we would talk about what we’d done—the writing that we’d done in the previous week. Sometimes we hadn’t, but we had the call anyway, and we would critique each other’s work and plan for the next week. I think that level of accountability helped me because we were all doing it alongside a day job, and our energy balanced each other out because sometimes I would be burning with a particular message I wanted, and I could go and turn ahead and write a few chapters. Julian was distracted, and then, two weeks later, Julian would go through mine and change it, and, by the end, it was quite hard to distinguish who wrote what, and some of the ideas are quite woven together.

Geoff Stead: [00:22:42] Yes, I guess that the low-ego, high-curiosity, mutual-respect thing worked well. I have a very solid underpinning on the tech side and the practical realities of building tools, gen AI, and practically what you might do. And Sae had a very fiercely academic perspective. She’s really a learning scientist with a strong background in evidence research and being able to prove things. And Julian is a very free-ranging thinker about organizational culture and some of the more philosophical aspects of change. We had different specialisms, but we had this sweet spot in the middle trying to figure out how we were thinking about generative AI, how we thought it might impact organizations, how it impacts learning.

Geoff Stead: [00:23:28] And then, as time passed, we developed a shared voice. Starting off, you could initially see who’d written which bit, but then we built a shared voice and also a confidence. One of us would write something a bit wacky or put a bit of a poem in the middle of the text because it felt like it needed a mix. And then, because nobody else took it out, we’d get confidence, and then the next person would do something else a little bit unconventional. That makes me quite proud when I look back at it. It was interesting—this art, some poems, and fairly wide-ranging thoughts. I think we only got there because we encouraged each other and were impressed by each other’s quirks.

Geoff Stead: [00:24:06] I read one review, which said something like it felt like they were sitting around a fire with a cold beer talking about AI with a bunch of interesting people who knew different bits about it, and that was what they wanted to help frame their thinking. I really liked that idea that this is a book version of sitting around a fire with some mates, having a cold beer and chatting about the world and trying to make sense of it. That was our journey. I’d, of course, love it if your audience gave us any feedback. We’re still slightly tentative and new in this book-writing business, and so I have anxiously watched to see who’s posted reviews where. So, if people are interested, we’re making a free one available to download, and we’d love to have feedback. Just tell us if you found it helpful.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:50] Hearing what you highlighted—the low ego and the high curiosity and how that made for a successful collaboration—it struck me that the same formula—low ego, high curiosity—makes for a really good learning engagement. If you approach any subject with those two things, it seems like you’re going to be better off than if you came in with high ego or low curiosity.

Defining InnovationCelisa Steele: [00:25:20] Innovation is also a big area of focus and interest for you, particularly how to build an innovation culture, perhaps within a larger, less innovative structure or business. As we begin to talk about innovation, it might be interesting here at the beginning to ask you how do you define or describe innovation?

Geoff Stead: [00:25:43] I probably think about it in terms of stepping outside the perceived constraints of the moment. So maybe finding a new or unexpected way of solving a business challenge or a learning challenge. Or maybe stepping out of the more comfortable, incremental methods of improvement that a business has got and trying to find new ideas, new approaches, or ways of taking bolder steps forward. Sometimes it’s about a new product, or sometimes it’s about a particular business challenge. I mentor companies sometimes in this area. Quite often they have a fairly clear business need, like, “We’re struggling with product-market fit of this thing we’ve built,” or “We work too slow,” or “We want to build this new product.” So there’s a fairly clear problem statement, but with totally unreasonable constraints they expect you will also be able to solve. And everybody’s got ten other things they think you’ll solve at the same time—how quickly, costs, using these people, using this process.

Geoff Stead: [00:26:46] They’ve got themselves stuck in a place where they know what they want solving, but they’ve added all these constraints that make it impossible. When I think about innovation, it’s often about trying to help people step away from the constraints that are holding them back to enable them to take a slightly bolder step forward. I end up stripping back a lot of those constraints to try and find a smaller subset of real success criteria. “If we could fix this, is this innovation?” So it tends to evolve a little bit in conversation. But, yes, I think it’s about stepping outside the comfortable path for moving slowly forward so that you can move faster forward.

The Relationship Between Innovation and CultureCelisa Steele: [00:27:23] What’s your take on the relationship between innovation and culture at an organization or within a group? Is there a certain cultural requirement for innovation to work?

Geoff Stead: [00:27:36] Quick answer—definitely. A slightly longer answer—I don’t really like the narrative that you get the creative, crazy people who do the innovation, and then you get everybody else who does the day job. I think that is a narrative that evolves. You get some amazing design agencies or agencies who will come embed for a while, spend some time with you, and create some innovation thing, and then leave. And it withers and dies. I don’t like that narrative, particularly that you get the innovators and non-innovators. But there is some truth to how an organization needs to think about innovation because, normally, there are loads of cultural barriers that stop innovation happening.

Geoff Stead: [00:28:18] The main barrier is lots of tiny little things. It’s how you manage procurement. It’s how the budget cycle works. It’s which IT team you’re allowed to use. It’s the legal thing about which new platform you can test out. It’s the other guidance about whether you’re in the office or not in the office. It’s a bunch of tiny things. When you add all those up, you end up sucking the air out of the innovation energy. And it’s not a bad thing because, when a business is specializing, you’ve invented this thing. You’re making it. That’s your business. You want to specialize. And the act of specializing is taking away some of the rogue elements and getting more and more optimized.

Geoff Stead: [00:28:57] But it’s exactly that skill set that gets you more optimized, that gets you there that will stop you doing the innovation. They really are two different things culturally. Can you have a culture that’s both of those? With huge difficulty. As an organization, can you grow both of those cultures in different bits? You can. You need to be careful not to upset everybody and make people feel jealous, but it is possible to do that. So I think, culturally, you have to recognize that there are these two zones—the skill set that got you where you are today, and, if you really want to bring innovative energy in, it’s the skill set that will take you to that next step. They’re quite different, and probably very few of the leaders of this group can do that, and very few of the systems and processes that you’ve built around this can do that. You have to find a way of separating those two.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:47] That’s very interesting because I think now I’m better understanding this idea that you tend to focus on innovation within a larger organizational context because of what I heard in your response there, that the overall organization may be very focused on that specialized skill set that got them where they are. And then for others to be able to forget that and think about other possibilities outside those boundaries, it does almost potentially need to be another group. That’s very interesting. I hadn’t quite thought of it. Is that a fair assessment of what you’re saying?

Geoff Stead: [00:30:25] I think that’s very fair. There’re also lots of examples of organizations trying that and failing. Sometimes people set up a vanity lab, where it says, “It’s a group of crazy people inventing nice things that the CEO likes to show people to, but there’s actually no path to take what’s invented there and move it over into the main business.” There are lots of examples even where things look fun and new stuff is coming out of them, but it doesn’t really help the business innovate. I think there are some guidelines you can put in place to increase the odds, but some of the innovative ideas will transition into the main business. But you do need to quite fiercely guard and protect that team, allow them to innovate, and, at the same time, try and find paths that help those innovations benefit the bigger business. There are several different ways to approach that, but, yes, it is a challenge.

How to Make Innovation Efforts SuccessfulCelisa Steele: [00:31:11] I have multiple follow-on questions. One is that you began to talk about some barriers; perhaps there are others that you want to highlight. If you do, please do. But then you just talked about there are some ways to hopefully set it up for success so that whichever group is thinking about innovation gets to make some progress. I would love to hear if you have some suggestions or ideas for listeners to consider around how to make innovation efforts within their organization successful.

Geoff Stead: [00:31:42] Gladly. The one thing is you do need to protect the runway or the space for the team to be able to fail, experiment, and try again and have the confidence to keep going. As part of that, you do need to somehow negotiate enough budget or time, elapsed time, runway, or find a way of helping the wider org celebrate some of the lessons learned as you go. What you don’t want is that, six months in, suddenly the rules change, and people start coming in and requiring different things. There’s a lovely term called being a “chaos pilot,” which was a Google term when they were talking about innovation.

Geoff Stead: [00:32:22] They thought, if you really want this to work, if you’re leading this team, you need to be a bit of a chaos pilot. You need to embrace chaos inside your innovation team but also be able to translate it into a language that works better in the wider business to maintain that support or the momentum. And part of that, I find, is about being a bit scary. So you do need to remind the business why this is critical, why you do need this innovation to work, why it’s a long-term view but also being a bit reassuring, that you help paint a picture of the future and tell a story about the lessons that are being learned so that you’re bringing the wider business along with you. You’re not just going into this little lab and having fun, and everybody else looks over the wall. Your job, as a leader there, is partly to be this chaos pilot and talk to the wider org. You do need to create some kind of runway, budget, time. There are several models for that.

Geoff Stead: [00:33:12] There’s the three horizons model or 80-20 or some framing where you think in terms of budget, effort, or time. How much of what we’re doing today is stuff that has to be useful this year? How much stuff has to be useful in five years? How much is just a crazy bet, but it might really pay off in ten years? Having some kind of framing that you use to communicate the work you’re doing is really helpful because, if you’re talking to a conservative, cautious finance person, they might be saying, “How much do you want to spend on this weird thing? No, we can’t give you more than 1 percent of the budget.” But, if you talk to them about, “What percent of the budget do you want to place for bets for the next five years? What percent do you want to place for the bets for the next ten years?,” all of a sudden the conversation changes a bit. Yes, maybe 1 percent for the crazy bet is actually quite well spent. But, for the nearer one, probably 5 percent of what we’re earning is worth investing in. And so having some kind of horizons framing for the types of experiments you’re doing and what the odds of success might be is really helpful.

Geoff Stead: [00:34:15] And then really protect the culture. Culture is ridiculously important in these teams. You partly do that by bringing in some new people so that you’re not overly constrained by the ideas of the existing org. You partly do that by celebrating culture. Again, Google had these X labs. I’m not sure how much it’s doing at the moment, but, if you search online for their Gimbal onboarding guide, Google X Gimbal, they put together this really lovely book, which was a digital 20-page thing that you would get as a new employee, and it would talk to you about “This is what the culture of this team is. This is what matters.” It stands well to the test of time. It’s probably five, six years old. But, if you read through it, it’s a really nice call to action about what matters in culture, what matters in innovation. That’s a nice thing to have a look at.

Innovation in Smaller OrganizationsCelisa Steele: [00:35:03] Selfishly, one of the other questions that I had, hearing you talk about innovation, is I’m part of a very small organization, and so when you talk about, oh, it needs to be a separate group, and it’s very hard for the same people who got you where you are and are helping you focus on that to also do innovation, when you think about smaller organizations, any different tips or ideas for how innovation works within those contexts?

Geoff Stead: [00:35:29] When I think about it for myself, I try and play sometimes or create opportunities to try out new things without a particularly clear end goal. I do keynotes every now and again, and I might try an entirely different tool set, tools to presenting for no real reason except that I’ve been using the previous tools for two years. It adds a whole lot of extra stress because I panic, and I’m trying to use these tools that I can’t master. But I do that partly because I find that’s where I find my innovation—by trying a constant flow of slightly new things. I find that really useful. I’m not sure if it’s called play or panic—one or the other. But I’m trying to create opportunities to use different tools or to be curious about different approaches. I’m not sure if that directly answers the question, but that’s how I approach it for myself.

The Connection Between Technology and InnovationCelisa Steele: [00:36:34] Given your technology background, given your interest, expertise in innovation, what do you see as the connection between the two, between technology—especially learning technology or could be technology (broader)—and innovation?

Geoff Stead: [00:36:49] I see two different worlds when I think about that, and, when I’m reflecting on your podcast audience, I imagine they probably sit across both of these worlds. In the one world, it’s a fairly techno-competent world, where it’s learning science, experimentation, and freedom to try different tools. And here there’s a strong connection between learning technology and innovation because it’s what different startups are building and types of learning that people are experimenting with. It’s the simulation tools, performance support, just-in-time information, using gen AI to create things. It’s an amazing, fertile moment at the moment. And so here the innovation approach is just have an experimental mindset, what we were just describing. Try some of these tools. You’re doing a podcast—try using one of the AI ones that lets you automatically get a transcript and edit the transcript. It reassembles the video based on the transcript. There’s cool stuff going on at the moment.

Geoff Stead: [00:37:48] But the negative thing in this world is there’s also a lot of hype, and there’s a lot of snake oil salesmen telling you that this AI feature is the best thing, and it’s going to transform…. And so you do need to follow the science, and you do need to be experimental and curious and look for evidence as you go. But, in this learning science-y world, there’s a strong connection between innovation and the learning tech side. The other world is a more platform-constrained view. Here I was putting myself in the shoes of somebody who’s creating learning resources for a big organization and their L&D department, and they have got a very established platform and a very established protocol for the methodologies that you upload it in. There I think it’s much harder because the platform itself might be clever, but there are so many constraints on the kind of format of what you can provide, that the innovation part is most of it’s been pulled away from you, and it may be embedded in the platform, or it’s lost in the noise somewhere.

Geoff Stead: [00:38:53] There it’s much harder to find the innovation piece. It’s still there, and sometimes the way to get to it is to go even lower tech. What you want to do is step outside the constraints. Sometimes simpler tech is actually better. We’re doing a podcast now. Podcasts are amazing. It’s just an audio file. It’s about as simple a tech as you can get, but you can distribute it around tons of channels. People use it in quite creative, different ways. The format changes. Whereas, if you were building a SCORM-structured course around the same topic, you’d be forced into a much more restricted way of working. Those are my two worldviews. There’s the learning science one, where I think it’s very fertile and innovative, and there’s the platform-constrained one, which I think a lot of learning professionals do still live in, and there what I’d encourage people to do is to even go simpler with the tech to try and put the innovation and creativity into how you use the format rather than the tooling itself.

Celisa Steele: [00:39:46] Well, thank you for that. I like that idea—simpler tech sometimes can, in some ways, be more innovative in removing some of the constraints of your current thinking. So thank you.

Personal Approach to LearningCelisa Steele: [00:39:58] One of the things we always like to ask folks who come on the Leading Learning Podcast is about their own lifelong learning. I would be curious to hear from you, Geoff, around your habits, practices, or sources that you use to continue to grow yourself.

Geoff Stead: [00:40:14] I mentioned play and panic earlier, and I think maybe that’s part of it. I love, if things are getting too stressful at work, we try and arrange a hack day so people spend a day trying to solve slightly more open-ended challenges and trying to see how to get our heads around that. I found that really helpful in the early days of generative AI, to just bring a whole bunch of our teams together who weren’t experts but require them to use it in some or other way over the next two days and build something. So hack days. In fact, the book I wrote was a bit like this. I committed to writing it because I felt this was really important, and I had a bit of something to say, but I didn’t yet feel an expert. In the process of writing it and debating it with Julian and Sae, I built my confidence and my expertise.

Geoff Stead: [00:41:00] I agree to do keynotes every now and again for much the same reason. It forces me to panic or to be a bit playful and think about clarifying what I believe about things. I’m also fairly curious, and I’m a big believer in multidisciplinarianism, or having a lot of different disciplines together, and that’s part of how I work. We have embraced design thinking and tech and product marketing and different skill sets, and we haggle away together to understand how to solve problems. I only work four days a week for MyTutor partly because on that fifth day I mentor different people in different kinds of business because it’s stimulating. So I try and keep open to different disciplines and listen to them, and I find that I learn from that quite often. I bring the learning sideways into my area.

Geoff Stead: [00:41:47] And then one other. This is a little bit philosophical. I’m from South Africa. It’s where I grew up. I did a TED Talk quite some time ago. Part of that was talking about this thing called Ubuntu. It’s a philosophical approach to life that’s the opposite of hierarchy. The idea is I help everybody else around me because the act of helping them helps me or that my life is better by lifting everybody else up a little bit. It’s a social good kind of mentality. I think that’s woven into how I lead and how I work with colleagues, where you go out of your way to help everybody else perform really well, and, by them performing well, the whole thing works quite well. It’s a nice philosophy. I think partly that’s why I do learning as a business because learning is about empowering people and helping them all to do better, and it feeds into how I run teams. It’s often how I learn things because I learn them from the people around me who feel more open to share what they’re learning, and then I learn socially from that. So Ubuntu. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s worth looking up the word. It is quite nice and reaffirming. But I think that’s a thread that followed me through my life and helped me think about how I learn from others.

Jeff Cobb: [00:43:14] Geoff Stead is co-author of Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI, and he would love for you to tell him what you think about the book, which is available for free as a digital download or for purchase in hard copy.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* A Curious Conversation About AI with Julian Stodd * Modern Learning with Sae Schatz * External Innovation and Learning Businesses * Studying Innovation with Mary Byers

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Learning businesses rely on the revenue that comes from introducing new offerings and growing the adoption of existing offerings. That means they have to know how to determine the best pricing for attracting and converting prospective customers while maintaining—or, better yet, maximizing—revenue levels. In a post-pandemic world, doing that has become harder.

Competition for dollars and attention was an issue before the pandemic. Then, with the massive and quick move to online education during COVID, learner expectations around price and value shifted dramatically. Do traditional one-off registration fees still work? What drives willingness to spend on education now? How can we gauge what learners might pay for a product?

These are the types of questions we address in the Webinar recording you’ll find on this page. In it, we draw on our years of research and consulting experience along with examples to illustrate methods for assessing price sensitivity and willingness to pay. You’ll learn to how to bolster the case for your current pricing, raise prices strategically, and evaluate non-product-specific pricing approaches like subscriptions or folding education into membership fees.

Below the recording you’ll find a links to the Webinar slides as well as to a range of resources mentioned during and/or related the session.

Download the Webinar slides

Resource LinksThe following resource links were shared or mentioned shared during the Webinar—or we’ve added them here because you might find them useful.

The 2025 Learning Business Summit
Please save the dates: January 28-30, 2025. And sign up to be notified as more details available and when registration opens (which means you’ll get the best possible rate).
“How to Maximize Learner Engagement in Continuing Education and Professional Development”
Save your spot for our next free Webinar on May 16, focused on engagement.
“Tool Talk: The Product Value Profile” We mentioned the Product Value Profile in the Webinar and how to use it to help with pricing. This Leading Learning Podcast episode gives you a fuller introduction to the tool.
“Tool Talk: The Value Ramp”
This podcast episode explains the Value Ramp, mentioned in the Webinar, in more detail.
“3 Principles of Pricing”
This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast offers a more in-depth discussion of raising and lowering prices than we were able to cover during the Webinar.
Leading Learning Podcast
The Leading Learning Podcast offers audio intelligence for learning leaders and those working in learning businesses. We highlighted some specific episodes above, but all the episodes focus on important and practical, actionable topics. Please subscribe!

The post Pricing in a Post-Pandemic World: Maximizing Revenue appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbCapacity deals with the people and the technology a learning business has in place, and capacity has a quantitative and a qualitative aspect. How well can the people and the technology do the work, and how much can the people and the technology do?

Artificial intelligence has the potential to change both the quality and the quantity of work that a learning business does, and so, in this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 410, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele focus on barriers to the adoption of AI and the potential accelerators.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] Artificial intelligence has the potential to increase both the quality and the quantity of work that a learning business does, and there are a variety of factors that might speed up or slow down a learning business’s adoption of AI.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:19] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:20] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:28] Capacity is one of the five domains in our Learning Business Maturity Model. Capacity deals with the people and the technology a learning business has in place—the capabilities and the competence staff, contractors, and consultants bring to the table, along with the abilities of relevant software, systems, and processes.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:48] There’s a quantitative and a qualitative aspect to capacity. How well can the people and the technology do the work? That’s the qualitative side. How much can the people and the technology do? That’s the quantitative side of capacity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:04] Artificial intelligence, in our view, has the potential to change both the quality and the quantity of work that a learning business does, and so we want to focus on barriers to the adoption of AI and the potential accelerators of AI adoption in this episode, number 410.

Growing Expectation that Individuals Use AI to Do Their WorkCelisa Steele: [00:01:24] There’s going to be a growing expectation that individuals, whether those are employees or contractors that are serving a learning business, make use of artificial intelligence in the work that they do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:37] Yes, I think that’s one of the things that does seem to be clear about how things are evolving around AI. There’s enough AI woven into enough places right now that seeing it mainly as a productivity tool bubbling up within learning businesses—using Microsoft Copilot or Zoom’s AI Companion—that’s naturally going to start happening, already is happening, regardless of whether organizations are really focused on AI and being strategic about it and how it fits into the future of their learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:12] You mentioned productivity, and productivity emphasizes the quantity side. It’s this idea that you can have the same people on the team, but they can get more done by making use of some of these AI tools. Again, it’s more on the quantity side than necessarily on the quality side. The quality is a little bit of a deeper process and is probably likely to take longer for learning businesses to figure out what it looks like to deeply incorporate artificial intelligence into organizational-wide operations, to make use of it to create and deliver learning products. All of that seems a little bit more fraught in terms of how it plays out and how it ties into strategic goals.

Moving Toward More Strategic Uses of AIJeff Cobb: [00:02:58] Yes, it’s not going to happen as organically and by default the way that having Copilot in your Microsoft Office Suite is going to happen. It is going to require a lot more attention, and it’s going to require, in most organizations, breaking through some barriers that are going to be there to slow down adoption by learning businesses. And so that’s where we want to focus first in this episode, around those barriers that learning businesses may be facing. We will say, in our experience so far, people are talking about AI. They’re interested in it. Some of this—using Copilot, using Zoom AI Companion—is going on. But we’re not seeing a whole lot of aggressive, deep adoption of AI at this point, and I think it’s because of some of the barriers we’ll discuss here.

6 Barriers to AI Adoption in Learning BusinessesCelisa Steele: [00:03:44] We have six barriers in mind. As we run through these, we encourage you to listen with an ear towards which of these really do seem to be barriers in your organization, in your learning business? Of course, also think beyond the barriers that we are going to mention. What other barrier is your learning business facing in terms of adoption? That’s just a note in advance—a way that we encourage you to be listening.

CostCelisa Steele: [00:04:13] The first barrier that we’ll mention is a barrier that shows up in all sorts of areas whenever you talk about making change, and it is simply cost.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:22] That’s right. To really integrate AI into your operations, your strategy is going to have some costs associated with the software and with everything that’s going to have to go with the software to use it well. You’ve got the free version of ChatGPT out there that folks can use. It isn’t the best or the most advanced version. You have to pay for access to get that. So, while you can use free AI in some cases, often there is that need to pay, especially when you start to think about that quality side versus the quantity.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:55] Yes, and to just make a point about the availability of what’s free versus what you have to pay for, there’s a podcast episode that Ezra Klein did with Ethan Mollick. We’ll be sure to link to that in the show notes for this episode. But Ethan Mollick makes the point that when ChatGPT first came out, it was about as good as a sixth grader at writing. The free version, which is ChatGPT-3.5 at this point, is as good as a high schooler or a maybe college freshman. And then GPT-4, which is what you have to pay to get access to, is as good as a PhD in at least some forms of writing. Right there you can already see, if you’re really interested in quality, that cost investment almost becomes a necessity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:43] Yes, and that’s relatively small to get a ChatGPT subscription, even for your whole team. But, again, as you start to expand and get into other tools and the capacity to use them, the costs start to proliferate pretty quickly, and you’ve got to reckon with those. Those are the new costs. But I think what may even be a bigger issue for many learning businesses is those sunk costs that they already have in their existing technology and learntech investments.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:11] Right. A lot of learning businesses have a learning management system that they invested heavily in, not only in terms of the software costs but, again, the people, time to figure out how…

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:23] And a lot of pain.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:23] A lot of pain in how to integrate it, how to make it work with your processes, how to get everyone trained on it. You have the cost of legacy systems plus all the surrounding processes and education that you’ve already spent, essentially, money on for your team. It’s going to be a little bit hard, probably, to divert funds away from some of those legacy systems until there’s a crystal-clear, pretty fast path to the return on investment. We’re seeing that as a barrier.

Perceived Lack of Demand from LearnersJeff Cobb: [00:06:56] So that’s cost—both the new cost and dealing with those sunk costs that you already have. Number two is perceived lack of demand from learners. This might take a little explaining, but you hear about these AI-driven learner scenarios that are all about personalization and dynamic and everything else. They’re predicated on this notion of what could be characterized as the “ideal learner”—someone who really appreciates and proactively seeks out learning experiences that are personalized, that do dynamically adapt to their needs.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:31] And not to be overly cynical, but to be realistic…

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:35] Realistically cynical.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:36] To be realistically cynical—that’s good. A lot of learners simply aren’t that ideal learner. They have a need. They’re trying to get their job done, and they need some piece of knowledge or a new skill to do it, so they’re really after that, and maybe they don’t care so much how personalized or dynamic the experience is. Or maybe they just have to check the box if they have some sort of CE requirement. Again, then in that case, they really just want to check that box and move on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:05] Yes, I think a lot of organizations, individuals who are creating learning programs like the idea of serving that ideal learner, but I think they know intuitively or feel like they know intuitively that maybe we’re not there yet. Maybe this isn’t the time to be aiming that high with what we’re doing. Now, that said—and this may already point towards the accelerator camp that we’re going to talk about in a little bit—the growth and enthusiasm for platforms like, say, Duolingo, which seems to have a pretty strong fan base…

Celisa Steele: [00:08:31] I’m one of them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:30] You’re one of them, and I’ve used it too. In fact, it keeps bugging me to come back. The enthusiasm around those types of platforms suggests that there might be more latent demand than many learning businesses appreciate at this point.

Lack of TimeCelisa Steele: [00:08:45] We’ve talked about cost as a potential barrier. We’ve talked about perceived lack of demand from learners as a potential barrier. A third barrier is lack of time. It’s very easy to say that learning businesses should make more time to explore artificial intelligence, to poke around and understand the possibilities, run some pilots, do some experiments. But I have met very few learning business professionals who feel like they have time to do that sort of piloting and experimentation and poking without a really clear return on investment, given all of the other things on their plate.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:25] Yes, usually plenty of other things to do for the individual, for the team, and saying that you’re going to make this a priority right now can just be a stretch in a lot of instances. So lack of time. And then, number four, a lack of understanding.

Lack of UnderstandingCelisa Steele: [00:09:40] Yes, there can be a skills gap. Even if you manage to carve out time or have people on your team who do have some time to devote to it, there may be a skills gap. Those people may not really understand artificial intelligence capabilities and the mechanics behind them, and then that can lead to a barrier to adoption because it can be, “Fine, play with this,” but, if you don’t really understand how the systems work and what they might do for you, that open-ended experimentation might not result in much coming of it that’s actually useful.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:16] That’s true. It really is easy to get into ChatGPT-4—if you pay for it—and get it to do some things, but then really understanding how you get it to do the things that you most want it to do in a productive way, there is a learning curve on that. And, yes, it goes back to that time issue. The time to get the understanding often isn’t there.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:36] It also relates to an absence of a strategic or even a tactical framing for AI exploration. If the directive that is passed down in a learning business is “Experiment with AI,” that leaves so much open to that individual who’s playing with it, and you’re going to get widely different results depending on how good that individual’s understanding of AI and its possibilities are.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:03] Yes, classic problem with innovation in general. There’s always that imperative, “Go innovate!” What does that mean? We haven’t actually developed a strategy and a plan around doing that. So that’s lack of understanding. Then, number five, content concerns.

Content ConcernsCelisa Steele: [00:11:18] This is an umbrella for us. There are a number of things that we’re categorizing as content concerns. Think about accuracy and hallucinations, for example. Obviously, that’s a very big deal in the context of learning businesses, where often the content absolutely has to be reliable and factual.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:39] Yes, if you’re in healthcare (for example, medical), you can’t be putting stuff out there that is not completely reliable and accurate. Valid concerns around that. That does have to be addressed. There’re concerns around data privacy and security, particularly around sensitive learner data that might be coming in. A lot of data churning through AI, and exactly what’s happening with all that data isn’t always clear.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:05] Which leads to, then, ethical concerns around what data do you have the right to share with an AI tool that your learners have given to you? And tied up in those ethical concerns, there’s also concern around bias.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:21] Yes, this is the kind of thing that’s always making headlines, I think, around AI. But the bottom line is even the developers don’t know exactly how it all works. There’s a bit of a black box in these large language models and other types of AI. The data used to train these large language models has the chance to perpetuate stereotypes, exclude or disadvantage certain groups of learners, depending on what goes into that training, and perpetuating equity issues and all sorts of other issues that we were already wrestling with before AI—we don’t need to have exacerbated by something that could take it to an even bigger scale than it is now.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:58] A lot of barriers wrapped up under that umbrella of content concerns. And then the sixth barrier that we’ll mention—this is the final one that we have brought to the table today to discuss—is culture.

CultureJeff Cobb: [00:13:12] Culture is always a big one there. Resistance to change. There’s a lot of comfort with traditional models that can slow down AI adoption. This happens with any new technology, any new approach coming into any sort of business. And, certainly, there are many areas of “We’ve always done it this way.” We’ve seen even resistance to advances that are driven by learning science within the learning field. You throw in something that feels a little less certain or harder to understand, like AI, and, yes, that resistance is bound to be there in many organizations.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:48] Yes, there’s a certain amount of inertia that can prevent the adoption. Again, like you were saying, we’ve always done things this way, and they’re working fine. Why do we need to change? I think silos, which can also come from culture, can further exacerbate adoption of AI because, even if one person or one team within a learning business or an overall organization figures out an effective use of artificial intelligence, will others in the organization even know about it? And, if they know about it, will they be encouraged to adopt it or apply it in their area? So I think silos are another aspect of culture that can really be a barrier to adoption of AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:32] To loop back and note all of those again. The barriers we’re seeing are around cost, both new costs and sunk costs. Around a perceived lack of demand for learners—maybe it’s just not time yet to do this. A lack of time on the part of the learning business and its staff—you just don’t have the time to do this. A lack of understanding—this relates to the lack of time potentially but knowing enough to be able to really get the full potential out of AI. The fifth one, content concerns around IP issues, privacy, ethical considerations, bias. And then, finally, number six—the one that’s always there in any big shift in technology, strategy, or anything else—is culture.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:15:23] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

5 Accelerators of AI Adoption in Learning BusinessesCelisa Steele: [00:15:59] We’ve looked at barriers to AI adoption. We’d like to talk next about accelerators. What might speed the adoption of artificial intelligence in learning businesses? We have five that we’ll bring to the table. Again, we encourage you to listen to these five and think, “Okay, which ones of these could actually accelerate the adoption of AI in my organization?” And also think about what else might accelerate the adoption of AI in your organization.

Vendor LeadershipJeff Cobb: [00:16:32] The first one we’re going to list is vendor leadership. This may particularly apply in the case of those legacy systems where you’ve got sunk costs and what the vendors are going to do there. But, overall, vendor leadership is going to be important here. If vendors, technology platform providers start integrating AI into those existing systems or investing heavily to smooth the path into new systems, that can make a big difference.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:59] Yes, and, so far, what we’ve seen in terms of efforts to incorporate AI into existing systems, it seems relatively rudimentary, more on that productivity side of things and the quantity rather than the quality side. Incorporating GPT to help generate content ideas or do a first draft of assessment questions, for example. And that’s useful, but it doesn’t really alter much about how things are being done.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:30] Right. Hopefully, it’s hard to remember…. In some ways, it’s late days, but, in other ways, it’s early days because the whole ChatGPT shift that really marked a turning point didn’t happen all that long ago, so you could argue we’re still in somewhat early days, and vendors are starting to catch up and accelerate their efforts. We probably will see a lot more vendor leadership coming in in the next one to five years. But that would be a big factor to speed adoption. The next one would have to do with the broader market.

The Broader MarketCelisa Steele: [00:18:01] Again, this is an umbrella point for us. But you can imagine, for example, if a learning business is being outpaced by key competitors, that’s going to really urge them to get their act together and invest more in artificial intelligence. If more explicit demand starts coming from learners around artificial intelligence being used in the products and services that you’re offering, again, that sort of market demand is going to really push a learning business to move faster to integrate AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:36] Generally, a fear of diminished reputation or relevance that, if you’re not keeping up with whoever the Joneses are in your competitive set, it just doesn’t reflect well on you. Those sorts of market pressures can come to bear. We also think about the partnerships and collaborations that can occur out there as being part of this broader market perspective.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:00] Yes, with the vendor leadership piece, where a learning business can take advantage of what a vendor of a learning platform might be making available. Another way to potentially leapfrog or accelerate your own adoption of AI is by partnering or collaborating with someone who already is further along that AI path than you are. You seek out new relationships—might be in the academic field, for example—and you can share knowledge, resources, and use cases, and maybe that speeds the adoption and application of AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:37] Vendor leadership, number one. Number two, changes in that broader market and environment that are going to impact how you’re thinking about AI. And then number three would be another major shift in AI itself.

Another Major Shift in AICelisa Steele: [00:19:53] Right. You mentioned that, in some ways, these are early days, some ways maybe late days. But, with the introduction of ChatGPT, that really got the world’s attention because it allowed many people to see, firsthand, what the potential for this generative AI was. If there were to be some other sort of shift like that or some sort of event, that could speed adoption even further.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:21] Right. One that’s out there potentially right now is the broader release of Sora, which is basically the video version of ChatGPT, using generative AI for video creation. It’s in beta or limited distribution right now. I have not been able to get my hands on it so far, but I’ve heard fairly incredible things about it. If you suddenly have this tool that allows you to crank out relevant, high-quality video very easily, that could be an inflection point. We don’t know. We’ll see exactly how much impact that has. But that’s just one potential example. ChatGPT was in many ways that proverbial tip of the iceberg because so much had been going on underneath that for so many years, and that’s what became visible and caught the eye of the general public and suddenly created this big shift. Something else is going to bubble up, no doubt, within the next one, two, or three years.

Regulation and GuidelinesCelisa Steele: [00:21:15] The fourth accelerator, or potential accelerator, that we see around adoption of AI is regulation and guidelines. This would help in terms of clarifying a lot. Like we were saying earlier around some of the barriers, there’s just a lot of lack of understanding about what AI can actually do and how it works. As regulations are rolled out, as clear guidelines are developed, that’s going to help build trust in artificial intelligence, and it’s going to make it clearer how to deal with some of the barriers that we talked about, things like intellectual property and what can or can’t you own, around bias, around ethical issues. If you have regulatory bodies developing those guidelines and overseeing things, then that takes the burden off of the individual learning business to have to work through legal opinions with a lawyer on their own, and then they’re allowed to think about, “Okay, within these rules, within these guidelines, how can we make use of it?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:21] Yes, this is almost certain to happen on a global stage too, which gives me a little more confidence that it will happen because, if it had to happen in the United States right now, given what the political environment is, I’m not so sure. But just like GDPR had such a big influence on how we think about Web privacy and security, regulations and guidelines are going to be coming from all over the world, and, hopefully, they will help to address some of those barriers that are giving organizations caution right now.

A Business Case for AICelisa Steele: [00:22:51] And then the fifth and final potential accelerator that we wanted to talk about is simply a good business case for AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:01] Always good to have a good business case for things. This, of course, will go back to things like cost and understanding learner demand and all of those barriers that we spoke to earlier. A good business case is going to address and figure out how you work your way through those. It’s going to address our classic triumvirate of reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:25] The business case can be broken down into how is AI going to help you with your reach? How is AI going to help you with your revenue? How is AI going to help you with your impact? On the reach side, AI potentially helps you to do more with the same resources, which could translate very naturally into the potential to reach and serve more learners, even without greatly changing the size of your team, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:51] On that revenue side, if you’re able to do the analysis and see that potential for long-term savings despite upfront costs or new revenue generation because it allows you to develop products more quickly, get them to market more quickly—but just getting to that point where you can quantify, you can put the financial framework around it, that certainly could help with speeding the investment.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:16] Around impact, AI offers the potential to unlock some of those holy grails of learning that we’ve been talking about for a long time—decades at this point—things like personalization, things like just-in-time or point-of-need learning. If you can do that, that’s going to allow you to better serve those learners. It’s going to allow you to have more impact as a learning business. If you can begin to see that, that can be part of that good business case for investing and adopting AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:48] Yes, and the same technology that’s going to make those things possible is also going to make it possible to get the data from them and know how effective they are, which goes back to regulation and all of the content concerns and everything else, but the potential for being able to serve the individual learner well, the organization well, the broader communities in which the individuals and the organizations work, and tracking the data around whether it’s actually having an impact or not. We’ve never been at a point before where that was as possible as it’s starting to be now.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:23] A good, strong business case for AI that helps you quantify and qualify the potential for impact on reach, revenue, impact can help accelerate adoption. The fourth point was around regulation and guidelines; as those are rolled out, that can help with speeding the adoption of AI. Third, we had mentioned another shift in artificial intelligence, some sort of development akin or similar to the release of ChatGPT. The second thing we had talked about in terms of an accelerator was broader market changes; as competitors adopt AI or as learners begin to clamor for AI or other partners and players becoming more attuned to AI, that’s going to push learning businesses to also pay attention. And then we started our list of potential accelerators with vendor leadership; if you have tech companies, for example, that invest in adding AI to their existing systems or developing new systems that then you can relatively seamlessly transition into, that will help with adoption.

AI Can Impact the Quality and Quantity of Work a Learning Business DoesCelisa Steele: [00:26:42] Artificial intelligence has the potential to increase both the quality and the quantity of work that a learning business does, and there are a variety of factors that might speed up or slow down a learning business’s adoption of AI.

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Related Resources* Personalization and AI with Erica Salm Rench * Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer * The Impact of Artificial Intelligence * Putting Foresight – and Artificial Intelligence – First with Jeff De Cagna – Part II

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbThere are many ways to look at data. Two views that can be clarifying for learning businesses are the performance view and the potential view. You can use data to understand how you’re doing currently. How is your learning business performing? You can and should also use data to understand possibilities. How could you be doing? What products and services might you add or sunset or change?

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 409, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss using data in decision-making.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] There are many ways to look at data. Two views that can be clarifying for learning businesses are the performance view and the potential view.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:12] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:13] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:22] Data [date-uh] or data [dat-uh]? Singular or plural, as in “the data show” or “the data shows”?

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:29] Yes, data raises a lot of questions. But it has—or they have—a lot of fans too. Some people swear by the need for data to make decisions, and, even if they’re not extremists about it, most people will at least say they buy into the importance of using data.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:47] Yes, and, Jeff, you and I personally believe that data should play an essential part in shaping the strategy and the tactics of a learning business. That’s why we’ve decided to focus on data in this episode, number 409. And we’re particularly focusing on the role of data in helping learning businesses make decisions.

An Event and a Session on Data for Decision-MakingJeff Cobb: [00:01:09] That’s right. One of the reasons we’re thinking about data these days is because of a recent in-person event that we were part of.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:19] That’s right. ASAE (the American Society of Association Executives) held a one-day, single-track event in person at their offices in Washington, DC, on April 18th, called Learning by Association: Launching Successful Professional Development Initiatives.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:40] This was a pretty focused event—pretty tight focus around launching professional development initiatives. There was just a single track to it. It’s a minimum viable product approach, I guess you would say—a way for them to test out whether this was something to do or not on an ongoing basis.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:59] Yes. When you say for them to test out, it might be worth unpacking that a little bit because I believe that the Professional Development Section Council was particularly instrumental in coming up with the idea for this event and pulling it off—then, of course, well supported by ASAE staff in doing that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:16] Right. ASAE has a lot of events for association professionals. Obviously, that’s the focus of the American Society of Association Executives. But somewhat missing from that has been a focus on the professional development area, and we know that education is a huge part of what most associations do. Most of them have it as a revenue source, which tracks back to what we focus on: reach, revenue, and impact. That revenue part—big thing for associations. Impact—big thing for associations. But not a lot of dedicated professional development programming up until now.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:54] Yes, the PD Council realized that there has been this gap, and so they decided to put together this event and roll it out. Diane Elkins, who’s the chair of that committee right now, at one point said she started chanting, “We’re number four! We are number four!” Because one of the key data points that they had going into this is that, out of all of the different segments that ASAE represents—when you think about associations, like membership, for example—it turns out that professional development is the fourth largest group. So a very significant segment of the people that ASAE seeks to serve, and yet they did not have a dedicated conference for them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:35] There was a little bit of data there. They had that data saying, “This is an important segment.” So that’s established clearly by data. We also know clearly that there are not dedicated offerings for that segment. ASAE has done various things in the past to fold in professional development here and there. But, in terms of really dedicated, that hadn’t happened. Of course, there’s been a lot of anecdotal input and good old common sense applied to say it would make sense for us to have something here that we could then gather more data from to determine what we then do going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:08] I think the timing of this happening in 2024—a few years post the initial lockdowns that were caused by COVID-19—was an important factor in having the decision to hold this in person. There was a lot of energy in the room that day.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:30] Yes, and we’ve seen this a lot. There’s still a lot of pent-up desire for community conversation, networking, that we’re still seeking opportunities—post-COVID, post-Zoom consuming our lives—to be able to engage in that sort of peer-to-peer interaction. And you could definitely feel it in the room there.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:51] You could feel it in the room, but that’s not to say that there weren’t also comments that showed the difficulty for some people in showing up in that room for a full day. Comments about, “Wow, this is starting really early and going really late.” If you happen to have responsibilities at home, perhaps around getting kids to or from school, it can be a challenge to show up at 8 am or a challenge to stay through the reception that went until 6 pm, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:19] That’s right. Those were data points that came from our being together. So much data can be gathered in real time. By just trying something, you learn so much. And, of course, with the issue of accessibility, inclusiveness—that was part of the agenda for the event as well. One of the important topics that got covered in this single-track, focused day that we had together.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:42] Right. There were essentially six sessions, with transition times built in between each hour-long segment. Those were also billed as being for networking, for being some of that peer sharing, peer discussion that can happen very naturally and informally when you’re all in the room together. But, you’re right, one of those sessions was around inclusivity and thinking very broadly, as one should be thinking, about inclusivity, not just in terms of perhaps people with a disability but also in terms of what I was just referencing around people with family responsibilities and trying to take into account as many of those factors as possible when you’re offering an educational program so that you’re not inadvertently cutting out potential learners who could value and benefit from what you’re offering.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:33] Just a quick taste of some of the other topics that were on the agenda. Started out with talking about a foundation for success. How do you, from the ground up, strategically determine what you’re going to develop in order to serve your membership? That was the “Program Success Blueprint”—the name of that session. We did a session following that that was really focused on data: “The Business-Optimized Portfolio.” We’ll come back to that. I will say something I’ve noticed—and maybe it’s that confirmation bias or recency bias or whatever—but data seemed to run throughout these sessions. In that first session around having a blueprint for success, data was very important. Obviously, the focus of our session was on data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:16] We then had the session on inclusivity and accessibility. Also very data-driven because of the way that you’re able to be inclusive and accessible is really having an understanding of both your audience specifically but in general. If you know the numbers around the types of people who may have these different types of challenges, it’s just a no-brainer that you need to be designing and delivering in a more accessible and inclusive way. So data was very important there. We looked at buying, building, borrowing around content creation, and, again, data very important to determine making those sorts of decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:54] And then there was a panel—actually two panels that rounded out the day. One panel with folks sharing some of their successes but also, very importantly, sharing some of their failures and what they had learned from those at their organizations, in their learning businesses. And then a final panel that pulled the curtain back on the day was with folks involved in the planning of the event and unpacking a little bit the decisions that had been made, a little bit of “If we had had more time or if we had it to do it again, this might be the direction we would go or the angle that we would take.” Again, if you have a room of professional development folks, to do that analysis of what actually has happened can be very meaningful because it’s the kind of thing you can take back and apply to your own offerings and think about, “Oh, that point about the scheduling (or whatever it is), we can apply that to what we’re offering in our learning business.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:54] Again, a type of data gathering. Very meta throughout this. We’re about to turn now to talking a little bit more about our session and specifically focusing on data, but just the whole perception of this event where data was saying that this is worth trying, and then you gather data, ran through the sessions, all of the topics that people were talking about, and then this backing up and looking at the event itself and saying, “What data are we gathering from this that then might shape what we do going forward?” I think that encapsulates a lot of what happens when you’re doing any sort of educational programming, any sort of professional development programming. You’ve got that pre-data, you’ve got that data that’s going to inform the topics, and then you’ve got the collection of data to then plan for going forward.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:09:42] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

What Does Data-Driven Decision-Making Look Like?Celisa Steele: [00:10:22] We can share a little bit more about what we talked about data and some of our further thoughts about data that, to your point, came out of the fact that we were there that day, what we heard in the room, and what folks happened to share there. Again, back to what we said at the outset of this episode, we really do believe in the importance of data, the value of data, in helping learning businesses decide what to do. And so we’re bringing that interest, and we’re bringing a lot of experience in helping learning businesses look at their own data and determine what that might mean about what they should add to their portfolio, what they might need to take out of their portfolio, how the portfolio is performing. So we come in with both experience and interest in this topic of using data for decision-making.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:12] Right. We did start off by really examining what that means—to be data-driven when you’re making decisions—because I think that gets thrown around a lot. Clients or prospective clients will come to us all the time and say, “We want a data-driven plan for moving forward.” What does that really mean? We broke that down a little bit to start with.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:33] Yes, and we started by first asking what the people in the room thought of when they think about data-driven decision-making and heard from people. I will say what we heard in the room was very much in line with what we were already thinking of in terms of data-driven decision-making, and, for us, it encompasses a lot of aspects. We want to look at both qualitative and quantitative data, for example. We want to look at both hard and soft data. We want to make sure that we have accurate snapshots of a particular point in time. Data very often is that picture of a moment. But then it’s also very valuable to have those snapshots over time, so you can begin to get a sense of progress and see how any changes you’re making are being reflected in the data because you can compare it back to a point in time before that change was in place, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:29] Yes, and all of this implies being conscious of and intentional about getting data, making sure you’re in a position to get data, sharing data, using data effectively in a meaningful way to make decisions going forward, and getting everybody bought into that process. And that was an important point of this also. We asked about “What is data-driven decision-making?” in the beginning. We also asked people about the data culture at their organizations, what it’s like for them. Are they using data? We did a one-to-five rating scale. One being you basically ignore the data—you just do whatever you’re going to do because that’s what you do—up to five being it factors into everything. I think we saw a pretty good bell curve on that in terms of whether people were using data or not. But, using it or not, there were common challenges out there that people had around it.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:28] Yes, and we should touch on some of the challenges. But I will say two things. One is that we talk about using data to help drive decision-making. We don’t want to be data-determined…

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:44] Right.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:44] …where you purely take what the data tells you and then run with it. There’s a lot of emotion that goes into human decision-making, and that means both on the learning business, internal side, in terms of setting strategy and determining tactics; it also means in terms of the learners and how they’re going to interact or respond. We’ve probably all had experiences where you put out something that’s exactly what the data said was wanted, and it doesn’t perform the way that you thought that it would. This is where some of the emotion comes in. And that’s why we like to talk about the qualitative as well as the quantitative, the soft data as well as the hard data. The idea is to pull all those types of data together and to also allow your gut to have some influence here as well, so that you’re not just using what the data says to absolutely determine the direction. You’re instead taking the data as one data point.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:43] Yes, and you made the point earlier too about data over time. You get those snapshots in time, but you need to look at it over time as well because we find all the time that an organization will run the big needs assessment survey or the big member survey or whatever it is, and they get that big bump in data that maybe they’re doing once every five years, and suddenly that becomes the driver for everything. And it’s just that one point in time. You have to make looking at data, talking about data, having data influence decisions, something that’s happening consistently over time. And you have some points of reference that you’re able to see how they change over time and what the trends might be.

Challenges to Having a Strong Data CultureCelisa Steele: [00:15:28] Some of the challenges that we heard around having a good data culture, around being more on that five end of the Likert scale of “How data-driven are you in your decision-making at your organization?,” some of those challenges have to do with silos, which can mean that the data that you really need or want isn’t something that you readily have access to. Perhaps someone else in the organization, some other department or area, has access to it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:00] Yes. We talked about a simple one that came up, which is Google Analytics. You can get so much very useful information from Google Analytics. We gave an example of working with an organization, a CPA society in December. If you’re in the public accounting field, you know that people are going for their CPE [continuing professional education] credit that accountants have to get to maintain their licensure. That always spikes at the end of the year because people are coming up against their 40 hours.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:29] We looked at the Google Analytics, and we could see, yes, it spiked, but then we also looked at the devices that were being used, which Google Analytics will tell you quite readily. And the mobile usage was above 50 percent of people hitting their CPE pages and trying to find a CPE to participate in. And this organization had basically no mobile accessibility for the online education that it was offering. So just that one data point gave you a place where you could have a huge win going forward. But so often, if you’re sitting in the professional development department, education department, of an organization, and you’re separated from the marketing folks, you don’t see those numbers. You don’t necessarily know that’s happening. The marketing folks don’t necessarily know to look for that. So you have to have those conversations and then not have those silos.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:16] I think terminology was another challenge that we heard—different departments or groups within the organization using different terms or collecting essentially the same data but in different ways. For example, you can imagine a free text field versus someone providing ranges. All of that can then greatly complicate your ability to use that data or to compare that data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:42] We asked about things like taxonomies, which are going to give you a common language and an agreement around this word applies to this—we’re tracking these things. Which some organizations had. Not a high percentage of organizations in the room had implemented taxonomies. But then we’ll often find that, even when an organization has implemented a taxonomy, the professional development department might have implemented this taxonomy, and marketing or membership or certification might have a completely different taxonomy. And so, again, you have these language problems. It’s a communication issue. It’s an accessibility issue around the data. It’s just an overall lack of standards and standardization as to how and what you’re going to collect and what form that’s going to take.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:27] And one other challenge that we heard was that even when you have the data, and you pull it all together, and you provide it, different people looking at the exact same data can come to different conclusions about what it means. And, for us, that gets back to this idea of data-driven, but not data-determined, decision-making because it’s all fine and good to think that data is going to point very clearly to the one, correct, true path, but, in reality, it often doesn’t. It usually steers you in the right direction.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:59] It’s directional, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:59] You still then have to use other sources of strategic thinking, critical thinking to determine, “Okay, we’re headed this direction. Now what specifically do we do?” Or “How do we specifically capitalize on that opportunity that the data is pointing us towards?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:17] Right. And then, once you’re out there and doing it, you have to be willing to course-correct. We were referencing it in the beginning, that the PD council at ASAE thought this was something to do, to get people in the room for this particular offering. But, even once you’re in the room, you’ve got to read the room and figure out how you might adjust, and then, of course, you’re collecting data from the people who are there, who are going to then tell you how to do some things the same, better, different going forward, and you always have to be prepared for that with data, and you’ve got to get out there with some reasonable assumptions about what the offering should be, what the engagement with the market should be, based on what the data tells you, but then you keep collecting data, and then you adjust as you move forward.

Looking at Data from a Performance Perspective and from a Potential PerspectiveCelisa Steele: [00:20:09] There are many ways to look at data or to think about data. One approach that we’re fans of is by thinking about data from both a perspective of performance—what can it tell you about how you’re currently performing, your products and services and what you’re able to achieve with those currently. That’s one view, performance. The other view that you can take is around potential. Performance—how are you performing? Potential—how could you perform, or how might you perform? That’s then much more about adjustments that you might make to your overall strategy, to your specific products and offerings, and thinking about what you might add, change, or remove.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:53] Discussing those two big areas, big buckets of data was really the meat of our presentation. We won’t try to go into all of that in a podcast because a lot of this was very conversational too, and people contributing what they’re doing. But, within that performance bucket, we like to further break that down. And again a lot of what we’re doing in the presentation was just trying to give people some language—an approach for talking about data, for categorizing data—so that, when you do get in that room with other people, you have some ways to parse it out and have meaningful conversation around it. Within that performance bucket—probably no surprise to anybody who’s been following us or listening to us—we tend to break that down into reach, revenue, and impact. What are some of those data points that are going to tell you whether you’re reaching those right learners that you want to be serving? What are the data points that are going to tell you if you’re making the revenue that you need to be making? And what are the data points that are going to tell you whether it’s actually doing anything, whether you’re moving the dial with your educational offerings?

The Performance Perspective: Reach, Revenue, and ImpactCelisa Steele: [00:21:53] In that reach area of performance, you’re going to be looking at things like Web traffic. You mentioned Google Analytics earlier. You’re going to want to be seeing how many people are coming to your sites, which pages on your sites—that level of detail, that kind of data. You also want to be looking at e-mail. In our experience, most learning businesses rely very heavily on e-mail to sell their products and services, and so you want to be looking at things like e-mail open rates, click rates. You also want to be gauging awareness, and this is something that we often find is overlooked because sometimes people want to be very mechanical about it: “We’re going to improve our e-mail content,” or “We’re going to make changes to the Web site.” But sometimes people aren’t even opening those e-mails, or they aren’t even visiting the Web site. There can be an awareness problem, and so making sure that you’re able to gain a prospect’s or even a current customer’s, current member’s attention and get them to become aware of what you are offering.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:55] Then if they are finally converting. In each of the areas we talked about—you’ve got your traffic, you’ve got your e-mail, you’ve got your awareness—are you then converting into enrollments and into registrations? Obviously, that’s going to be the end game with reach—or, I guess, the end game. We’ll call it the end game because you’re going to go beyond there to impact, but we’ll get to impact and talk about that. But that’s a quick synopsis of the reach area. We then talk about revenue, [which] tends to be a clearer thing to folks. They’re usually tracking your revenue at a gross level and at a net level too. We do find that organizations are often tracking the overall revenue of the learning business, getting that gross revenue. They’re likely tracking the gross revenue of different products or product lines.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:38] But, when it gets down to net revenue, things get a little foggier usually because, in a lot of cases, organizations aren’t really factoring staff time and softer costs in at either a product category or a product-by-product basis. So you don’t really know your profitability or your net revenue, and you want to get to that because you really need to know what’s performing the best within your portfolio. Every product doesn’t necessarily have to be profitable, but you want to know which ones are and which ones aren’t so you know how to manage that mix. And then one we mentioned that we hardly ever see attention given to in this revenue area is cash flow. How is the cash flowing in?

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:20] It often happens that organizations will put a lot of money down upfront, for example, on a big event, putting down guarantees and securing whatever contracts they need to, when the actual revenue from it is not going to flow for quite a while. So there’s a gap in that cash flow, which can end up leaving you cash poor. Even though you know that money is coming eventually, you don’t have cash on hand to invest in other products and marketing and the variety of things you might do to grow your learning business. So paying attention to how is cash flowing. Are there ways that you can have some products that are going to have more immediate cash flow to them? And, in general, making sure that you do have access to the funds you need to do what you need to do. You don’t have to wait until all the registrations are in or until the next budget is approved.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:08] And then, in this performance view of data, the last area is impact. That tends to involve looking at things around attendance or completion rates or specific learner performance, meaning perhaps how they do on tests or quizzes. It can also involve looking at engagement feedback. It can look at retention. Are those learners that take one course from you coming back for second, third, fourth courses, for example? Like revenue, I think a lot of the things that tend to get tracked under impact are fairly typical, but there’s still often a lot of room for improvement to make sure that you’re collecting data that is actionable and going to help you make better products or services. We’ve had Dr. Will Thalheimer on the podcast before, talking about how to take your smile sheets to the next level so that you’re getting useful information out of those reactions from your learners and that you can use that data to then improve your products.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:14] This is one of those great areas for a form of tracking over time. Not just getting the reactions right at the end of a course or a session. Get those, but then also follow up, whether that’s a week later, three months later, or six months later, to find out is what was taught in that learning experience, is that actually being applied on the job or wherever it was intended to be applied? But you have to collect that data to know.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:40] We do know that a lot of learning businesses rely on learners to self-report how effective something is, how much they’re applying it. That often is somewhat necessitated by reality. But there’s also the opportunity to think beyond just asking learners for their reactions and their views, to think about how else could you triangulate or get different perspectives on the value of that learning? Perhaps you can have access to their managers or their bosses to get some input on the performance. You might be able to use something like the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method to go out and gather some stories of people who are having important, impactful results come from the education offerings that you’re putting out there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:25] Right.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:26] We have a past episode with Rob Brinkerhoff, and so we’ll make sure to link to that in the show notes for this episode.

The Potential Perspective: Three ToolsJeff Cobb: [00:27:40] That’s a quick rundown of the performance area and reach, revenue, and impact within that. Then, as you noted, Celisa, we also covered this potential area. Performance is about what’s happening now or what has happened in the past. How are we doing? Potential is about what could happen in the future. What could we be doing? How might we improve? We’ll say a little less about this because we focused on three of our tools to help people with this, and we’ve talked about those tools a lot in different episodes on the podcast, so we’ll link to those. But those were the Value Ramp, the Product Value Profile, and the Market Insight Matrix.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:22] We’re using those three tools, but the umbrellas those fall under are going to help you realize your potential. You’re going to want to do some kind of portfolio analysis. That’s where we’re recommending the Value Ramp, [which] could be useful to help you look at the overall story and sense that your portfolio is telling to the world. You’re also going to want to do some product analysis, so not just at that overall portfolio level but at the more individual product level or at least product line level, how are things performing? That’s where the Product Value Profile is potentially useful. And then you need to be doing market assessment generally to make sure that you are taking advantage of opportunities and that you’re aware of any risks or threats to what you’re currently offering. That’s where the Market Insight Matrix can help.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:14] This is, again, an over-time thing. The Insight Matrix gives you a framework for different types of data points to track for different reasons over time and to be able to provide some visibility and some accountability around those metrics so that you can have them as an ongoing conversation point. We emphasized there, and we’ll emphasize here, that all of these are great thinking and conversation tools. They’re ways to help you surface the opportunities, the challenges, the issues and do it in a way that makes it as visual as possible and also makes it as referenceable as possible by multiple people. You can put the Value Ramp up. All you have to do is draw it on a whiteboard, and you can start a conversation around it. It’s data-driven, and you can use the data you get from that conversation to then determine what do we need to go out and do more in terms of gathering data? Same thing with the Product Value Profile. Same thing with the Market Insight Matrix.

A Decision-Making Framework: Objectives, Alternatives, and RisksCelisa Steele: [00:30:10] We said at the outset that we’re fans of data and that we’re fans of using data to help make decisions. We should unpack that a little bit because, again, it’s very easy to say, “Yes, let’s use data to make decisions.” Well, what does that actually look like? What does decision-making look like? Where are some of the opportunities to apply data? There’s a framework that we talked about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:33] Yes. Again, very simple—can help with a group trying to make a decision. Any good decision process is really going to have three elements to it. You’ve got your objective or objectives that you’re trying to achieve in this case, based on the data that you’re working from. You’ve got your alternatives, which are the different ways that you can achieve the objective or the objectives that you’re pursuing. And then you’ve got the risk that may factor into any of those alternatives and into whatever final decision you go with.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:03] Risk breaks down a little bit further into both severity and likelihood. Not all risks are equal. If, for example, you’re considering some sort of very expensive product development process that’s going to take years or require hundreds of thousands of dollars, that’s a pretty high risk that something could go wrong. If you’re thinking much more of a minimum viable product, like the ASAE event that’s held at their offices, not a whole lot of overhead. That’s a very different level of risk, if one of those fails versus the other one, for example. There’s the severity. But then there’s also the likelihood. How likely is it that either of those might potentially fail?

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:46] Yes, and so something like a minimum viable product, the reason that’s so attractive in the first place is the likelihood with any minimum viable product is usually relatively high that it’s going to fail because usually you’re venturing with something new. But you’re reducing that seriousness significantly. You feel okay putting it out there because, if it does fail, you’re not bankrupting yourself in the process of doing that.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:08] Around the objectives, this is an area where, in so much of the work that we do and that learning businesses do, you can gloss over the objectives, and you can think, “Yes, we know what the objective is.” But you really need to dig down and make sure that everybody is clear on what that objective is. I can give an example from outside a learning business. Jeff, you might be faster-thinking than I am about an example from a learning business. Think about somebody saying something like, “I want a car to get to work.” If you really unpack that and realize that the objective is actually, “I need to get to work,” the car is one alternative, to talk about that next piece. But maybe there’s a public transit option that would also get you to work. Or maybe Uber would turn out to be less expensive than buying a new car and all the maintenance and everything that goes with it, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:07] I’ll just stay with that non-learning business example because it’s easy for folks to digest. Once you’ve got that objective, then, as you’re indicating, that introduces your alternatives. Everything flows from the objectives. You have to be clear and crisp about what those objectives are so that you’re then looking at the right alternatives and weighing the pros and cons of those alternatives. This is when the whole pros-and-cons thing tends to be valuable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:36] If you’ve got a clear objective, and you’ve got really good alternatives that you’ve weighed out—we see this happen all the time in learning management system selection, for example—your field of alternatives tends to shrink pretty quickly, based on how well they do align with truly supporting your objectives. And then you get down to a point where you’ve got two good alternatives. Then you’re going to look at the risk of those alternatives. And, ultimately, if you’ve got two good alternatives, a little bit of a balance in the risks—so one isn’t clearly riskier, more likely, more serious than the other—then it comes down to price. Price is its own form of risk, you could say, but you have this very clarifying and clear process to go through with the decision that, again, can be easily communicated, and everybody can say, “Here’s where we are in the process. Here’s what we’re doing at this point.”

Clear Objectives Help Identify KPIsCelisa Steele: [00:34:26] Those objectives, again, are just so important. That’s essentially the goal. When everyone has those objectives clearly in mind, everyone’s really clear and in agreement around those objectives, around that goal, then that’s going to tell you a lot about what you need to do. It’s going to also tell you a lot about what your key performance indicators might be. There are a ton of data points that any of us could be tracking, and there’s way more data than we can make effective use of. And so what having those clear goals and objectives is going to help you do is determine what are those key data points so that we do have good data to help us in our decision-making, in fine-tuning our approach. But we’re not drowning in the data, and we’re not missing the signal for all the noise that the data might be producing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:27] There are many ways to look at data. Two views that can be clarifying for learning businesses are the performance view and the potential view. You can use data to understand how you’re doing currently. How is your learning business performing? You can and should also use data to understand possibilities. How could you be doing? What products and services might you add or sunset or change?

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Related Resources* Tool Talk: The Value Ramp * Tool Talk: The Product Value Profile * Tool Talk: The Market Insight Matrix * Access and Ability in Learning with Diane Elkins

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Michelle BrienEffective marketing is integral to a learning business’s success. But doing marketing well requires care and thought.

In this episode, number 408, Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele talks with Michelle Brien, vice president of marketing at Matchbox, who approaches her work with care, thought, and authenticity.

Celisa and Michelle talk about how Michelle defines marketing, the central role value plays in marketing, the rise of digital and content marketing, the potential for generative AI in marketing, and the fundamental importance of understanding your audience.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesMichelle Brien: [00:00:00] If I had to define my approach to marketing, it would be sharing information that helps people to solve a problem or a challenge that they have.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:13] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:14] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] Effective marketing is integral to a learning business’s success. But doing marketing well requires care and thought. In this episode, number 408, Celisa talks with Michelle Brien, vice president of marketing at Matchbox and quite possibly one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet—someone who approaches life and work and learning with care and thought and authenticity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:48] Celisa and Michelle talk about what marketing is and how Michelle defines it, the central role value plays in marketing, the rise of digital and content marketing, the potential for generative AI in marketing, and the fundamental importance of understanding your audience. Celisa and Michelle spoke in late March 2024.

Helping Organizations with Digital InitiativesCelisa Steele: [00:01:17] Tell folks a little bit more about the kind of work that you do.

Michelle Brien: [00:01:21] Sure. At Matchbox, it’s interesting because we’ve just rebranded and launched a new focus, but our goal is to help associations to think more intentionally about how they can align online experiences that they might be creating for education, engagement, or revenue generation with their digital strategy to create what we’re calling digital initiatives. I think a lot of organizations know that they need to have a digital strategy to remain relevant or to grow their businesses into the future, but not all of them are using digital or virtual as effectively as they could be. And so our intention is to try and help provide a platform and resources that combine strategy, technology, and people to extend the scope of their internal teams and make it easier for them to launch digital initiatives that would help to grow their potential audience for education programs, foster deeper engagement, or diversify their revenue sources.

Coming Around to MarketingCelisa Steele: [00:02:26] I know your title there at Matchbox involves marketing, and you’ve been working in marketing for a long time at various organizations, often for organizations that have a toe or maybe a whole foot in learning. And so, I’m just curious to know, did you know from an early age that marketing is what you wanted to focus on, or how did you come to be involved in marketing?

Michelle Brien: [00:02:49] No, absolutely not. As you say, I’ve always had a toe in the education side of things, and I’ve always sought roles that helped me or allowed me to support those who teach others, maybe in different ways, which is interesting. But no. I studied sociology and information studies as my undergraduate degree, and I completed the librarianship pathway—so completely different. I was lucky enough to win a scholarship for postgraduate education, and I spent a year working in the information studies department in the university and trying to figure out whether I would do arts management or marketing. Those are the two courses that I had drilled down to. Eventually, I opted for marketing because it offered better career prospects.

Michelle Brien: [00:03:37] It’s very difficult to get a job in arts management, especially somewhere like in Ireland, where it’s a smaller pool of museums and galleries and things to pick from. The program that I chose in marketing was a really interesting one. I know you’ll be interested because I had an active learning structure. We wore suits and went into an office and worked in an office, and we spent about 40 percent of our time in lectures and learning and about 60 percent of our time actively working on projects for clients that the university would bring in, and we would run the whole project, from researching it to putting together a proposal, a plan, and then executing that, whether it be for market research or promoting something or that sort of thing. It was a really interesting way to learn, so I think that might have been one of the reasons why I chose it.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:30] I love that you noted that you put on suits. It’s this immersive learning, right?

Michelle Brien: [00:04:35] Oh, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:35] You have to dress for the part.

Michelle Brien: [00:04:37] That was very much it. I was always a little bit of a fish out of water because I’m not really a suit kind of person, and I didn’t really want to go into FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] marketing, which is where everybody else was very clearly pointing their career at. I always knew I wanted to do something different. For me, the part of marketing that speaks to me is understanding people and the creative elements—so combining the sociology and information aspects from my undergraduate studies, understanding people and then creatively communicating to help them solve their problems.

A Definition of Marketing and the Importance of ValueCelisa Steele: [00:05:10] I noticed on your LinkedIn profile—when I was preparing for our conversation—that you talk about brand, product, and content marketing. You talk about these different flavors of marketing, but I thought it could be interesting for you to explain to us what you think of when you think of marketing. How do you define marketing?

Michelle Brien: [00:05:34] I’m glad that you shared that question with me before the interview because I had to step back and think about how I would define marketing. It’s been a while since I studied, and, though I keep up with changes and things, I think a lot of people, when they think of marketing, they would define it as the process or activities that you do to promote and sell products or services, and I don’t really like to think about marketing that way. So I went and looked up a definition, and I looked around until I found one that was more in line with the way I approach it. And I found it with the American Marketing Association, which is interesting. So I’ll read it for you. They define it as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” That sits so much better with me. I really like that.

Michelle Brien: [00:06:26] If I had to define my approach to marketing, it would be sharing information that helps people to solve a problem or a challenge that they have. Like I said, I’m drawn to the creative and strategic aspects. For me, a way to market something effectively is to tell the story—not just the case study of like, “What’s the latest success story with our brand or our product?” kind of thing—but to tell the story of what the challenge is and to help the person that I’m trying to communicate to understand or gain a different perspective on that challenge, how they might provide something that’s helpful that might actually help them to solve it. That’s what I seek to do when I’m thinking about marketing and how I approach it.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:09] I definitely appreciate that AMA definition because it is broader than promotion, and marketing is broader than promotion. Also it landed with me that they use value in there, that it’s this idea of creating value, communicating value, and sharing value.

Michelle Brien: [00:07:24] Yes, that’s something that’s really important to me too: the value piece. I try to be guided by authenticity and integrity in what I do. We’ve all been on the end of various different marketing practices that may not sit well with us, so I don’t like to then visit those on other people. I like to be able to provide value and think that whatever I’m doing in my work is going to help somebody, and that’s what I aim for.

Marketing Learning Products and Services in ParticularCelisa Steele: [00:07:48] When you think about marketing, in that definition that you found that resonated with you, or if you think about marketing activities in general, in your experience or in the way you think about it, is there anything that’s different about marketing when the marketing is tied to learning products and services or things that are focused on trying to help individuals gain skills, knowledge, or know-how?

Michelle Brien: [00:08:14] That’s an interesting one. For many, many years, I was doing marketing for a learning management system, and that was selling to learning businesses that were providing continuing education to their members or professionals in their industry. It was very interesting because it struck me how different their audiences were and so then how different each of their needs were. There wasn’t really a one-size-fits-all approach, and that’s where I began to focus on understanding the challenges and understanding the needs, not just of the people who would be my customers but who their customers would be. That is the challenge, really—that you’re not just providing a product or service to your client but potentially their clients or people that they interact with as well. A learning business being able to understand what the different challenges of their potential customers are but also others in the wider industry—and that could be potential customers or in connected industries that they might need to interact with—is a really big challenge. But one, if they can solve it and focus on bringing that into their marketing themselves, then they’ll be very successful.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:36] That idea of understanding the audience that you serve and their challenges, their opportunities resonates with what you were saying around authenticity. Part of being authentic is when you really understand what are those needs and challenges of that audience. And then how can you respond and provide value that helps them with those needs and challenges?

Michelle Brien: [00:09:53] Yes, exactly.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:10:01] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

How Marketing Has EvolvedCelisa Steele: [00:10:38] You’ve been working in marketing for many years, so I would be curious to get your perspective around the changes that you might have seen over those years of work in marketing. How has marketing evolved, if it has?

Michelle Brien: [00:10:53] It definitely has. It has been very interesting to watch marketing evolve and to realize the importance of continuing education, especially in a career like marketing. Studying in information studies and learning about the knowledge economy and how we were coming into this era when I was leaving college, it was really interesting. Marketing is about harnessing knowledge and sharing it and using it effectively to communicate. And then there are so many different aspects that have developed as the ways that we communicate have changed and the technologies that we use to communicate have changed. If you look at even training that people do nowadays, when I was learning, when I was training in marketing, I would have had a much more general scope to research, to promotional activities, and all of the different aspects of marketing.

Michelle Brien: [00:11:48] But, nowadays, in more recent times, a lot of marketing programs have honed in on very specific things. So you might do a degree, a full degree, in digital marketing—which didn’t exist when I was doing my marketing training—and that digital marketing might focus on things like SEO or pay-per-click. And, even as I say that, I’m realizing to myself, that person who did that in the last five or ten years is now also realizing that education is almost obsolete to them because Google has changed so many rules around SEO and how we can use it, and pay-per-click is something that works effectively for certain products or services but not necessarily for all. So it’s really changed over the years.

Michelle Brien: [00:12:29] One of the things that I have noticed very recently and sits really well with me and is something that I’ve tried to educate myself on is the move for marketing and sales—to be honest—and customer success to move to more of a RevUP’s model, where they’re all working together rather than against each other. The kind of marketing that generated hundreds of leads to pass to sales, no matter the quality, never sat well with me as a process, and, thankfully, it’s not something that I ever got too deeply involved in.

Michelle Brien: [00:13:03] But there were many companies where that was the key metric for marketing—how many leads did you deliver—as opposed to what were the quality of those leads, and how many of those were sales able to convert, so that we know what the most effective marketing activities are to actually support the generation of business, and then for sales to get on board and not just close all business but business that is a really good fit, so that then, when customer success gets involved, you build a trusting and lasting relationship with that customer, and then you don’t lose that customer when they realize that what they were sold didn’t fit what they were looking for in the first place. I love that emphasis on providing value and integrity through the whole process and that move of marketing, sales, and client success to come together towards RevUPs.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:52] That ties back to value again. Part of why that works, when those partners come together, is because there’s this idea of, “Okay, where is the value, and then how can we all help realize that and make sure that it is valuable for everyone involved?” I like that perspective. One other thing that occurred to me when you were talking about some of the changes in marketing was the rise of content marketing, which is still with us. I feel like content marketing and learning are closely tied because the goal of so much of content marketing is really education. You’re educating a consumer about something, and, in the case of learning businesses, you’re educating them about education, which creates this virtuous cycle, where the content marketing and the learning can feed together very nicely and fit together in a tight way. Any comments about content marketing from your side? I know it’s something you’ve engaged in a lot, and that gets back to value too because that’s providing value.

Content Marketing’s Focus on ValueMichelle Brien: [00:14:53] Yes, absolutely. That’s exactly as it is. To me, the main point of content marketing is to provide value. I think it’s really important that you engage in content marketing with that aim, to provide value, and not to provide content purely for the sake of generating clicks. I do think it’s an interesting one because, again, there are lots of changes coming into content marketing, at the moment, with discussion about generative AI and that sort of thing. And that’s something where the marketers who are going to be successful are the ones who harness those tools in a way that brings out the human element to deliver value.

Michelle Brien: [00:15:35] So, for me, it’s not about quantity over quality. It’s about even these tools that are making it easier to generate content, that’s great, but let’s use it to make the aspects of the generation that lead to efficiency better as opposed to the quality. If you’re using generative AI to get you past that blank canvas thing, that’s great, but making sure to always review and make sure that you have looked over this and you’ve understood what the customer needs, what’s the purpose of this, and how is it going to help? And then a human is the one that actually finalizes and delivers. That’s where I think content marketing is going to undergo a lot of changes in the next few months and years, and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out and who comes out on top.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Its Potential for Work, and SkepticismCelisa Steele: [00:16:19] Talk a little bit about what Matchbox does periodically with AI. It’s my understanding that you guys gather together periodically to talk about how AI might be impacting your work, and maybe some of what you just shared around your thoughts might have come from some of those internal discussions you all have been having.

Michelle Brien: [00:16:38] I’m not going to lie—I’m the AI skeptic in Matchbox, and I’m the one who really has to be convinced. It’s probably a big part of my librarianship training and that need to always seek and validate your sources to make sure that they are authentic, that they can be trusted, and that sort of thing. I think that has led a little bit to my skepticism in approaching AI. But, I have to admit, the learning days have been fantastic, and they have changed my perspective. I know you’ll appreciate the structure of the day. The first one that we did was very much independent learning, and we had a presentation about what’s the difference between automation, AI, and generative AI, and what are some of the things that we should consider. And then we all went away and looked for different tools and things that would help us understand how AI would work in our roles, and we came together at the end of the day.

Michelle Brien: [00:17:30] This time, we felt we needed to focus it even more, so we started the day with a welcome from our CEO, who gave us the goal of we wanted to see could we use AI to save us two hours in our work week. That was the focus goal that we approached it with. We did watch a presentation about AI that helped to ground us in it, and then we did a design thinking session. We had a series of questions that one of the team members had put together in a document, and we spent almost an hour because we were all contributing so many ideas into it, in this document, and answering the questions. They were prompting us to think about what are some of the ways that we could make our work more efficient in the different roles across the company? And what are some of the things that we might want to consider if we were implementing AI in different areas? And that sort of thing.

Michelle Brien: [00:18:24] We came out of this session with this huge document with lots of ideas and thoughts in it, and then, in the second part of that, we were discussing it, and we broke out into breakout rooms, and each breakout room did something different. Some people took the document and fed it into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize it and pull out the key learnings. And then other people took it and fed it into ChatGPT but asked it very specific questions about parts of it, so that it would pull out more, different things. Each group came out with very different results, and it was really interesting to share those. But, yes, I think my eureka moment actually, in the whole day, came from realizing that ChatGPT is a conversational tool, and I was still approaching it like Google, where I would give it prompts and ask it for information, and then I would add to those prompts or do a series of prompts to build on that information to try and get what I was looking for, but sometimes it was still missing something.

Michelle Brien: [00:19:20] One of the teams suggested to me to ask ChatGPT to tell me what other information it needed in order to give me a more complete answer. That blew my mind. Because I knew it was a conversational tool, but I had never actually engaged in a two-way conversation with ChatGPT and never thought to ask it to ask me a question. If you have to create a business plan, a proposal, or something like that, you can feed ChatGPT the information that you want and ask it to help you to structure it and give you the headings and things. But asking it to tell you what you’re missing in your prompt then does give you a better outcome. So it does improve both the efficiency and the quality, which, yes, it’s a scary thought, but kind of cool. So I’m definitely going to think a little bit more about how I can work with ChatGPT as we go forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:14] Sounds like you’re becoming a little bit less skeptical as you go through these learning days.

Michelle Brien: [00:20:18] Just a little. But that’s what it’s all about. I learned that I wasn’t using it effectively, and now I can actually take from that and move on and grow. I’m always open to learning more—but will always maintain that small skepticism in the back of my mind.

Understanding Your Audience As a Key to Successful MarketingCelisa Steele: [00:20:45] I would love to get your thoughts on what goes into successful marketing. What are some of the key factors based on your experience? I’m thinking in particular about learning businesses and what they might need to do or know in order to ensure that they’re successfully marketing what they’re offering. Any advice that you might have, based on your years of experience?

Michelle Brien: [00:21:08] Yes, it definitely starts with understanding your audience. Thinking back to some of the learning businesses that I would have worked with when I was on the LMS [learning management system] side of things, being able to understand your audience will help you to better promote your programs. For example, I’m thinking of a learning business that was in the insurance space, and they provided training and accreditation for people across all aspects, in all different kinds of roles in the insurance industry. They had an amazing program that they put together. It was a subscription program, so it gave access to all of their content over the course of the subscription and allowed people to choose from various different career paths that they could take. But people weren’t taking it up, and they started looking at what was wrong with their messaging and what they could do to make it better.

Michelle Brien: [00:22:01] They came up with a marketing program that created videos of people who were at the top of their career in those different roles within the industry, and they talked about how much the education that they had received had helped them in making their choices in where to specialize or how to move through their career. And they used those videos then to promote the education programs to younger professionals or people coming into the industry, people who are trying to choose their specialization, and they saw a huge increase in the uptake of their programs. It really does come back to understanding who your audience is, what their needs are, what they’re trying to get from what you might be able to offer, and how you can help them to achieve that, and then creating messaging that helps to show them not just what you provide but what the benefit is to them—where they can get to or what they can achieve by engaging with your education program.

Personal Approach to Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:23:01] That makes a ton of sense, focusing again back on value, and that value which has to be grounded in what are the actual needs of the audience that you serve or aim to serve. We always love to ask guests who come on the podcast about their own lifelong learning habits, and so I’d be curious to know what are some of your sources, habits, or practices that you use to inform how you continue to learn and grow?

Michelle Brien: [00:23:30] Yes, sure. To be honest, I try to engage in a lot of different kinds of learning. I haven’t done a structured training program in a little while, but I actively follow people on LinkedIn in the marketing space, especially on the RevUP side of things, to look at where things are going and what I can learn from them. And there are so many people that share free learning resources and share ideas, and so I try to make the most of those. The other aspects, I would say, of learning is, for me, not just learning about marketing but also learning about the community that I work in and how better to understand it. For example, I try to follow a lot of the people in the association or learning business areas to see what’s important to them and what I can learn about them.

Michelle Brien: [00:24:22] Some fantastic books, as well, that I’ve recently ordered. Michael Tatonetti, Pricing for Associations, has just come out with a new book about pricing and value for associations. Amanda Kaiser’s Elevating Engagement—really trying to understand where that comes from. And so I would have to say a big part of my learning about the community that I’m working in and a part of comes from looking for the people who amplify the voices of other people in that community. So the Leading Learning Podcast is probably one of the first tools that I looked to when I joined the association community years ago. And also people like Deirdre Reid. Or Association Forum, Associations Now from ASAE. People who gather the voices and stories from the community and share them. I try and learn a lot from those.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:19] Michelle Brien is vice president of marketing at Matchbox.

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Related Resources* Revving Up Revenue with Sean Soth * Value-Based Pricing with Dr. Michael Tatonetti * Elevating Engagement with Amanda Kaiser * Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbThe third sector of education can be difficult for learners to navigate, and pathways can help learners. Having guides along the pathways can help even more.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 407, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele draw on a recent guided trekking experience to offer six takeaways about the value of guides that learning businesses might apply as they work to better serve their learners.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] Having a pathway to follow is helpful for learners in today’s ambiguous world. Having guides along that pathway is even more helpful.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:15] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:24] We’ve talked about and written about and generally spouted the value of pathways for adult lifelong learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:31] Yes, the third sector of education can be difficult for learners to navigate, and pathways are a way that learning businesses can help learners make sense of the choices. By offering prescribed or recommended plans for what learning experiences can lead to what ends, learning businesses provide some clarity in an ambiguous environment.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:53] And while we’ve talked about the value and importance of pathways, what we’ve talked about less is the value of guides, and so that’s what we want to focus on in this episode, number 407, because guides are able to further adapt and personalize pathways for specific learners and for specific circumstances and events.

Firsthand Experience with Guides in Peru Got Us ThinkingJeff Cobb: [00:01:18] Part of what has us thinking about the value of guides is a recent trip we took, and we’ve talked about the value of travel before. This was a case where travel proved very valuable to us. We took a trip to Peru, which involved a six-day trek that took us through a variety of landscapes and climates before the big finale (drumroll) of Machu Picchu.

A view of Machu Picchu from the Sun GateCelisa Steele: [00:01:43] Now, this is definitely not unexplored territory that we were covering.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:49] We weren’t going boldly where no one had gone before.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:51] Definitely not. Even if we just take that big finale of Machu Picchu, over 1.5 million people visit that site every year, which means an average of around 2,500 people per day.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:05] But, still, it was unfamiliar territory to us, and we weren’t just going to Machu Picchu. We were hiking over a whole bunch of terrain before we ever got there, and we decided that it would be good to work with a guide to do that.

6 Takeaways About the Value of GuidesCelisa Steele: [00:02:20] It definitely was a good move for the trip. And part of what value we got out of it was thinking about the value of having a guide, the value of engaging a guide. And us being us, we started thinking about, okay, what would the role of a guide tell us about the role of guidance in lifelong learning and what a learning business might provide?

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:46] This is what both of us were thinking about as we were walking along in a highly beautiful landscape. Not really, of course, but it did get us reflecting. We came up with six takeaways about the value of guides, and we think those takeaways apply or could apply to your learning business.

Create a FrameworkCelisa Steele: [00:03:06] First up, number one is create a framework. When you set out on a long journey, there are any number of decisions to be made, and, if you’re new to making that journey, if you’re a novice, you don’t really have a great foundation, a great basis for making those decisions, making the choices around, okay, where will I go? How long will I walk? All of those intricate details that are wrapped up in something like a six-day trek.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:36] And so a good guide is obviously going to do that for you. They’re going to create that framework for you. They’re going to draw on their own expertise and past experiences, as well as what they’ve observed about the experience of their past clients because they’ve done this a whole lot before. And so that’s the context of taking a trek—having that sort of guide leading you. But what could that look like for a learning business?

Celisa Steele: [00:04:02] I think surfacing and focusing in on the areas of learning that are truly most important for and valuable for your audience, that’s one takeaway of what this framework could look like in the context of a learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:18] Yes, so what’s perennially valuable, what’s emerging—that second part around what’s emerging is particularly important to that concept of leading learning. But, basically, a good guide in the context of a trek and a good guide in the context of a learning business is going to bring things down into an overall manageable context and conceptually give you the guidance on how to approach things. What it’s going to be valuable to do in setting that smaller context, that more defined context in which you’re going to pursue learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:55] I think one way that can manifest itself is in assessments or other ways that you help learners understand where they are and which offerings in your portfolio are going to be appropriate to them—i.e., which offerings do they already have enough background and knowledge and skills to then be able to engage in? Which ones aren’t going to be too easy, and which ones aren’t going to be too hard? And so that idea of helping people find what’s appropriate to them, through assessments or other things, I think that’s a strong example of what guiding could look like in the context of a learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:35] Of course, even knowing what to assess, what to ask—the kinds of things that are going to help people define their learning experience—that’s part of creating that framework as a guide. Another way this happens or could happen is recommendations for how much to do by when—and maybe different scenarios. For example, if somebody’s working full time, you might go through the material at this pace; if you’re between jobs or working part time, then you might go at a different pace. But, in general, again, it’s setting up those parameters for you to engage in your learning journey. To extend this metaphor, a guide in the trekking world is leading you on a journey; a guide in the learning business world is also leading people on a journey.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:21] I think those recommendations that you were just talking about, Jeff, it reminds me of the concept of atomization that we talked about when we were doing our audio book report on the latest book from Mauborgne and Kim, Beyond Disruption—this idea of breaking down a goal into achievable bits and parts. So, if you’re going to say, “We’re going to go out and hike 50 miles,” that might seem overwhelming. But, when you break it down into, “We’re going to do 12 miles this day and 10 miles this day, and we’re going to have breaks for lunch, and we’re going to have breaks for snacks,” all of that, then, begins to make it seem much more doable. And what you were talking about, Jeff, in breaking down a learning plan and saying, if you’re studying for a certification, for example, that could be a huge body of content, but, if you begin to break it down and say, “Okay, by the end of the first month, you need to have covered these concepts, and then the second month you’re going to move on to these,” that begins to make it much more attainable and doable.

Map from Salkantay Trekking showing major points along one of its treks2. Manage the PathJeff Cobb: [00:07:19] So that’s the first way in which a guide can be truly valuable, helping to create that framework, providing you with a more defined space within which to work and approach navigating that space. And then, of course, you are actually navigating that space; you’re taking a pathway through it. And that’s the second big thing that a guide does for you is help to manage that path. There were extended periods along the trail when we were doing the trekking in Peru thing, where the guide was nowhere in sight, but that was possible because we were on the right path in the first place. At points where the path was not as clear, the guide would point the way. And, given all that’s happened in Peru during the rainy season, there were times when the path was completely covered by landslides. In those cases, the guide—and this was in collaboration with other guides—led efforts to re-create a path across those landslides.

Hikers crossing a path newly hacked across a landslide that covered the original roadCelisa Steele: [00:08:18] Also know that the same approach to the path didn’t always work for everyone. At the highest altitude part of our trip, where there was the steepest incline, the guide recommended horses for a couple of people in our group, and that was based on him having observed us doing a shorter high-altitude hike the day before, and so he was able then to make targeted recommendations for each person. For some, he thought, “You’ll be fine. Tomorrow you can do that high-altitude, longer, uphill, fairly strenuous, challenging hike.” For others, he thought, “You know what? You might not actually enjoy doing that. Or it might be you pushing you beyond your limits, but we have this option where you can take a horse to the top and then walk down.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:07] And that’s, again, based on what we were saying before, that the guide has expertise. The guide has observed many other people go through this journey, this experience before and can then draw on that to help to manage the path for each of the travelers. Again, what might this look like for a learning business? How do we extend this metaphor into our day-to-day work?

Celisa Steele: [00:09:28] I think that managing the path, in the context of a learning business, could look like more personalized feedback on progress. If you begin to notice that a learner is going through material more slowly than anticipated or if performance on assessments is lower than anticipated, then that would be a moment to recalibrate. Similarly, if a learner is flying through all the content or scoring perfectly, it might also be a sign that it’s time to recalibrate and perhaps offer something more challenging in that case—obviously less challenging in the case of someone moving slower or not performing as well. But it’s really about assessing the progress that individual learners are making and then refining, recalibrating as needed.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:16] Similar is helping that learner to self-assess and be self-aware. So try out this test, which, the corollary in the trekking world, might be a short hike, as opposed to taking on the whole Salkantay trail, which we did. Try something out first to see how you do, and then that’s going to help you predict how you’re going to do on the big test, the big exam, or in this case, the longer, the bigger hike that we ended up taking.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:44] This might be a good place to note that, while we’re talking about guides—we’re talking specifically in our trek about an actual person as guide—what we’re talking about with learning businesses is guidance in general, which might be provided by people, by facilitators, by instructors. But some of this may also be baked into your technology, for example. And you might be looking at data, looking at reports that come out of your learning technology platform, to see, okay, is this person slowing down or not? And so, it could be more automated. We’re talking about guidance and guides somewhat metaphorically—could be people; could also be other ways in which you’re providing that guidance.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:28] Of course, this is one of the big potential areas for something like artificial intelligence—it can play that guide role in a highly scalable basis. You’ve got to have the data there. You’ve got to have the good practices in place to support that happening. But once it does, AI as guide is a very powerful concept.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:50] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Focus Learners’ AttentionCelisa Steele: [00:12:28] Our third takeaway from our trekking experience is that a guide can help focus your attention. When you’re hiking through mountains, and you’re doing that day after day, there’s a lot to take in, and there’s a lot that can capture your eye. It’s good for hikers to be free to let their minds wander and take in whatever part of the scene strikes them, but there are also things that you want to make sure that a hiker doesn’t miss on a journey.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:00] For example, the huge variety of orchids that grow in the Peruvian jungles. They’re everywhere. I had no idea. But our guide helped us to tune in to the many different varieties along the way. And, of course, now I’m aware that there are even many more that we haven’t seen yet and probably do a little more looking on that.

Wiñay Wayna orchids along an Inca TrailCelisa Steele: [00:13:21] A good guide will call your attention to things like that, things that you might not have noticed—one or two kinds of orchids, some of the bigger, flashier ones growing closer to the trail, you might notice. But, when they can pull back the foliage and show you the tiny little orchid right there, you begin to have a new appreciation for that particular environment, that particular climate. That’s a great example of a guide calling your attention to something that you might have overlooked if left to your own devices.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:50] Right. So orchids, learning business—how do we tie these two things together?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:57] One area would be around pruning, which continues the vegetation analogy. We know from all that learning science has taught us is that pruning learning content down to the essential is so, so important, so that we’re not overwhelmed by extraneous information as learners. You really want to prune so that you can focus in on what’s most important. In the case of the guide with the orchids, part of that is literally parting the leaves to call your attention, forefronting that little tiny orchid that’s down there and allowing you to appreciate it. In the context of learning then, it is about making sure that you are not hiding the key content and the key information by having too much there. It is about pruning, so that then what’s left is visible, is on display, is going to be something that the learner won’t miss.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:53] Yes, and we talk about this a lot in the “Presenting for Impact” course that we’ve made to help subject matter experts improve the educational impact of their teaching, and this whole process of getting attention in the first place and then maintaining it. Pruning is a big part of that. If you put too much in front of people, they don’t know where to put their attention. You have to guide them to where to focus that attention and use both art and science. And how you do that—whether it’s through how your slides are created, how you stand in front of the room and present yourself, or whatever the particular teaching and learning medium is—really paying due attention in how you’re going to earn that from the learners and keep focusing it in the right way throughout the experience.

Learn more about “Presenting for Impact,” a free resource you can use with your presenters and subject matter experts.4. Challenge LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:15:40] The fourth takeaway we have is that a good guide will challenge you. They’ll challenge the learner. A guide is not there to passively go along for the ride. No, the guide is there, an active participant observing what you’re doing, trying to figure out when, where, and how to push you a bit, but, of course, also doing that in a supportive way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:08] Yes. On one day, for example, we had to cross the Urubamba River twice using a pretty rudimentary, hand-towed cable car. This was the end of the rainy season, so it was really a raging river. The water was flowing very, very fast.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:25] And fairly high up above the water as well. Probably 40 feet.

Co-host Jeff Cobb and another hiker using a cable car to cross the Urubamba RiverJeff Cobb: [00:16:30] Forty or 50 feet up, and you’ve got this churning water going underneath you. One of the hikers, a person who was in front of me, was clearly frightened of doing this, which is certainly understandable. But one of the guides really encouraged her and rode across with her both times. I’m sure that, when she looks back on that experience and tells friends and family about it for years to come, that’s going to be something she talks about.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:55] Another example was, we mentioned already, in the rainy season, there were landslides that closed the path in multiple places. And, yes, we used the cable cars in a couple of places to get around some landslides. But the other approach was the guides re-hacked a pathway across the landslide. So you’re walking across land that had just recently fallen. That also gave some hikers pause, to be walking across that landslide that seemed like it might begin to slide again. There was at least one hiker that I saw who balked at crossing, and so a guide went across, held her hand, and led her across. Again, it’s this idea of really being there, providing support, being attuned to what any individual is feeling, and figuring out, as a guide, what support can you offer? What can you do that will make it feel manageable?

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:55] This speaks to how important trust and authority are for guides because I’m not going to just follow somebody across a new path through a landslide or go across a raging river on what looks like a flimsy cable car unless I trust that these people know what the hell they’re doing and that they have the authority to say that this is something to do. And you know that they’ve done it before many times, that they’re not going to take a risk. They’ll be risking their own lives and health in this. So they have to earn that trust. They have to have that recognized authority to be effective as guides.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:35] In the context of learning and learning businesses, this correlates, in my mind, to appropriate challenge, and that’s a really big deal in learning. If something’s too easy, then there’s not really going to be any growth or learning because the learner doesn’t really have to engage and apply herself. If it’s too hard, then the learner may give up, throw her hands up, and walk away. Again, no real growth or learning. So there’s a lot about pitching the learning experience to the appropriate level for the learner. Jeff, I know this came up in your recent conversation with Clark Quinn, that importance of pitching the right level for the learner.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:15] It did. It’s so important in practice and application, which themselves are such important concepts to learning that often don’t get the attention that they should. And often wrapped up in that are emotions. Emotions are a big deal that, again, often don’t get as much air time, as much attention as they could. But, to go back to that example of crossing the landslide or the woman who was struggling with the cable car, there’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in that. Some of that was some genuine fear, obviously some anxiety that was at a manageable level. It was at the appropriate level of challenge. You could get past it. But that core emotion, being there, is a big part of what makes that experience memorable. It’s going to cement it into long-term memory and be something that somebody carries forward with them. That’s integral to effective learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:07] That also came up in your conversation with Clark Quinn—the importance of emotion and how we tend to focus too much on cognition without paying attention to the fact that, if emotion is not managed, if it’s too high, then it may actually interfere with cognition. A little bit of anxiety, a little bit of fear may actually help with learning, but, if it’s too much, then it’s going to tip over, and someone’s not going to be able to pay attention and actually do what is required of them. It’s that balance. I think again a good guide is going to pay attention not only to the cognitive aspect and whether something is too hard or too easy, but also the emotional side. Is it too stressful? Is it too anxiety-producing to be useful?

Help Learners CelebrateJeff Cobb: [00:20:51] Right. To briefly recap where we are so far, that good guide is going to create the framework, the overall approach to the experience; is going to manage the path through the experience, not dictate the path, mind you, but manage that path or help you manage that path. It’s going to help with focusing your attention in the most meaningful and valuable ways. It’s going to challenge you, as we were just talking about. And then, the fifth one, a good guide is going to help you celebrate.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:19] The guides would typically hold up their hands for high fives at the end of particularly hard climbs, or you got to the summit, high five, or they’d say, “Okay, here we are. Here’s this beautiful scenic spot. Stand here for a picture.” Again, they’re trying to help us see our accomplishment and celebrate with us that we’ve achieved something.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:40] Our particular guide had an approach to taking photos where he would—or videos, really. He would start the video, then walk towards you, and then have the camera swoop over the top of you so it looked like a drone or something was diving in to take the video of you, which was very effective. We all appreciated it. And there are other things too. One afternoon—this is probably about halfway through—we’d done most of the big hikes that we’re going to do, and there was an afternoon where we were able to go to some hot springs, and this happened to be after we’d been spending the day crossing landslides, lots of distance, lots of stress, and being able to essentially celebrate a little bit by sitting in some warm, hot springs water was a great thing.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:19] What does helping learners celebrate look like for a learning business? I think one obvious way is that, especially along those longer pathways, say, working towards a certification, you want to celebrate the accomplishments that a learner makes along the way. Rather than waiting until they actually pass that certification exam, which might be a year down the road, you want to help them celebrate, as they’ve maybe taken a practice test or as they’ve covered a certain amount of content in their review. You begin to help them see what they’ve already achieved and build some momentum to continue to carry them forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:56] Yes, definitely. We got a little certificate at the end that said we had accomplished this, which I wasn’t really even expecting, but, to be honest, a fist bump up at 15,000 feet on the Salkantay trail probably meant a whole lot more to me than that certificate’s ever going to mean. Often these things are extrinsic. They’re these little gestures, tokens, that sort of thing. But, hopefully, you’re really tying them into. You’re tapping into the learners’ intrinsic motivation as you’re doing it. These guides know it. At the point that we’ve gotten up to 15,000 feet, and they’re giving us that high five, internally, we know we’ve done something that got us there. And, really, the high five is just the exclamation point on it, so to speak.

Have Learners DoCelisa Steele: [00:23:37] Our sixth and final takeaway that we’re going to offer is that a guide, a good guide, has you do. There’s nothing theoretical about hiking 50 miles. Every day you have to get up, and often you have to get up very early. There was a 4:30 a.m. wakeup call many mornings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:56] More than once, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:57] You have to get up, put on your boots, grab your hiking poles, and then you put one foot in front of another. This isn’t about just studying the map and thinking about the pathway. It’s about actually walking the pathway.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:12] That’s so true because I can remember studying the map. We had the map of what we were going to do, and it’s a pale shadow of what it’s actually like to do it. It was helpful, but, still, as you said, it’s the actual doing that helps. And so, once again, we can tie this back to good practices for learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:32] What having you do might look like in a learning business is practice and application and making sure that you’re building that into your learning experiences and giving your learners chances to think about how concepts apply to their lives and their jobs—and not just think but actually do something related to that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:57] We have a briefing we should mention, “Practice Makes Profit,” which goes into how important practice is as part of creating impactful learning experiences that are going to attract learners back, again, time over time, they’re going to be willing to pay for learning experiences, their employers are going to be willing to fund. So this doing as a path to learning is extremely important.

Download the free briefing to learn how and why to make better use of practice in your portfolio of offerings.Some Final Thoughts on What Guidance Might Look Like in Learning BusinessesCelisa Steele: [00:25:24] Again, this guidance that we’ve been talking about may take the shape of humans—human guides, instructors, facilitators—helping your learners. It may be more built-in, baked into some of the technology. It may leverage AI. It may leverage other data that you have. But the idea is to think about not just providing the pathway but to also think about how can you guide your learners in their progress along that pathway and making the appropriate decisions for them as they move along that pathway.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:00] Right, and this is all part and parcel of good, effective instructional design. To go back to my conversation with Clark Quinn, this really gets at a lot of what he talks about when he talks about making experiences meaningful for learners. When you’re doing that, when you’re making the experiences meaningful, you are serving these functions. You’re doing these things that we’ve just described as a good guide.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:47] Having a pathway to follow is helpful for learners in today’s ambiguous world. Having guides along that pathway is even more helpful. So think about how your learning business might offer both pathways and guides to help your learners.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* The Science of Engagement with Clark Quinn * “Presenting for Impact” online course * “Practice Makes Profit” executive briefing

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbIn the Tagoras Learning Business Maturity Model, strategy is one of the five fundamental domains learning businesses need to work on and in to mature and be successful.

To help with your essential strategy work, in this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 406, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele talk about “Part Two: How to Realize Nondisruptive Creation” of Beyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth Without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] The book Beyond Disruption can help learning businesses think about identifying new products and services to reach more learners, generate more revenue, and have greater impact—and do that in a way that avoids the disruption of traditional kinds of innovation.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:22] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:30] In our Learning Business Maturity Model, strategy is one of the five fundamental domains learning businesses need to work on and work in in order to mature and be successful.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:42] To help in your strategy work, we offer in this episode, number 406, the second half of our audio book report on Beyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth Without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:01] As a reminder, in episode 404, we covered the first half (part one) of that book, which is titled “Nondisruptive Creation: What It Is and Why It Matters.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:22] In this episode, we’re going to look at the second half, or “Part Two: How to Realize Nondisruptive Creation.” So more how-to and practical versus the more conceptual that we covered in the previous episode.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:38] If you haven’t listened to episode 404 yet, we do encourage you to listen to it, but this episode should also stand on its own.

Defining Nondisruptive Creation: It’s Not Disruptive Creation, and It’s Not Blue OceanJeff Cobb: [00:01:48] It can stand on its own, but, as a reminder for those who listened to episode 404 already, we should offer a quick recap. And, of course, this will be good for those who have not listened to episode 404 already.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:59] Kim and Mauborgne argue that nondisruptive creation is a unique form of innovation, and it involves “the creation of a brand-new market outside or beyond existing boundaries.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:15] This is a new term, a new positioning—which is always good for selling books, I’ll say—but it’s not a new phenomenon.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:25] Yes, a lot of the examples that we cover in episode 404 go back decades at this point. So definitely not a new phenomenon. But, as you said, this is their positioning of it, and that’s the basis for this book. They contrast nondisruptive creation with disruptive creation, and disruptive creation displaces and disrupts usually at least some, if not potentially close to all, of an existing industry. You have Netflix eating Blockbuster’s lunch, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:57] Right, and, for a long time, this was really seen as “the” way to innovation, and innovation and disruption, you always heard those in the same breath, and it felt like a zero-sum game. There are winners, and there are losers. Basically, if you’re innovating, you are disrupting. You’re taking some of your competitors’ pie.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:17] Now, they also argue, Kim and Mauborgne, that nondisruptive creation is different than blue ocean strategy, which was really what brought them to the forefront of so many people’s attention—it certainly brought them to our attention. But blue ocean strategy leads to a blend of disruptive and nondisruptive growth; usually some displacement happens, but it’s less than with disruptive creation. It’s a middle path. When we talked about Southwest, for example, in episode 404, it took away some demand from the existing airline industry. It also took away some demand from the existing rental car industry. And then it created a little new demand by working across those two existing industries.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:01] And so blue ocean is already pointing towards that non-zero-sum thinking; it’s about expanding that pie to create those blue oceans rather than just taking somebody else’s pie.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:13] Then nondisruptive creation and growth—when you’re dealing with that kind of innovation—it doesn’t involve any significant displacement. Sesame Street and Post-it Notes are examples of nondisruptive creation, and that nondisruptive creation is the focus of Beyond Disruption. With it, you have positive-sum thinking. Instead of zero-sum thinking, this is actually really adding to that pie, and it’s a win-win rather than a win-lose.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:45] To sum up, disruptive creation generates new markets within existing industry boundaries, which creates that disruptive growth. Blue ocean strategy creates new markets across existing industry boundaries, producing a mix of disruptive and nondisruptive growth. And then nondisruptive creation creates new markets outside existing industry boundaries and generates mostly nondisruptive growth.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:11] So the three key words there are those prepositions: within, across, outside. For disruption, you’re looking within existing boundaries. For blue ocean, you’re looking across existing boundaries. And then with the nondisruptive creation, you’re looking outside of existing industries.

Recapping the Three Distinctive Characteristics of Nondisruptive CreationJeff Cobb: [00:05:29] In Part One, Kim and Mauborgne talk about three distinctive characteristics of nondisruptive creation. It can come about, for example, because of a scientific or technology-driven innovation—think something like Post-it Notes—but it doesn’t have to—think about something like Sesame Street, which really wasn’t a technology innovation.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:51] They also say that nondisruptive creation is not limited to any specific region or socioeconomic standing. It can happen in developed markets or in developing, or bottom-of-the-pyramid, markets. You take something like Post-its and Sesame Street—those started in developed economies. But you have Grameen Bank starting in Bangladesh and that bottom-of-the-pyramid-type setting.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:14] And then, finally, it can be new-to-the world innovation—so something we just haven’t seen before, like Square, the e-commerce tool—or it can simply be new to an area of the world, for example, where it hasn’t been there before, and we referenced the machine sold in India to make sanitary pads.

The Importance of Mindset in Nondisruptive Creation and Structure Versus AgencyCelisa Steele: [00:06:32] That’s the end of our recap and reminder of what this nondisruptive creation is all about. But, in Part Two of Beyond Disruption, Kim and Mauborgne look at how you can find these kinds of innovations, whether they’re new to the world or new to an area, as you were just talking about that distinction, Jeff. I would say that a lot of what they suggest in Part Two of the book boils down to what we would call mindset. Organizations that find nondisruptive creation often do so by essentially having a growth mindset, by having a can-do, can-learn mindset, and feeling like they’re not going to be fixed and limited by current constraints. They borrow a distinction from sociology. It’s a distinction between structure and agency. Structure has to do with the environment, the world we experience, and our reality.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:33] Agency has to do with the power for us to think and act for ourselves and that influences and even creates our environment. Kim and Mauborgne argue that, for a long time, the corporate world has been urged to analyze what is, so that they can then shape their view of what could be—meaning they were focusing on structure, focusing on the reality and the world as it exists. But Kim and Mauborgne point out that organizations that generate nondisruptive creation tend to focus more on agency over structure. That focus on agency and this idea to think and act leads then to having them question the existing assumptions, that leads to them experimenting. It leads to them reimagining a world without those givens and those limitations of that more structure-driven viewpoint that has had a strong hold in the corporate world and in business in general for so long.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:38] It’s probably easy to not appreciate or even to dismiss how important that point of view is because it is true. So much of strategy, historically, has flowed out of situational analysis. What is the situation right now? And then what do we change to create a new situation? I think that factors into blue ocean strategy as well. The blue ocean strategy isn’t free of that. Getting yourself in a mindset that’s not just about what is—or not dwelling too much on what is, and trying to get outside of the boundaries entirely. Maybe completely throw out what is, and imagine a different world entirely. You think of the world that we work in, where it’s just a given that there is continuing education credit, for example. So many organizations operate in that world, and it’s unimaginable to even think that maybe there could not be CE credit and still be a viable learning business. And it’s a good exercise to throw that out the window and say, “We don’t have that. So what now?”

Don’t Confuse the Means with the End and Focus on ValueCelisa Steele: [00:09:41] Kim and Mauborgne also make the point that nondisruptive innovation and growth tend to come from organizations that don’t confuse the means with the ends. That is, those organizations don’t focus on the discovery, the new technology, or the product per se. Instead they focus on value. Here’s a little quote from Beyond Disruption: “They”—meaning these organizations creating nondisruptive innovation and growth—“see technology as a great enabler but realize that value innovation, offering buyers a leap in value, is what ultimately creates a nondisruptive market.”

Celisa Steele: [00:10:23] Technology is at the heart of a lot of the nondisruptive innovation cases that they cite, but the key is to not see that technology as the end but as a means to an end. The tech is providing a path to providing value. We can take Post-it Notes again—that was a technology-driven innovation. It was essentially a failed adhesive, and it was set aside because, until there was a use case that unlocked the value of that discovery, there really wasn’t a use for it. But somebody suddenly realized, “You know what? Being able to put something on a page and then remove it later, that’s actually pretty useful.” So, again, the technology didn’t necessarily have value until the application was thought of.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:13] Yes, and I think this focus on value—we do tend to focus a lot on value, at both Leading Learning and Tagoras, when we’re talking about things like pricing but also strategy in general—I think it’s when you really forefront “What is the value that we can create, that we’re trying to create, that is possible, that we’ve discovered, that nobody else has discovered?,” when you start focusing on that, that’s really what frees you up from being mired in the current situation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:40] You’re really focusing on what that value is, how you can achieve that, what makes sense for achieving that value, and you start to get into areas where nobody else has been thinking before, if you can discover what those new areas of value might be in ways that you can realize that value. To go back to the continuing education thing, for the most part, nobody really cares if they’re getting continuing education credit. They’re doing it for some other reason. There’s some value that’s being created, or potentially created, for learners in this whole learning business landscape that we work in, live our lives in, day in and day out. And, if you spend some time thinking about “What is that value? How can value be realized?,” you start to leave behind all of the old structures and start to think through “What is it that gets us to achieve that value?”

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:12:32] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Nondisruptive Creation Tends to Be DemocraticCelisa Steele: [00:13:09] The third point they make around what I’m going to put under the umbrella of mindset around nondisruptive creation is that the organizations that go down that nondisruptive creation path tend to view creation as more democratic. You don’t have to be the scientist in a lab having that great breakthrough. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur per se. One example that they give is Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented White-out. She was a secretary and an artist, and she realized that the way painters paint over a canvas to cover up mistakes could actually be applied to the pages she was typing up. She wasn’t high up in this bank at all, but she had this insight and her experience, and she was able to create this nondisruptive creation of White-out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:57] Fun fact: She was a single mother, and her son, Michael, grew up to be in the Monkees. Michael Nesmith—you may recognize the name if you’re a fan.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:06] “Hey, hey….”

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:07] “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.” Yes, that might be my favorite bit of information from this entire episode.

How to Identify and Pursue Nondisruptive OpportunitiesCelisa Steele: [00:14:13] Then, after the mindset, Kim and Mauborgne get into—or try to get into—some more specifics about how to identify and pursue a nondisruptive opportunity. And I say “try” because their three building blocks for realizing nondisruptive creation are really almost laughably simplistic. Building block one is identify a nondisruptive opportunity. Number two is find a way to unlock the opportunity. And number three is realize the opportunity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:41] Yes, definitely simple, or even simplistic, but not easy.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:46] No, definitely not easy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:48] I was talking earlier about you need to see new value. You need to understand value and really align your activities to the creation, the delivery of that value if you want to break outside of current structures. But that’s not easy. Occasionally, some great, new value falls in your lap to a certain extent, something like Post-it Notes did. You created it for some other reason, and then, suddenly, you have an aha. But oftentimes this is why organizations call in consultants. That’s why you have retreats. It’s why you try to engage in active learning, day in and day out, so that you will have those moments where you have that realization that, hey, there is a huge value opportunity here, and we can start to find the ways to unlock it and realize it.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:31] Yes, I think that’s a very important and valid point. What Kim and Mauborgne are trying to do in the second half is teach you how to go out after these opportunities rather than just sitting and waiting for the aha, the eureka moment to strike. This is more about going out and trying to find these.

Two Avenues to Nondisruptive OpportunitiesCelisa Steele: [00:15:51] So they talk about two avenues to nondisruptive opportunities. One is by addressing an existing but unexplored issue or problem, and then the second is by addressing a newly emerging issue or problem. In terms of that first, addressing an existing but unexplored issue, Kickstarter falls into that category.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:15] Yes, for how many eons were people wanting to start a business, needed ways to fund that business that were simply out of reach to most aspiring business owners? Most people can’t go out and get loans from a bank. Most people can’t go and issue stock and sell it. So what’s the answer for that 90, probably 99 percent who can’t do those things?

Celisa Steele: [00:16:35] Right, and Kickstarter also had that real focus on creatives as well. So, really, almost microbusinesses and things that people sometimes don’t think of as businesses. You want to write that book and be able to put it out there or get that CD out there. Now, in the second category, addressing newly emerging issues or problems, Kim and Mauborgne talk about Dimchae, which is a kitchen kimchi maker that got really popular in Korea. What was happening is that Koreans traditionally would make their own kimchi, and they would put all the ingredients in a big clay pot, bury it in the garden, and then they’d have it over the course of several months. Well, as more and more Koreans moved to the city, they didn’t have gardens to bury these clay pots in anymore.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:21] You could do it in a refrigerator, but then your whole refrigerator smelled like kimchi, and it took up a lot of space in your refrigerator. So Dimchae made a countertop kimchi maker, and it took off. That’s just one example they give. Because of this move of the Korean population to the city, that’s what created this need. That was addressing a newly emerging problem. They also talk about the nondisruptive market of cybersecurity. As the Internet grew, as we all began to engage with e-mail and the Internet, that opened up the possibility for people to take advantage of us, which then created the opportunity for this cybersecurity market. Businesses working in that industry really are addressing a newly emerging issue or problem.

Three Ways to Identify Nondisruptive Opportunities: Direct Experience, Empathetic Observation, and Active ScoutingJeff Cobb: [00:18:05] Those are two avenues or paths to disruptive opportunities: an existing but unexplored issue or problem or a newly emerging one. And then they also talk about three ways to identify a nondisruptive opportunity, and those include direct experience, empathetic observation, and active scouting.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:27] With direct experience, this could be you’re Bette Nesmith Graham, and you’re thinking about how what a pain in the butt it is to retype your pages when you make a mistake, and you realize, “Ah, well, I can use the same logic that I use when I’m painting there.” So it can come from your direct hands-on experience. Empathetic observation can be that you’re paying close attention to those who are suffering the brunt of whatever the issue or problem is. And then, with active scouting, you’re going out and asking questions or doing some field work to observe what’s happening. I think all of this aligns pretty well to the Market Insight Matrix that we use in our line of work.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:08] It does. It aligns with our overall approach to market assessment in general. In the Market Insight Matrix, we divide activities into tracking, listening, and asking. Tracking is really observational—just looking at what’s happening out there. Listening is a little bit more engaged in conversations that are going on. And then asking is being more directive—actually putting something out there and testing it in the marketplace. And so you get levels of experience out of this. You certainly get the opportunity for empathetic observation. And then, in these more active parts of the Insight Matrix and of our market assessment in general, you are actively scouting and trying to surface what those opportunities are going to be. Where is that value that can be created that’s potentially being overlooked?

Celisa Steele: [00:20:00] We think of ourselves as lifelong learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:05] I do indeed.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:05] I think a lot of our listeners think of themselves as lifelong learners. So that first point, around direct experience, we shouldn’t gloss over that. There’s real potential for us to think about in our own learning, “Where are our pain points? What is it that, gosh, if someone could figure out how to do X, that would make my own learning so much easier, so much better?” Yes, you do need to know your audience. You need to do the work to make sure that you’re tracking, listening, and asking, that you’re having the empathetic observation opportunities, that you’re doing that active scouting. But also don’t forget that you do have direct experience that may be very relevant here.

Assessing and Framing Nondisruptive OpportunitiesJeff Cobb: [00:20:47] Definitely. And then, once you do have an opportunity in mind and, again, whether it’s to address an existing issue or an emerging new issue, you’re going to want to assess it and then really frame that opportunity.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:03] Yes, and that first one, around assessing the opportunity, Jeff, that fits very neatly with the kind of market assessment work we do a lot in our consulting projects. This is about really trying to assess the size of that potential market for whatever product this opportunity is going to lead to.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:21] Yes, it’s the analytical part of that. We’re going out and getting that data from the market, but then what opportunity does it really represent in terms of reach, revenue, impact? Those are the three things we talk about, and that’s how we characterize opportunities. Is this something that is really going to expand our reach? Is it going to expand our revenue? Is it going to help us to have much more impact than we might otherwise have?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:46] Yes, Kim and Mauborgne actually do talk about, when assessing the opportunity, to not just look at the financial side but to look at the impact side as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:53] Right.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:55] And then, on the framing side of things, Kim and Mauborgne talk about using “atomization” to make the opportunity seem more manageable and like something that could actually be pursued so that folks don’t get overwhelmed. As an example, the Grameen Bank didn’t set out to solve extreme poverty across all of Bangladesh. Instead, Yunus started with microloans in one village and then grew from there. By really focusing at first on the microloans in one village, that allowed him to get alignment around that vision, and it seemed achievable rather than saying, “We’re going to fix poverty.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:38] Right. And then to follow their flow, their logic: If you have an opportunity in mind, you’ve assessed the market potential and then framed that opportunity, then you’re ready to really invest the time and energy in trying to unlock that opportunity and realize its potential.

Who Should Theoretically Address This Opportunity, and Why Haven’t They?Celisa Steele: [00:22:58] And they say the place to start there is to try to understand why this opportunity has been overlooked or gone unaddressed. The key question they would have us ask is: “What industry should theoretically address this issue, and why hasn’t it done so?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:16] I think that’s an interesting one in our world because, just this week, I noted in a post on LinkedIn that Spotify has now entered the course market, lifelong learning. And, of course, LinkedIn itself has LinkedIn Learning. It bought Lynda a while back. You ask that question about “Who theoretically should address this issue?” It may be somebody you haven’t really been thinking about. It may be an industry you haven’t been thinking about before. Social media has gotten into this. Big tech companies have gotten into this. Now a company that’s known as a music distributor has gotten into this. It can produce some really interesting thinking to consider who else should or could address a particular opportunity.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:59] That is an interesting example because “Who should potentially be addressing this?,” it could point to one of those other players in the third sector, maybe. We like to talk about the third sector of education—that’s the range of folks helping people once they finish their formal education. And so it could be that an association’s saying, “Oh, well, normally, that would be a higher ed group doing that and handling that.” Or it could even be that a second sector player; maybe it’s even something that you expected high schools to address, for example, and now, suddenly, it needs to be addressed by someone else. I think that’s a little bit behind some of the need for the training that happens even as “educated folks” join the workforce, where the businesses are finding that they’re not really prepared to do the job and ready to do the job. In some ways, they’re backfilling for what might have been an earlier industry’s responsibility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:55] Yes. One of the reasons we see so much potential in digital credentials, which is something we’ve talked a lot about recently and are doing a lot of work in that area, is because it really seems like an area where the “Who should address the issue?” is a little bit up for grabs. There’s a lot of scrambling in academia, higher education around this. But there are also a lot of nonprofit and for-profit players involved in that. Employers themselves are involved in it. The associations are involved in it. How that’s all going to shape up? Again, to go back to something like LinkedIn, social networks, a lot of the value in badges, for example, right now is them showing up on LinkedIn profiles. There’s a role, obviously, for that sort of network of players to help create the ecosystem around digital credentials, which is a very important part of them actually catching on in the end. Again, there’s a big opportunity there, and that whole question of “Who should/who can really address it?” is very important.

Competence and Confidence RequiredCelisa Steele: [00:25:54] Now, Kim and Mauborgne also make the point that organizations that are going down this nondisruptive path need both confidence and competence. On the confidence side, they insist that it has to be the collective confidence. It has to be organization-wide. It can’t just be a leader or somebody who’s all gung-ho about this idea, and the rest of the people are thinking, “Oh, no, I don’t know if this is really going to pan out.” It’s collective confidence across your learning business or organization. Then the second part of that is the competence. They break competence down into three things. Resourcefulness, which I think is basically the ability to research and to learn new things and to be able to figure out what it is you need to know. The second thing is internal capabilities; this is basically what we refer to as capacity in the Learning Business Maturity Model—it’s about your existing people and technology in your organization and the knowledge and the skills that those people and that technology provide. Then the third thing is a could mindset instead of a should mindset. This gets back to opening up possibilities; it puts us into that agency realm rather than that structure realm.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:12] Should often makes people think about, “Oh, there’s a ‘right’ answer,” or “I should be doing it this way,” whereas could opens up possibilities, experimentation, and brainstorming—it opens up the possibilities. They offer a 2×2 matrix, where they put confidence on one axis and competence on the other, and then they divide those into high and low. That results in four boxes. If you’re in the box where both confidence and competence is high, then that’s a green light. That’s an idea to pursue. You can go all in on it. If your confidence and competence are both low, then that’s one you shouldn’t pursue. If it’s a mix, if either competence or confidence is low, and the other is high, then that’s a place where you need to do a little bit of rethinking and recalibrating to see can you bring up the confidence or the competence to be higher, and to make it a sufficiently safe bet to spend more time and energy pursuing whatever that nondisruptive opportunity is?

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:24] I will say, with any business book, if you want consultants to use it, want corporate leaders to use it—as I’m sure Kim and Mauborgne do with this book—you have to have a 2×2 matrix in it. That’s an absolute necessity. And that’s probably a good place to cap off our discussion of this book, and we hope the listeners have found it helpful. Obviously, we’re just scratching the surface here, and it’s a rich text that you should dig into. If you have not actually read Blue Ocean Strategy, which preceded this, you can read them independently, but we really, really strongly recommend that you read that as well. Read both of these. Mark them up. Have some discussion within your organization about them. They’re conceptually very powerful, but they’re also both practically very powerful.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:11] It’s something that I’ve always liked about Kim and Mauborgne; they give you these concepts, but they also give you some good tools to apply to bring the concepts to life and make them usable within your context. We’ll say too that we’d love to hear from you whether this book report has been useful or not, and we’d love recommendations from you if there are other books that you’d like us to do a future book report on. You can always send in comments on the show notes for any episode that we put out there. Or you can always send us an e-mail at leadinglearning@tagoras.com.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:08] The book Beyond Disruption can help learning businesses think about identifying new products and services to reach more learners, generate more revenue, and have greater impact—and do that in a way that avoids the disruption of traditional kinds of innovation.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Nondisruptive Creation, Part I * 6 Paths for Leading Your Learning Business to Blue Ocean * Tool Talk: The Market Insight Matrix * Digital Credentials Aren’t Valuable Unless… * Learning Business Maturity Model

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Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee
Clark Quinn We often hear learning businesses say they want to better engage their learners. But what is engagement, and how does it work?

In this episode, Leading Learning Podcast co-host Jeff Cobb digs into those questions with Clark Quinn, executive director of Quinnovation and author of Make It Meaningful: Taking Learning Design from Instructional to Transformational.

Jeff and Clark talk about engagement and motivation; learners’ cognitive, affective, and conative involvement; and how the cognitive aspect gets more than its fair share of emphasis. They also talk about the role of emotion in learning, about practice and feedback, and about how the ability to make better decisions is ultimately the desired outcome of most learning experiences.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesClark Quinn: [00:00:00] There’s a large focus on the cognitive side, but there’s much less focus on the engagement side. And yet we have evidence that it matters a lot, particularly your intent to commit to learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:18] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] We often hear learning businesses describe a desire to better engage their learners. But what is engagement, and how does one engage learners? This episode, number 405, digs into those questions with Clark Quinn. Clark wears many hats. He’s executive director of Quinnovation, chief learning strategist for Upside Learning, co-director of the Learning Development Accelerator, and science advisor to elevator9. Jeff and Clark talk about applying learning science to how learning experiences are designed, developed, and delivered—and how there’s still more work to do to make sure products and services are well aligned with learning science. They talk about engagement and motivation; about learners’ cognitive, affective, and conative involvement; and about how the cognitive aspect has gotten more than its share of emphasis over time. They talk about the role of emotion in learning, about practice and feedback, and about how, broadly speaking, the ability to make better decisions is the desired outcome of most learning experiences. Jeff and Clark spoke in March 2024.

Applying Learning Science to Achieve Better OutcomesJeff Cobb: [00:01:47] Can you say a little bit more, for listeners who may be less familiar with you, about the specific work that you do?

Clark Quinn: [00:01:55] The underlying theme, I would say, is that focus on applying learning science in ways that lead to better outcomes for individuals, for organizations, and hopefully for society as a whole.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:11] That certainly jibes with how I think about you, how I’ve interpreted your work. It seems to be very, very rooted in this desire to see learning science become much more integral to how we design and develop and deliver learning experiences. So I thought it would be interesting to get your thoughts right here at the very outset of our conversation on how are we doing on that? How much progress have you seen over your years of working in learning and development? Are we applying learning science more/better now, or are there areas where you still see significant room for improvement?

Clark Quinn: [00:02:46] The short answer is yes. But I am seeing increased attention to learning science. There are more books about it; there are more talks about it; people are caring more about it. And yet the flip side is we’re still not anywhere near where we could and should be as a whole. There are pockets of great innovation and application, and there are places where they’re still going, “Wait, if it looks like school, it’s learning, right? We’ll present knowledge, test knowledge, and we’re done.” No, but I get where they came from. We’re just trying to move the needle on that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:26] But you’re still out there fighting the good fight, I know, along with a number of other good people who we’ve also had on the podcast—folks like Will Thalheimer, Julie Dirksen, and those types.

What Is Engagement, and What Does Learning Science Say About It?Jeff Cobb: [00:03:35] Now, part of the reason you’re concerned with learning science is to be able to use it to create more engaging learning experiences, and that concept of engagement is something I’ve seen you devote a lot of attention to. It was really front and center in the most recent of your books, Make It Meaningful. I know I hear all the time from listeners, from clients that we work with, that what they want to do is create more engaging learning experiences. So let’s take a look at that. What does learning science tell us about how to achieve that goal, how to have those engaging learning experiences? And it might be helpful to preface that with what engagement is in the context of learning because people say “engaging,” “we want engagement,” and you’re never quite sure what they mean by that.

Clark Quinn: [00:04:21] Thanks for the opportunity because I was going to say I want to take a step back. From the cognitive science perspective, cognitive science was an interdisciplinary approach to thinking. When they realized philosophers, neuroscientists, linguists, and psychologists were all talking about thinking, and they weren’t talking to one another, they created the field cognitive science. And even cognitive science recognizes that cognition is only one aspect of how we engage. They talk about what we know. But then there’s also our intent to apply it, and they called that the conative aspect. And then there was the affective, which is who you are, which is largely immutable. But that conative is the intent to learn, and they similarly recognized, about a decade later, that there were a bunch of people looking at learning—cognitive scientists, educational psychologists, educators, and instructional designers—and they thought, “We need a way to come together.”

Clark Quinn: [00:05:15] And, as they pulled it together, they recognized that there’s a large focus on the cognitive side, but there’s much less focus on the engagement side. And yet we have evidence that it matters a lot, particularly your intent to commit to learn. We can give people learning, or—to paraphrase Dorothy Parker—you can lead a learner to learning, but you can’t make them think. But, if we open them up and help them know “I do need this, and I don’t know it already, and this experience will change that,” you’re going to get their willingness to at least beginning to engage, and then you have to deliver on that promise by ensuring that there’s the right level of challenge. Everything they’re doing is obviously of meaning to that trajectory, of moving from not knowing this to knowing this. Caring about them along the way and being supportive of their greatest success, you obtain and maintain that intent to learn.

Clark Quinn: [00:06:15] You have to get the learning elements right. You have to have the right cognitive things, but you also have to have the right emotional things. I use the word emotional as a shorthand, but it’s a shorthand for your motivation to learn, keeping anxiety low. It turns out a little bit of anxiety is conducive to learning, but too much will extinguish it, and learning itself is typically anxiety-inducing enough; you don’t need to add any more. So we make it safe to learn. We keep people’s motivation up. We build their confidence. And these are all not technically emotions yet a side that the cognitive side doesn’t tend to address and yet are important for learning. My previous book had been on the learning science, and I wanted to complement to talk about the engagement side, and that’s why I wrote the Make It Meaningful book and tried to summarize what’s known and apply it in a practical way so people can generate the engaging experiences you’re talking about.

The Role of Emotions in Motivation and LearningJeff Cobb: [00:07:14] You referenced emotion there, and I think we do tend to, if not completely overlook…we just don’t emphasize enough the role of emotion in learning. I think, to a large extent, people who are designing learning experiences, even if they are thinking about emotion, they’re just not really sure how do I connect with a learner emotionally? How do we do that better? You talk a lot about stories. I know stories are important. Say more about how we are able to get that emotional connection with learners.

Clark Quinn: [00:07:44] I break it up into two parts. One is the initial hook, to use a fishing metaphor—and I’m not a fishing person, so I may bugger this up. But we need to initially hook their interest, and then, again, we need to deliver on that promise, which the metaphor is landing them. You hook them, but then you’ve got to land them still. And I think the important component is the “What’s in it for me?” We have to help them understand why they should care. Too often we go, “This is the learning you have to have,” and we never address why. Even somebody who knows better, when I was writing about this, commented on my blog post. I said, “Well, tell me about your syllabus,” and he sent it to me, and I look at it and go, “Nowhere do you tell them why they should do this.” He goes, “You’re right. Thank you for giving me lots more work to do.”

Clark Quinn: [00:08:31] But that’s just an element we neglect. And really, of the instructional design theorists, for instance, John Keller is really the only one who’s talked about motivation. So he has his ARCS Model: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction, which are all great elements. It gives prescriptions, but it’s not quite, in my mind, the full picture. And so that’s what we’ve tried to pull together. How does surprise play a role in this, and how do we do this? But, at core, I think it’s about just helping them go, “I do need this. I need this.” It’s that “What’s in it for me? And there’s something I could be doing that I’m not doing now that matters.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:10] How do game elements fit into this? Because, obviously, people can get really charged up in game-type environments, and there’s always a lot of buzz out there about “Let’s build gamification into our learning” and that sort of thing. How does it connect into emotion? How does it connect into engagement?

Clark Quinn: [00:09:26] It’s interesting. We had Mark Oehlert on the LDA [Learning Development Accelerator] earlier this week talking about Think Like an Anthropologist, and he pointed to Raph Koster. Raph Koster is a game designer who wrote a book called A Theory of Fun, and in it he claims what makes games fun is learning, which actually, I think, is quite relevant. My very first book was on how do you design games for learning. And, in general, I want to separate out extrinsic motivation from intrinsic motivation. Actually, in the most recent book, I point to Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory that my partner in the LDA, Matt Richter, pointed me to. They talk about that distinction. There’s guilt: “Oh, I should do this. Or we just add points, and, oh, well, I’m getting this extrinsic motivation. I think there’s evidence that can be damaging. If you do it wrong, it can extinguish interest—or it only works for the 10 percent of people who are getting high scores, and, the rest of the people, it turns them off. Unless you have a highly competitive group, which can happen.

Clark Quinn: [00:10:27] But I’m much more interested in finding the intrinsic interest. Why should I care? And it’s not just points, but what is it about the inherent nature of this that is meaningful to me? What games do really well—you don’t play every game that’s out there. There’s a certain genre or certain games that work for you, and they have been chosen because they work, because they tap into some story you care about. And then games are wonderfully tuned. They spend buckets of money to fine-tune. It was Will Wright, one of the game designers, a game designer—he did SimCity and The Sims. He’s the one who said, “Look, building the model is one-tenth of the work. Tuning it is nine-tenths of the work,” and it’s all that work that they can spend to get the right ratio of rewards to actions—whether it’s the randomness of the loot you collect or how you advance—and integrating all this into a coherent whole can really play a role. That’s great when you’re designing a game. And I have designed games for learning.

Clark Quinn: [00:11:36] But even we can do that in non-game learning experiences just by making better contexts. It turns out learning science tells us we learn better in context than on abstract problems. What we can do from the emotional side is make that context compelling. Instead of just working on another patient, why not save the ambassador’s daughter or the rebel leader’s daughter? It’s more compelling. We’re not just making another deal for a little bit more commission. We’re doing the deal that’s going to save the company from going under. We have ways to ramp up this exaggeration. If you look at movies and TV, they ramp up exaggeration—real life to something that’s one level above but still compelling. And we can do that, and we should, because what we find is that it accelerates the time to learning and makes it more effective. It sticks better when we do this right. And that’s, I think, powerful reasons to do this.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:12:35] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

What Learning Science Tells Us About Practice and FeedbackJeff Cobb: [00:13:14] When you’re engaged in a game, you’re typically practicing and getting feedback. You may not be thinking about it that way, but that’s what you’re doing. I think most people who develop learning experiences do have some understanding that providing for practice and giving feedback are important for effective learning. But I think it trips a lot of people up. Either they make it more complicated than it needs to be, or they provide practice and feedback—and you mentioned meaning earlier and things being meaningful—that really aren’t very meaningful to the learner. It just feels like you’re going through the motions. So what does learning science tell us about how to do practice and feedback well?

Clark Quinn: [00:13:55] Contextualized practice matters. We want good story settings, but we should make them ones that the learner recognizes are relevant. And the challenge needs to be pitched at the right level. We learn that from games—too simple, and they’re boring. We can also learn that from Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, and it happens to match really nicely with Vygotsky’s notion of Zone of Proximal Development. Too simple, no learning happens, and it’s boring. Too complex, it’s too frustrating, and no learning happens. And in between is the zone. And that changes as you develop your abilities. You need more challenges. You need the right level of challenge and the right context, a good story that is a real application of that skill and yet one that the learner recognizes. It doesn’t have to be set in the real world; it can be set in a fantastic world. And there are reasons, particularly in the case of needing far transfer, where that may actually facilitate your ability to abstract the underlying principles and then remap. Because from learning science, we have two goals: retention over time until it’s needed and transfer to all appropriate, no inappropriate situations.

Clark Quinn: [00:14:58] By practicing across contexts—the multiple practice spaced over time supports retention, which is why games have you do it again and again. You face this opponent, that opponent, that opponent, and, to Raph Koster’s point, at the end is a test. At the end of a level is a test—it’s the boss. You’ve practiced these maneuvers, and now you really have to put them all together to get past the boss. That’s a test. It’s learning. But then feedback. People are beginning to recognize that the best feedback comes in the form of consequences of your actions in some way. It may be your boss saying, “That was a bad decision.” It may be your customer saying, “Nope, that didn’t work.” It may be your patient dying. Whatever it is. The didactic feedback was the wrong choice because this should come after the experience.

Clark Quinn: [00:15:45] You don’t want to break the experience and stop and say, “No, that’s the wrong answer. Okay, now continue.” Particularly as you gain expertise, your feedback can be delayed. But games, as you point out, really are multiple-choice questions. Do I shoot this opponent versus that opponent? Do I run away? These are all choices you make. And then the consequence of those actions plays out. You may die, and you have to learn why. Better try not running away this time because it didn’t work. Whatever it is. You’re having choices and feedback, and they are tuned to be at the right level of challenge and have the right level of randomness and the right level of rewards. We need to be thinking about that from a learning perspective as well. What are the right decisions? What are the consequences of that? How do they tie together? Really good learning designs are mini scenarios, and, if you string them together, you get branching scenarios, or you can have a full simulation-driven experience underneath that’s really a game. But, whatever it is, it’s the core thing.

Clark Quinn: [00:16:45] By the way, editorial comment. This is what AI is not yet going to be able to do, and perhaps for the foreseeable future, is actually determine what are the right decisions we need to embed in sequence at the right level and a variety of contexts to span. And then AI can help us write really compelling scenarios. But, as yet, I think the role of designers is going to be embedding the right decisions in a meaningful context and choosing the right sequence of consequences and feedback. And we know what makes good feedback. Learning science tells us, in addition to practice being contextual and challenging and spaced and whatever, feedback needs to be minimal, based on the behavior, not the person, specifically referred to the underlying mental model that tells you how the world works, and should guide your decisions. All that stuff can happen. But the world should tell it to you first, and then, after the experience, you can provide the didactic feedback.

Making Better Decisions: The Ultimate Goal of Most LearningJeff Cobb: [00:17:45] You used a word in there a few times that has jumped out to me in your writing, and that’s decisions—making decisions, making choices. It makes me think about, when we’re designing and delivering learning experiences, when we are learning, we’re presumably doing that because we want to achieve something. You can make an argument for learning for the sake of learning, but I think, even then, you’ve got something that you’re trying to achieve, some sort of outcome. And your perspective that comes through a number of times in Make It Meaningful is that the ability to make better decisions is really, broadly speaking, the desired outcome of all learning in a way. Could you say a little bit more about that? Because it makes so much sense, and, when I read that, I was like, “Yes, of course.” But I don’t think I’d heard it quite put that way before. So tell us more about the role of being able to make decisions in learning.

Clark Quinn: [00:18:40] I argue largely that what’s going to make a difference to the individuals you care about, to the organizations that need these people, is not going to be the ability to recite more rote facts. That’s rarely going to be what’s useful. What’s largely going to make a difference in going forward, in our increasingly ambiguous era where rote stuff gets increasingly automated, the ability to make decisions in ambiguous and challenging contexts is going to be what really makes a difference to the success of the organization. And so this arose a little bit as a pushback on Bloom’s taxonomy and other approaches to categorize learning. “Oh, is it this level or this level?” Brenda Sugrue did a pretty good evisceration of that, and she said, “My ultimate thing would be what are the things people need to be able to do? Let’s embed that.” Cathy Moore does that in her action mapping as well. But the key there is what do people need to be able to do?

Clark Quinn: [00:19:38] I argue, again, decisions are going to be what’s most important, and putting them in that situation to make those decisions is going to work. There used to be a belief that you had to ask the rote knowledge questions to ensure that they knew the rote knowledge before you put in the circumstance where they applied that knowledge to the decisions. But, recently, some work…and I’m going to blank on her name. She’s at the Berklee College of Music, but she was a student of Roediger before that. She was a grad student with Roediger and McDaniel or Brown, who wrote the book Make It Stick, which summarized a bunch of good learning research. Her research showed that you could just ask the high-level application questions, and that requires you to retrieve the low-level knowledge sufficiently so that you don’t need the low-level questions. Embedding the core types of performance you need into the environment, scaffolding it, so maybe you have it simplified beforehand, where the numbers all line up really easily, or parts of the problem are solved, that’s all great.

Clark Quinn: [00:20:39] But, eventually, you gradually release more and more roles in the decision-making process until they’re taking it on at the level that you need them to be able to do it at the exit of the learning experience. That’s what makes a difference. When I state what I state about decisions, it’s a way to say what matters is what people need to do. You can argue that, well, executing a process is different than making a discrimination…. Yes, but, at the end of the day, have them making the decisions they need to make. And, if it’s built of component decisions, then Merriënboer’s four-component instructional design talks about the knowledge you need and the complex problems you assign it to. Maybe you have to back up and have some predecessor skills mastered, but those are decisions too. Get those mastered, and then put them together. That way, you get a learning experience that transforms you from where you started to where you end up being. But, still, what’s going to make a difference is at core the ability to make those decisions in the context under ambiguous circumstances. That will be what advanced organizations want and, therefore, what should be embedded in learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:47] Yes, it’s, I guess, one of those elegant ideas. You hear it, and you’re like, “Of course.” But it was a bit of a revelation for me. I think, as I’m now developing, whether it’s a podcast episode or a formal learning experience or even marketing materials, I’m going to be thinking, “What am I trying to help people decide here? How am I facilitating a decision-making process?” And I think that can be very clarifying to think about things that way.

The Potential of AI for LearningJeff Cobb: [00:22:21] A little while ago, you mentioned the inevitable, which is artificial intelligence, which, of course, is everywhere now. All sorts of buzz about that. And we don’t necessarily have to talk about artificial intelligence, but I would love to know what has you most excited right now in terms of what’s becoming possible with respect to developing and delivering engaging, effective learning experiences, what already is possible? That may be technology, it may be something else, but what’s on your mind when it comes to possibilities right now?

Clark Quinn: [00:22:54] There are actually several things on my mind right now. One of them is that all the excitement is about generative AI, which is only one form of AI. I’ve been an AI groupie for decades, literally. I happened to be around at the transition from formal symbolic logic to the sub-symbolic models because I was in the lab with Dave Rumelhart. I was in Don Norman’s group within the lab, and other grad students were in Rumelhart’s when he and McClelland came up with the parallel distributed processing that catalyzed the whole machine learning effort that’s now underpinning a lot of what we do. We still have some roles for symbolic learning. Machine learning is mostly discrimination. I don’t mean that in a bad way, although there’s a lot of that too. But I mean discriminating “Is it a this or that?” It’s categorizing. Generative AI generates new things, with some severe caveats around it.

Clark Quinn: [00:23:47] I haven’t been an AI groupie because I think it’s horrible. I’ve been one because I’m excited about the possibilities of modeling the brain and getting useful outputs. But I have a caution there. I think one thing is people are way too negative in one sense, and other people are way too positive, and, of course, the right answer is somewhere in the middle. We have to know what the limitations are, we have to understand how they work, and then we can figure out how to work with them, which goes to…. In my mind, they’re really good partners in thinking, but they should never be trusted completely. You really need a human in the loop that knows enough to be able to go, “That’s garbage.” Narcissist that I am, I tested ChatGPT by asking it what books have I written? It listed four, and three of them were books I’d written, and one of them was a book I’d never written. But it was perfectly confident that those were the four books Clark had written. It didn’t have the other three—or four, actually.

Clark Quinn: [00:24:42] But ChatGPT is based on the Internet. Other ones are based on more rigorous bodies and can be more trustworthy. If you create your own, constraining your sandbox, you can have good faith in it, but, still. Which goes to the broader picture of why my interest in technology. This goes beyond learning, and I think it’s an important message. Technology can be a wonderful augment to our cognition, which is where I am enthused, because it does things well that we don’t and vice versa. If you remember way back to the Foldit app, it was a game to have you fold proteins, and computers would find protein foldings that humans didn’t. But, with that game, humans would find protein foldings that a computer wouldn’t. And, together, we got more than either one alone. If you look at chess-playing, the best competitions are with a computer and a human partner, and the best teams are not the best chess expert nor the best program, but the ones that know how to work together best.

Clark Quinn: [00:25:45] There are times when we shouldn’t try and put it in the head. One of the messages, beyond learning experience, why I talk about cognitive science as well, is we have cognitive gaps in our architectures. Some of that’s knowledge and skills, and we can develop those through courses. But there are other times when it doesn’t make sense. If we’re not seeing it very frequently, any learning we do will be atrophied by the time we come to this situation. We’re far better off providing information in the world, like checklists and step-by-step guides, and, in many cases, those are better and cheaper solutions than putting it in the head. So, while I’m enthusiastic about learning design, I’m also enthusiastic about a good performance consulting up front to decide should it be in the head? And then let’s do it right and make it engaging. Or should it be in the world? And when can we use technology? Increasingly, we can have interactive technology that asks us some information about the context and then can gives us better recommendations and asks us further questions. So we have a dialog with the computer to better solve it, using its strengths and our strengths, than either one alone.

An Approach to Personal Learning and DevelopmentJeff Cobb: [00:26:49] As we’re wrapping up the conversation, one thing we always like to ask our guests about is their own approaches to lifelong learning. So I’d love to know what are some of your practices right now for your ongoing learning and development?

Clark Quinn: [00:27:06] I like Harold Jarche’s personal knowledge management approach, where he talks about seek—that’s either when you do a search and also the feeds you set up that are tuned to your interest and continually maintaining and updating those as part of the process. And then sensing is making sense of what’s come in. I have two important ways of that. One is that re-representing it, processing it. I love a diagram. I think diagrams are really useful ways to understand what’s happening, the causal relationships between elements, to understand how the world works—basically, mental models. The other way is to experiment, to test it out, to try things. And then the final component of his is share. Seek the information, sense (make sense of it), and share. So I blog. I write books. These are ways that I put it out there. Why do I do that? Because the feedback I get helps fine-tune that. People will comment and go, “What about this?” “Oh, you’re right.” Or I say, “Here’s why I think differently.” And they go, “Oh, okay.” We’re learning together. So those are my practices—diagraming, experimenting, and sharing—but also figuring out what to track, who to track, what tools to play.

Clark Quinn: [00:28:25] I used to be on Twitter. I’m off that now. I’m on Mastodon or Bluesky, and I haven’t yet converged on any of the ones, so I’m continuing to explore them both. Neither one has that interpersonal relationship I had with other folks, so we’ve got some other channels. We’ve got some Discord. We’ve got some Facebook. We’ve got stuff. And I still go to events and interact with people there. I have a wee bit of a problem with that. I’m an introvert. So, if you ever see me at an event, come up and talk to me because I’m too shy to. I’m not aloof. I’m shy. That’s the problem. But those are the practices. Apply what we know. Metalearning, I think, is really important—that was a chapter in my Learning Science book. Our learning to learn matters as well. And, too often, we don’t know. People believe still that highlighting matters or that learning styles are real, and there’s a bunch of stuff that we can understand better—how human learning happens—and apply it to ourselves as well as to those we design for.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:28] Clark Quinn is executive director of Quinnovation, chief learning strategist for Upside Learning, co-director of the Learning Development Accelerator, and science advisor to elevator9. He’s also the author of many books, including Make It Meaningful: Taking Learning Design from Instructional to Transformational and Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions: Debunking Learning Myths and Superstitions.

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Related Resources* Debunking Learning Myths with Clark Quinn * Design Learning for Behavior Change with Julie Dirksen * Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer * On Learning Well: A Practical Look at Metalearning for Learning Businesses * The Truth in Learning, Leadership, and Motivation with Matthew Richter * Personal Knowledge Mastery with Harold Jarche

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbStrategy is one of the five fundamental domains in the Learning Business Maturity Model. And most learning business leaders know that strategy is important. But truly understanding strategy and formulating intelligent strategy? That’s trickier.

To help with that understanding and formulation, in this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 404, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele offer an audio book report onBeyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth Without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of blue ocean fame.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] Nondisruptive creation is a mode of innovation and growth well aligned to the mission-driven focus of learning businesses that aim to have a positive impact on the field, profession, or industry they serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:18] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast. Strategy is one of the five fundamental domains we’ve identified where mature and successful learning businesses need to invest time and intention. And most learning business leaders know that strategy is important. But truly understanding strategy and formulating intelligent strategy? Well, that’s a bit trickier.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:46] That trickiness or slipperiness of strategy is why we’ve been big fans of the work of W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne for a long time. They are talented at dissecting the strategy of successful organizations, explaining that strategy at the conceptual level, and then developing tools and frameworks to help others develop successful strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:10] In this episode, number 404, we want to offer a kind of audio book report on their latest book Beyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth Without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs. And this was published in 2023.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:28] In fact, we’re only going to cover the first half or part one of the book in this episode. So we hope you will tune back in to episode 406 for part two. So part one of Beyond Disruption focuses on “Nondisruptive Creation: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Part two is “How to Realize Nondisruptive Creation.” So, again, today is going to be on that part one. It’s going to be more foundational, more conceptual. Episode 406 will be more of the how-to, more of the practical.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:04] We talked about summer reading a while ago. You can go back to episode 362 for that. And I know that Beyond Disruption was on Celisa’s nonfiction pick list, but I don’t think you got to it over the summer, did you?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:21] I did not. I did read them all. Every one that I said I was going to read in that episode, I did read them, but I did not get to this one—Beyond Disruption—during the summer. I got to it very recently, but it felt like a book that would be worth providing this kind of report on. And part of that’s just because, as we said at the outset, we are long-time fans of blue ocean and the work of Kim and Mauborgne.

Blue Ocean StrategyJeff Cobb: [00:02:46] We are indeed. Their two previous books. Blue Ocean Strategy, which came out in 2004, was a mega bestseller. I think it’s got to be one of the bestselling business books of all time.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:57] Well, actually, the cover of Beyond Disruption says about Blue Ocean Strategy, “one of the bestselling business books of the century.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:03] There you go.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:04] And it must be true if it’s on the book cover.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:06] That’s right. And then Blue Ocean Shift, which is a follow-up that came out in 2017 to expand on some of those blue ocean ideas. As you were referencing, we’ve found Blue Ocean Strategy both conceptually and practically very, very useful. Some of the tools that come from it we’ve used repeatedly over the years in our consulting work, things like the strategy canvas, for those who may be familiar with it. And just to give a little bit on what blue ocean strategy is, the core concept is you want to go with your business, with your product offerings, to where there is less competition or even no competition. The idea is that most organizations really focus on trying to outperform their competitors, or their rivals, within an existing industry, jockeying for that competitive advantage. There’s zero-sum thinking there—if I win, you lose—and it keeps you in a bloody red ocean, as the metaphor there.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:13] Right. Meaning there’s a lot of competition. There are the sharks eating the fish there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:17] Gruesome.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:19] Yes, that’s where the red in the ocean comes from. And so the idea is you want to be out of where there’s so much competition; you want to try to find a blue ocean where there is very little to no competition, and it’s much more smooth sailing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:33] Smooth sailing. You can kick back on your yacht, relax, and listen to some of those yacht rock tunes while you’re out there on the blue ocean. This is something that we do have some substantive existing resources on, because we do use it frequently. We are big fans of blue ocean. There is a blog post on Blue Ocean Strategy, which really goes through the six paths for getting to a blue ocean. And, again, Kim and Mauborgne are very methodical about how you can do this. This looks at some of the key ways they talk about assessing the industry you’re in and essentially looking at other industries, looking at that industry in a different way and reconfiguring, emphasizing some things you might do more, de-emphasizing or even eliminating some things, and then introducing some new things into the mix. That’s how you get to that blue ocean, or at least get yourself closer to it. So we’ve got that blog post, and then we also do have a podcast episode around that.

Blue Ocean Strategy Versus Nondisruptive CreationCelisa Steele: [00:05:29] Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode, and we’ll link to some of those existing resources that we already have on blue ocean. Now, in the preface to their most recent book, Beyond Disruption, Kim and Mauborgne write about the fact that they got a lot of requests from people for them to say more, to explain more about innovation. A lot of the literature and a lot of the thinking about innovation is still stuck in that zero-sum win-or-lose approach, and so tied to that is the fact that often innovation and disruption get talked about in the same breath at the same time. It’s almost like they go hand in hand. And so Kim and Mauborgne are really trying to tease apart the disruption in the innovation part, and it’s very much in line with their blue ocean strategy. Blue ocean strategy really is non-zero-sum thinking. So, if you have the more traditional “We’re going to outperform our rivals,” that’s that zero-sum thinking. The blue ocean tries to get you beyond that. It’s that non-zero-sum thinking. And then what they really talk about in this new book is nondisruptive creation, and that is actually positive-sum thinking. It’s this idea of innovation without destroying or disrupting anything that already exists.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:55] Yes, and I see this as trying to move beyond, or at least add to, that traditional conversation around innovation, around creativity. You have Joseph Schumpeter, the economist, on creative destruction—that’s the process that new things come out of. And Clayton Christensen, when he talks about the innovator’s dilemma, it’s really about companies dealing with how do they deal with the disruptive innovation that’s happening out there? And, if they don’t deal with that disruptive innovation, then they’re not going to survive, basically, and there’s a dilemma there in how to deal with that. I don’t think Beyond Disruption necessarily replaces any of that thinking, but it takes it into new territory.

Three Distinctive Characteristics of Nondisruptive CreationCelisa Steele: [00:07:32] Right. And they mention both Schumpeter and Clayton Christensen in the book. So, yes, they’re definitely trying to expand the literature and the thinking that’s out there around innovation. They posit that there are three distinctive characteristics of nondisruptive creation. And so the first distinctive characteristic is that it can come about because of a scientific or technology-driven innovation, or not. So it doesn’t have to be tied to a new technology, although it can be. I’ll just give a couple quick examples here. One, in a nondisruptive creative product that came about through a scientific discovery, through technology, is the Post-it Note.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:17] There’s this idea, you might have heard before, that it was a failure. It wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. It was this adhesive that didn’t work. But then they came to realize that—oh, a light adhesive where you can post a note and then remove it easily without damaging what it’s on—that actually has a use. So it didn’t displace any existing product; it was a technology that led to this nondisruptive creation. And then an example of a nondisruptive creation that didn’t come about because of any new technology is Sesame Street. Sesame Street really introduced this new idea of educational TV for kids, but the TV already existed, the technology behind it all existed. It was really more about the application of that technology.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:07] It’s hard to imagine a world without Post-it Notes or Sesame Street, both just such an integral part of life now. In addition to it not having to come out of that scientific or a technology-driven innovation, it’s also not limited to any specific region or socioeconomic standing. So it can happen in developed markets—that’s certainly what happened with Post-it Notes—or in developing markets. Kim and Mauborgne talk about the bottom-of-the-pyramid concept with this—that C.K. Prahalad, another great strategic thinker, did so much with a while back—and they specifically referenced Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:47] Right. And just really briefly, Grameen Bank is a microfinance option that really opened up lending to people at the very low end of the socioeconomic ladder who really had no access to capital before, and it allowed them to be able to borrow money. So that’s the second of those three distinctive characteristics. The third is that nondisruptive creation is not synonymous with new-to-the-world innovation. It can be new to the world, or it can be new to an area. New-to-the-world innovation—that can actually just as easily be disruptive as nondisruptive. You have to think about how that new-to-the-world innovation is being applied. So, if you think about new to the world, you think about something like CDs replacing cassette tapes. Well, that’s a place where you have displacement in the music industry because of it.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:42] But you can have new-to-the-world innovation that does not displace anything. Again, I’ll cite Sesame Street there, where it really just added this new category of edutainment for the very young. It can also be new to an area, and one of the examples that they give in Beyond Disruption is a machine that got sold in India to allow women in rural areas to make sanitary pads. So it’s not an innovation; it’s not a brand-new product. Sanitary pads existed throughout the world, but not in these rural areas in India. So that’s an example of a new-to-an-area versus a new-to-the-world innovation. Those are the three distinctive characteristics of nondisruptive creation. First, it can come about because of a scientific or technology-driven innovation, or not. Second, it’s not limited to any specific region or socioeconomic standing. And then, third, it’s not synonymous with new-to-the-world innovation. It can be new to the world, or it can be new to an area.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:52] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Innovation and Nondisruptive CreationJeff Cobb: [00:12:29] Kim and Mauborgne posit that nondisruptive creation is a “distinctive innovation concept for growth,” and they define it as “the creation of a brand-new market outside or beyond existing boundaries.”

Celisa Steele: [00:12:45] They go to a pretty good length to say that this is not a new phenomenon at all. It’s a new term. It’s a new couching. But the phenomenon has been around for a very long time, as you may have already begun to gather from these examples that we’ve listed. Sesame Street first aired in 1969, and the Grameen Bank was started in 1976; it’s been around long enough to earn a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. That was a prize that the bank itself shared with its founder, Muhammad Yunus. Post-it notes—they go back to 1980. So these are examples that show that nondisruptive creation is not a new phenomenon at all.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:28] Again, they’re really contrasting it with disruptive creation—that’s the kind of creation that really displaces and disrupts some or all of an existing industry. You just mentioned CDs and the cassette industry. You can think of any number of ones, like Netflix coming along and toppling Blockbuster in the videotape industry.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:48] Then they also say that nondisruptive creation, it’s different from disruptive creation, as you just said, Jeff. And it’s also different from blue ocean strategy. And so I’m going to quote them here because this is a little short passage where they really just tried to distinguish between these three different kinds of creation. “While disruptive creation generates new markets within existing industry boundaries, resulting in a high level of disruptive growth, blue ocean strategy creates new markets across existing industry boundaries, producing a mix of disruptive and nondisruptive growth. In comparison, nondisruptive creation stands apart, because it creates new markets outside existing industry boundaries and generates mostly nondisruptive growth.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:39] I’ve been trying to get my head around this, and it may take me a while to fully get there. But, when I think of blue ocean strategy across this spectrum that you’ve just described—where you’ve got completely disruptive stuff, you’ve got blue ocean stuff, and then you’ve got the nondisruptive stuff—I think of something like Southwest Airlines coming along, which didn’t totally disrupt everything; it was somewhat disruptive, but really, it was a situation where they looked at the airline industry as it currently existed. And then, as you noted, and as we’ve mentioned, they looked across into other areas.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:12] Specifically, Southwest looked at other industries; they looked at the car rental industry and said, “What can we learn there? How would we make taking a flight—something that you might opt for instead of renting a car—seem as good or better a deal than getting that car?” And that’s what really fueled their thinking to carve out that blue ocean within an existing industry. It wasn’t something completely new and different. It didn’t completely disrupt that industry in the way that, say, CDs did to the tape industry or that Netflix did for Blockbuster. But it did shake it up some while creating that blue ocean, but it wasn’t all the way in that nondisruptive realm either because it clearly did disrupt some.

Within Versus Across Versus Outside Existing BoundariesCelisa Steele: [00:15:51] Right. I think that example ties to that passage that I quoted. There are really three key words in it: within, across, and outside. It’s these prepositions that are really driving this distinction, and that when you have disruptive creation, it’s happening within these existing boundaries. So it’s like listening to music. It happened on a cassette tape; now it’s happening on CDs, it’s happening on MP3s, and it’s happening on your iPhone. These are cases where it’s very disruptive. One is really supplanting the next one. Then you have blue ocean, which is happening across existing industry boundaries, and what you just shared around Southwest.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:30] They weren’t just looking at other airlines; they were also looking at the car rental industry and took what they could learn from that. So they were looking across industries, and that gave them that insight to decide what their strategy would be. And then nondisruptive creation is about creating new markets outside existing industry boundaries. And so, if you keep those three prepositions in mind, then that hopefully helps with this distinction of these different types. And so that nondisruptive creation is really meant to be a positive-sum perspective because, if you take the disruptive creation, that really does tend to shake up an existing industry massively. With nondisruptive creation, you don’t have that, so you lose some of the social pain that can go along with it.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:22] Nondisruptive creation doesn’t bring the social costs—things like lost jobs that often happen if existing players go out of business. So when Blockbuster goes out of business, that means a lot of people are losing those jobs, and there isn’t necessarily an obvious place for them to go—that’s what happens with disruptive creation. With nondisruptive creation, because it’s not happening within an existing market, you largely are finding new jobs and new opportunities, and it’s not actually eliminating any as part of that process for creating new. An example of that could be Kickstarter, which I am hoping that many folks are familiar with.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:04] But this came along with this idea of a way to help especially creative projects find the financial backing they needed to actually be launched out into the world. So there wasn’t really anybody else who was providing that kind of level of crowdfunding/crowdsourcing for those creators. Kickstarter provided that. So that’s an example of nondisruptive creation that Kim and Mauborgne cite. We know people who have used Kickstarter. We know Will Thalheimer is using it for his latest book to try to get it out into the world. That’s currently running while we’re recording. It’ll be wrapped up by the time this airs. But that’s an example, from our world, of someone using Kickstarter.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:48] Yes, and before that, you either had to have a book publisher or you had to self-finance. So this really did create a completely new space. And then musicians are using that. Businesses are using that to get going. You don’t have to necessarily go out for venture capital, get a bank loan, or deplete your savings anymore if you can do something like a Kickstarter.

Four Sources of Business Advantage for Nondisruptive CreationCelisa Steele: [00:19:14] Kim and Mauborgne talk about there being four sources of business advantage for nondisruptive creation, and we’ll talk about those four sources. I will say up front that all four don’t necessarily apply all of the time, and Kim and Mauborgne found that in their examples as they were looking through what they had to mine as they were trying to develop this theory. But very often, all four do apply. The four sources of business advantage have to do…if you think about the entity behind the nondisruptive creation, if you think about them as an entrant into a space, if you think about them as an incumbent, and then if you think about the internal stakeholders, and then if you think about the external stakeholders. So those are the four perspectives that drive these four sources of business advantage. And so we can maybe just talk about each as we go along.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:05] Yes. If you talk about as an entrant, you’re going to be able to avoid direct confrontations with established incumbents because you really aren’t confronting them. If you think about Kickstarter that we just talked about, it wasn’t like the publishing houses or the record companies or the banks were saying, “Oh, no, Kickstarter, don’t do this. We want those people.” No, it was serving this audience that wasn’t being served by doing what it was doing. And, if you do try to come in and disrupt what’s already going on—they gave the example of MoviePass trying to disrupt conventional movie-theater sales, but they just really couldn’t win against the established players like AMC. So they were going for that confrontation. They had to if they’re going to disrupt that industry. And it was a losing battle.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:50] Right. Because those incumbents have a lot of vested interest in not allowing disruptive creation to happen. So, if you can come in in a nondisruptive way, then you’re likely to not have any pushback or any competition from incumbents that you really have to deal with. Now, if you happen to already be established—in that case, you’re an incumbent instead of an entrant—then nondisruptive creation can actually be an effective way to respond to disruption in your industry. Kim and Mauborgne give the example of Cunard, the big transatlantic ship line. They’ve existed for, I don’t know, hundreds of years maybe, but during World War II, they did a lot of transatlantic voyages to move people.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:39] Well, they got disrupted by Pan Am when we suddenly, then, had transatlantic flights. And so Cunard, at first, tried to compete head-on. They bought a big equity stake in an Airways, and then they ran into trouble because the state-owned British Overseas Airways Corporation appealed to the minister, and they got Cunard’s air license revoked. But then what Cunard did was they rethought, and they thought, what if, instead of us providing a way to get people from one side of the Atlantic to the other, what if it’s not about that? It’s about the journey. It’s about the experience of getting there. And so they really rethought what it would be like to be on that ship and how that could be different than being on a plane. By doing that, they really helped create cruise tourism. They’re now part of Carnival Corporation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:30] And so, those first two, being an entrant or being an incumbent, are about market dynamics and how you’re going to interact with an existing market and/or create a different market that doesn’t require any disruption. But then you also have this issue of just your stakeholders, in whatever it is that you’re trying to do, and if you are being nondisruptive, then you’re going to have this advantage that your internal stakeholders—might be your employees, might be your current customers—are going to be supportive because they have nothing to lose.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:00] That’s right. An example of a disruptive creation where an organization ran into that internal stakeholder issue and those internal stakeholders not being supportive is Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica had this huge sales force; they were really good at selling those hardback versions of the encyclopedias that people would have in their houses. Well, then, as things moved towards computers, into being online, Encyclopedia Britannica knew that was happening. They developed a CD-ROM at first, and they were moving online, but their sales people were pushing back because that CD didn’t cost as much as the hardbacks. And so, even as the organization was trying to evolve, the internal stakeholders weren’t supportive because it was disrupting, that CD was displacing those hardcover encyclopedias.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:53] And you never do see a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson anymore. Those days are simply gone. So that’s an example of internal stakeholders being supportive, or at least having nothing to lose with the type of change we’re talking about. And then there’s also external stakeholders. And with disruptive creation, those external stakeholders usually don’t care because, again, it’s not impacting them, and there’s not going to be any backlash that you might deal with if you’re trying to put forth some really disruptive type of creation.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:23] Right. If it’s nondisruptive creation, usually external stakeholders just don’t care. You’re not going to have to deal with backlash. One example Kim and Mauborgne give of a disruptive creation that did result in backlashes—TADA, which is a ride-hailing service in Korea. It made use of this loophole in the law that allowed non-licensed taxi drivers to drive large vehicles. I think it was over 11 passengers. And so they introduced this ride-hailing service that used these big vans—12-15 passenger vans—so they didn’t have to employ taxi drivers to operate them. Well, then, the taxi drivers were concerned because it started taking away their business. Very unfortunately, it led to such a decline. For some of those taxi drivers, there were examples of suicide, then there were protests and folks trying to get the government involved. And so, then, ultimately, the Korean National Assembly amended that law and got rid of that loophole that it allowed TADA to exist in the first place. So, again, if you’re going to create disruption, the incumbents may be pulling in also external stakeholders to help them push back and try to keep you out of their space.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:45] Yes, it makes me think of what’s going on with Uber all over the place. But, particularly in London, with the London cabbies—a similar sort of situation of external stakeholders. A definite backlash to that disruption in that market.

The Rising Importance of Nondisruptive CreationCelisa Steele: [00:26:07] Kim and Mauborgne argue that nondisruptive creation is going to become more and more important, and they really have two main reasons for saying that. One is that they argue that nondisruptive creation is a way to tie social good to shareholder benefit. So rather than those being separate, rather than social good being relegated to a corporate giving program or something like that, you actually tie the two together. They argue that “…with nondisruptive creation, social good is not achieved in how companies spend money, but it begins to be achieved in the very way that they make money.” And so part of that is this idea that, with nondisruptive creation, you’re not eliminating jobs; you’re not eliminating companies; you’re creating things that would provide jobs, that would provide something, a product of value, and so you’re doing good through what you actually offer with your nondisruptive creation. That’s one reason. The second main reason they say that is nondisruptive creation ties to where we are in terms of the industrial revolution.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:19] Yes. And so they cite the fourth industrial revolution, where they see us now, and just a brief history of revolutions here. The first industrial revolution began in the late 18th century. That was steam power coming along, mechanization—all of those things that made possible the factories, that people moved from farm to factory to cities—everything that happened in society then. The second came in with mass production, electricity, assembly lines. And then, in the third, which is in the 20th century, we obviously saw computers, automation, the whole rise of IT. But now, many people characterize us as being in a fourth industrial revolution, in which we have exponential technologies like AI, blockchain, and virtual reality.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:09] As we know, artificial intelligence has replaced some jobs. It’s made those jobs no longer needed to be done by humans, and it’s going to replace more jobs. It’s also changed jobs, and it will change more jobs as humans learn how to work with artificial intelligence. Now, nondisruptive creation can help because it can provide jobs and work for what Kim and Mauborgne call the “released human capital.” So, as AI is replacing people and changing what jobs are needed, nondisruptive creation will actually be creating new jobs that can then hopefully help those folks who’ve been displaced find work and something to do. I would say then there’s another third reason that we think nondisruptive creation might continue to grow, at least in our little small space of learning businesses, and that’s because it really does feel like a natural alignment of nondisruptive creation with the mission-driven focus and purpose of most learning businesses. So, if you think about really wanting to improve the profession or industry that your learning business serves, that’s very much in keeping with nondisruptive creation, where you’re trying to add to the pie, not take something away from others. I think there’s something that’s very well aligned.

Three Paths to InnovationJeff Cobb: [00:29:35] And so, a final takeaway from the first half of the book before we wrap up today, and, again, we will be back with talking about the second half of the book. But, for this first half, we’ll quote directly from the book where Kim and Mauborgne say, “…what triggers one type of market-creating innovation over another largely comes down to the type of problem or opportunity you set out to address.”

Celisa Steele: [00:30:01] So they talk about three paths to innovating new markets, and those three paths are to offer a breakthrough solution to an industry’s existing problem—that’s the first one. The second one is to redefine an industry’s existing problem and then solve that. And then the third is to identify and solve a brand-new problem or seize a brand-new opportunity beyond existing boundaries. Now, which of those three that you are engaged in and pursuing determines the kind of growth? So, if you’re offering a breakthrough solution to an industry’s existing problem, that’s going to put you into that realm of disruptive creation and growth.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:47] And, if you’re redefining an industry’s existing problem, trying to solve for that, then blue ocean strategy leading to that blend of disruptive and nondisruptive growth—so some displacement but less, that middle path. That’s going to be the type of growth that you’re going to pursue.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:03] And then, if you’re solving a brand-new problem or if you’re seizing a brand-new opportunity, that puts you into the nondisruptive creation and growth area. Again, just to give a few examples of that. We’ve mentioned them, but I think it’s always helpful to peg these concepts to specific examples. So, if you’re thinking about that, a breakthrough solution to an industry’s existing problem—that’s the cassette tape to the CD to the MP3 to smartphones, or it’s Netflix largely replacing Blockbuster.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:35] Or Uber.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:37] Right. That’s an example where Uber didn’t eliminate taxis, but it certainly caused major issues for them. And that’s an important distinction that Kim and Mauborgne make, is that, when you’re dealing with disruptive creation, it doesn’t have to entirely displace an industry, but it needs to do it. It usually does it largely. It really impacts it fundamentally. Blue ocean strategy—you talked about Southwest earlier. Stitch Fix is another example that they give. Basically, Stitch Fix took some demand away from two existing industries, one being online women’s apparel, the other being personal shoppers. So it took a little bit away from each of those existing industries, but it also really expanded demand because it created the option for folks who wouldn’t necessarily have engaged with either. But when you put the two together—this idea of online shopping and personal shoppers and being able to afford fashion at a reasonable price—it pulled in new people. So it was a little disruptive and also nondisruptive.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:44] And then, for that third area, nondisruptive creation and growth—we’ve referenced Sesame Street, of course, as a type of innovation that did that, and Kickstarter as well. So two examples of that nondisruptive path.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:57] That is our summary of the first half of Beyond Disruption. Remember that we will be coming back in episode 406 with a report on the second half of Beyond Disruption. So that’s when we’ll get more into the how-to. This was more of the conceptual undergirding and looking at the distinction between blue ocean and disruptive types of innovation and then nondisruptive types of innovation.

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Related Resources* Nondisruptive Creation, Part II * 6 Paths for Leading Your Learning Business to Blue Ocean * Blue Ocean Strategy for Your Learning Business * Smart Growth with Whitney Johnson * Learning Business Maturity Model

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbYou can think of this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast as an origin story. Co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele talk about the relationship between Leading Learning and Tagoras, about what Tagoras is and does, and about the start of Leading Learning. Along the way they touch on the kinds of things that learning businesses need to be able to do, whether through the skills and knowledge of their internal team or by looking for outside support.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Helping leaders in organizations lead learning in the field, industry, or profession they serve is at the heart of what we do as Leading Learning and as Tagoras. The two go hand in hand.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:19] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] This is the Leading Learning Podcast, but, if you’ve been listening for a while, you know that we frequently mention Tagoras in a little audio blurb that runs during episodes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:38] And we realized that some listeners might not understand who or what Tagoras is and does or the relationship between Tagoras and Leading Learning. And even those who do might appreciate more detail or an update to their understanding.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:54] So that’s what we’re going to unpack in this episode, with some commentary along the way on the kinds of things that learning businesses need to be able to do, whether through the skills and knowledge of their own internal team or by looking for outside support.

Starting Tagoras, the Parent Company of Leading LearningJeff Cobb: [00:01:11] And, of course, we didn’t start doing this yesterday. In fact, it was 17 years ago that we founded Tagoras, the parent company of Leading Learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:21] That’s right. Jeff and I co-founded Tagoras back in 2007. It’s not necessarily a straight shot from what we studied in school to founding Tagoras. It’s a circuitous path. We both majored in comparative literature in school, as you might remember from past episodes where we’ve talked a little bit about our background. And so it was a circuitous path to get from comp lit to consulting, and there were many steps along the way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:49] That’s true. There was really nothing in my comparative literature curriculum that said anything about creating startups, consulting, or working with learning businesses. Yes, we had to pick that up along the way. We earned our stripes, so to speak. We got involved with the dot-com era—that’s what pulled us out of graduate school way back in the day—working for a company called University Access, which, in many ways, was an early version of what we now see with Coursera and edX, those types of companies, which morphed into Quisic. And then, you and I left and started our first company, the one that preceded Tagoras, which we called Isoph.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:26] Yes, I think it might be worth saying a little bit more about University Access because, as you said, that is what took us out of academia. We were both in a PhD program. I know I was thinking I was going to be a university professor. That was the path I thought I was on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:42] And I had already been teaching for probably five years at that point, working on my PhD. Those of you who have gone through particularly a humanities PhD, know that, once you’re at that level, you are basically a very low-paid professor with full professorial responsibilities, but you’re still supposed to be writing your dissertation in the meantime.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:02] But your connection to the University of North Carolina was part of what got you roped in to being part of University Access. And you already said it’s a little bit like what we see now in Courseras and Udemys and that sort of thing, but the fundamental idea there was that these professors at the top-caliber schools really would benefit if their message could be more broadly heard. So, if they could serve not just the learners at Harvard or whatever other top institution in their field, but if their instruction could be taken out to a broader audience, that would benefit everyone involved, and that was the driving force behind University Access.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:43] Yes, it was a fascinating time. Folks have to remember this was the very early days of the Internet, early days of the World Wide Web, when the Internet actually became useful. YouTube had not been created yet, and University Access grew out of…one of the founders came from Hollywood. He was a Hollywood producer. A successful one. Wanted to create high-quality video and deliver it over the Web. The other one came from McKinsey, and he had the business background. They were childhood friends. They started this company. Back in those days, it was possible to go out and raise a gazillion dollars because it was the dot-com era. So we raised a lot of money to do this, and, frankly, it was just too early to be delivering high-quality video over the Internet.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:21] So we would actually do a combination of Web-based stuff with video tapes, high-production video, distributed those through community colleges and other universities. And these were top professors from the top business schools. It was really focused on business schools that we were capturing and putting out there into the world and had so much going for it. But, like I said, it was a little too early. We were in the fortunate position of learning a lot without necessarily having our names on the line for the business because, like so many dot-com businesses, that one did not make it. I’ll mention that right about the same time is when Blackboard was created. I can remember when Blackboard was created. That’s one that did make it.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:59] After leaving University Access—which changed some names along the way before it finally petered out—Jeff and I left and started Isoph, which was the company that focused initially on nonprofits, and we worked on helping them create online courses. In part of the discussions that we were having with those organizations around their needs, we also realized that a lot of the learning management systems (LMSes) just really did not do what they needed them to do. Too many of them were either coming out of academia and the university world, or they were coming out of the corporate world with the internal captive L&D audience, and, really, these nonprofits needed something that was more market-facing. So we ended up expanding beyond developing online courses into also then developing a learning platform.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:50] Which was something we swore we would never do, but, yes, we decided we had to do it. This was also back in the days of Microsoft releasing .NET and Web 2.0 coming along. So we created one of the first .NET LMSes. We created what, I think, probably was the first LMS that integrated with association management systems (AMSes) that could issue continuing education credit, that had e-commerce attached to it, all of those things are common now. They were not at the time. You and I were doing a lot of the design work. I can remember I was running queries in SQL databases—again, something that was not in my comparative literature curriculum—but very hands-on. And we’re a distance from that now. But we, again, really earned our stripes in that learning technology world and creating hours and hours and hours of online course content for organizations.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:40] We eventually sold Isoph. We ended up working for the company that bought us for a while, but we ultimately decided we wanted to start our own company again. And this time around that’s what became Tagoras, and we really wanted to focus on serving organizations, and we were a little bit more focused. We didn’t want to necessarily get into the nitty-gritty of the software development or even online course development, but we felt like we had a lot of knowledge that could help organizations as they were thinking through, “Okay, what should I develop? How should I develop it? What do I need to be thinking about when assessing technology?” And so that was the point of origin for Tagoras, where we thought we have this wealth of information that we can share with organizations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:24] We knew there were already, in the corporate world, groups like Brandon Hall and Josh Bersin who were providing research, guidance, consulting, and that sort of thing. The equivalent didn’t really exist in our world because, at that point, we were already focused on what we now call learning businesses and were doing a lot of work with trade and professional associations and other kinds of market-facing organizations. They just weren’t getting a lot of good information and guidance at that point in time. This was really new stuff to them, so it made sense to set up a firm that would really focus on that. And maybe this is where we can talk about how we got that name, Tagoras. You can probably already tell, by the fact that our previous company was called Isoph, that we’re a little strange about our names.

Naming Tagoras and Our Consulting FocusCelisa Steele: [00:08:04] Right. Both names have ties to philosophers. Isoph ties to the sophists, and those were some of the first traveling teachers, and we thought that fit with this idea of online learning. With Tagoras, we are playing off of Protagoras, again, another philosopher. We’re also playing off “tag” in the World Wide Web. We’re playing off of “agora,” which is the gathering place in Greece, the marketplace that brings people together, that brings information, goods, and knowledge together. So we wanted to pull in all of those various threads, and that’s how we came to coin Tagoras.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:43] It’s a name that’s just absolutely packed full of meaning. We just unpacked some of it for you there. I’ll tell you, it made it very easy to get the domain name too—no problems there at all. Of course, for a while, we were exclusively consulting. It was really just you and me for a while too. We did that on purpose. We wanted to stay small, boutique, really focus in on working with learning businesses, and we did that for a number of years, very successfully grew. But, then, things started to change.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:11] Well, maybe talk a little bit about the kind of work we’ve done with consulting clients and what we started out doing. And then it’s essentially stayed the same, but there’s been a little bit of refinement around our areas of expertise and knowledge.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:26] It stayed similar, though the emphasis has changed a lot because I think there are still people who worked with us, boy, 17 years ago, 15 years ago, or whatever, who do think of our primary focus as being e-learning and being learning management systems (LMSes). And it’s really not. Those are important to us. Obviously, you can’t be in the learning business or the education world now without knowing about and caring about those things. But, originally, we focused a lot on learning management selection, even some implementation-type projects. We originally did a lot of research, in-depth research, around learning management systems (LMSes) and published that for many years. And we still do selection work around learning platforms. But really early on the bulk of what we did was more around strategy development because there was a real gap in that at the time. It was easy enough to go out and license an LMS and build some courses, run some Webinars, whatever, but to actually turn that into a viable business that would grow and thrive was a different matter.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:24] So probably the bulk of our time and certainly the bulk of our revenue over the years has come from strategy projects, which usually also incorporate a significant amount of market assessment to really understand a client’s situation—doing surveying, doing interviews, focus groups, pricing sensitivity, just a full range of different tools we’ll use to really assess a market situation and then work with the organization, with the staff, with the board to really develop that strategy. And, yes, we do still do platform selection, though we’re finding more and more now that it’s less about selecting a platform and more about aligning technologies within an organization because a lot of organizations might be on their second or third learning management system (LMS). They don’t want to have to select another platform. They just want what they have to work well and to get a return off of it in the context of their overall technology ecosystem. So we’re much more focused on that now.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:11:17] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

The Organic Start of Leading Learning As a Natural Evolution of What Tagoras Was DoingCelisa Steele: [00:11:55] Tagoras, we started that back in 2007. But then somewhat organically—or very organically, I would say—in 2014, we introduced a sub-brand. We introduced Leading Learning. We first used that term to brand one of our Webinars. And then, the following year, in 2015, we held our first place-based event, the Leading Learning Symposium. So that 2014, 2015 was really the kickoff of Leading Learning, which is this sub-brand underneath the Tagoras brand.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:30] Yes, and that happened organically, though it happened organically out of something that we were doing intentionally, which was content marketing. We were very focused on publishing research, putting blog content out there, developing those resources, starting to do Webinars. Content marketing. If you were paying attention to marketing at all, this was all the rage then. We took that very seriously and then wanted to provide value in that way. And then it started to morph into, well, this really is kind of its own thing, so let’s call it something different because it felt different than what we had been doing with consulting, and we wanted to distinguish it.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:06] That’s right. We wanted to be as helpful as possible to as many learning businesses as possible, and Leading Learning became this way for us to support organizations—and that’s organizations that we’ve done consulting with, organizations that we haven’t yet consulted with, organizations that we may never consult with. But we want to be able to provide some resources and support around strategy and market assessment and thinking through what it is you need to do to be able to survive and thrive as a market-facing learning business. As you said, we started doing a lot of blogging, research, report development, and Webinars, and we did a lot of that initially from that content marketing standpoint of potentially bringing in consulting clients. But then we realized there really was value beyond just serving consulting clients or potentially attracting consulting clients, and that’s when we had this idea of “Let’s put this under a separate brand, and we can then put it out there.” And, yes, it will still serve that content marketing role, but we can also be providing value under that Leading Learning brand all on its own.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:15] And, as we’ve matured and evolved as an organization, I think we’ve become much more clear and focused on what our mission is. We really are here to serve this broader, lifelong learning landscape, to help the learning businesses within that landscape be able to elevate their reach, revenue, impact—those are three terms you hear us say again and again and again—and Leading Learning is a way for us to fulfill that mission as broadly as possible because we know the simple fact is we’re not going to consult with most of the organizations that are out there. Numerically, it doesn’t work, and, frankly, we’re not cheap. There are a lot of organizations that are not going to make the level of investment that it takes to work with us from a consulting standpoint, but we still want to be providing the resources and the value out to learning businesses that do help to elevate lifelong learning, that do help to elevate the learning business, that make it clear—another term we talk about again and again—how important this third sector of education is. So it’s part of our serving that sector.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:22] And so, both brands—the Tagoras brand and the Leading Learning brand—share a focus on learning businesses and their role in that third sector. It comes down to how much a learning business wants to do on its own versus how much support it might want from us. On the consulting end, we’re much more, obviously, hands-on in facilitating the process. On the Leading Learning side, it’s more around providing the resources and some guidance, but it’s much more of, “Okay, you go do it yourself. You’re the one who needs to drive the process and apply it.”

Celisa Steele: [00:15:56] Now, of course, in both cases—consulting and the Leading Learning resources—the learning business still has to be very actively involved. Even on the consulting side, we can’t do it all. It has to be a partnership working with the learning business because so much of what we’re dealing with is fundamental, and it’s about really embracing a particular mindset or strategy internally, and we can’t come along as an outside group and impose that from outside. That has to be something that the learning business adopts and embraces as well. But it’s along the spectrum. Leading Learning is much more self-serve—here are some resources. And then Tagoras, with the consulting, is much more of let us facilitate whatever you need help with in terms of market assessment, strategy, or other areas that are important to your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:43] Yes, and then you can think of this in terms of one of our other concepts that we trot out a lot, which is the Value Ramp. If you look at our Value Ramp, we don’t have a ton of offerings along our Value Ramp. We’re pretty selective in what’s there. But consulting is going to be way up the Value Ramp in terms of the investment that’s required and the value you’re going to get out of it. A lot of what you’re getting from Leading Learning is going to be in the lower parts of the Value Ramp, and then heading up. A lot of that’s going to be free. And then you head up into things like our paid events and other offerings that we have, and that’s something we’re conscious of too as we evolve our business over time. We tell organizations to look at their Value Ramp and rationalize it and have it tell a logical value story, and that’s something we’re always looking at ourselves and continue to do work on building out what that story is from our perspective.

Naming Leading LearningCelisa Steele: [00:17:33] We spent some time explaining the name Tagoras. Maybe we can just touch on the name Leading Learning, although that’s much more immediately parseable. It’s two words that people are familiar with: “leading” and “learning.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:46] It’s really at the heart of our work because we feel like the organizations that are working in the third sector, providing the education and the learning experiences that people get in those other 50 years, should be leading learning. If you’re an organization working in a particular field, profession, or industry, the way you’re going to make a mark on that industry is by helping to guide, helping to advise, helping to point the way to what the professionals, what the individuals in that field or industry need to learn. How do they need to evolve? How are you going to guide them? So don’t just sit back and be passively reactive in what you’re providing. Really think through what are the opportunities, and how is what you’re doing leading learning in the field or industry that you’re serving?

Celisa Steele: [00:18:35] That’s certainly one perspective. And then there’s another nuance to that as well, which is that we tend to focus on the leaders within learning businesses and aspiring leaders in those organizations. We want to support them—support those leaders in leading their own learning business. And then, of course, as you just explained, Jeff, that learning businesses then hopefully leads the field, profession, or industry that it’s focused on serving. So it’s two layers there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:02] Yes, and I will say, I mentioned that it was easy to get the domain for Tagoras. It was easy to get the domain for Isoph as well. It was not easy to get the domain for Leading Learning. We did actually have to buy that one to get it because others wanted that term.

The Importance of the Practical and the ConceptualCelisa Steele: [00:19:16] So whether you work with consultants—and I will say that most learning businesses will work with some consultants at some points—but whether you work with consultants or not, there’s a need to focus on the kinds of things that we emphasize, both in our consulting work at Tagoras and in the resources that we offer through Leading Learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:37] We like to focus on both the practical and the theoretical/conceptual levels. Both are important. We’ll talk to people who say, “I don’t want the theory. Just show me what to do, how to apply it.” But that theory often is what’s setting context for what you’re doing. And we’ve talked about this in many different places around learning—that the context is just so important. We spent a lot of time thinking about the big issues, the trends that are coming. You may have been to one of our annual trends Webinars. What is impacting this whole business that we’re in? But then, of course, you do ultimately want to get to what do I do about that? How do I actually apply this? What is the practice that comes out of this?

Celisa Steele: [00:20:22] The lifelong learning landscape is complex. It’s competitive. It’s being disrupted. So there’s a lot that’s unclear and foggy. What we aim to do is to take some of that lack of clarity and grapple with it and then get to a place of clarity so we can help learning businesses say, okay, this is what we want to focus on. This is the path forward that we are choosing. And, to your point, here’s why, which is then that theory or that conceptual piece of it. The practical is, okay, this is what we’re going to do, but, if you don’t have the theory and the concept behind it, then it’s very hard to get that internal buy-in and to have that prolonged investment in actually executing on a strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:09] Yes. This usually plays out in the types of tools, models, and frameworks that we’ve put out there. If you think of something like the Learning Business Maturity Model, for example, which we’ve talked about many times—we’ll talk about it many times again—on one level, it’s very conceptual. Any model is. We’re talking about domains and this whole concept of maturing as an organization and different stages of that. But then we want to give you some ways to assess where you are in that, so we’ve got an assessment that goes with it, so you can actually score yourself and get some concrete information.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:42] And then we want to guide you in what you then do about what you find out in the Maturity Model. Some of that we do through things like podcast episodes and Webinars, really focusing in. The whole Leading Learning blog is structured around the domains of the Learning Business Maturity Model, so we’re constantly putting out content to address those domains that’s going to be useful in moving towards maturity. And then, on the consulting side, we have our Maturity Accelerator Program. We can sit down with you, roll up the sleeves, go through the assessment, and design a plan that your organization is going to then implement to move from wherever you are right now to wherever you aspire to be in your maturity journey.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:25] Both practical and conceptual—those are both important to us. We’re also big fans of taking a well-balanced view of whatever the issue is. You were just talking about the Maturity Model. We have five domains in that Maturity Model, and, if a learning business focuses too much on a single domain, if they just focus on strategy without also giving time and attention to leadership or to the portfolio of offerings, they’re not going to be successful. So there’s always this idea—and this is where I think that the conceptual or theoretical can help—that you want to be well-rounded. You want to make sure that, if we’re thinking about the Maturity Model, that you’re making progress in all five domains. We also talk a lot about reach, revenue, and impact—it’s already come up in this episode. But, again, it’s this idea that you, as a learning business, need to be thinking about all three because, if you focus too much on impact but you aren’t keeping the reality of revenue in mind, then you’re not going to be able to thrive or make it long-term. So there’s this need to be balanced, and this need to think through things at that practical level and at that conceptual level.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:45] Helping leaders and organizations lead learning in the field, industry, or profession they serve is at the heart of what we do as Leading Learning and as Tagoras. The two go hand in hand.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Tool Talk: The Value Ramp * Revisiting the Learning Business Maturity Model * Maturity, Learning, and Desired States

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Julian StoddIf anything, we should all be able to agree that generative artificial intelligence is a curious thing, worthy of reflection and exploration.

Julian Stodd is a researcher, an artist, an explorer, a writer, and captain and founder of Sea Salt Learning, which helps organizations set strategy and change direction. He is also a firm believer in working out loud and a previous Leading Learning Podcast guest.

In this episode, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Julian about ideas from Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI, which he co-wrote with Sae Schatz and Geoff Stead. Julian’s perspective on AI is both technical and philosophical, specific and expansive, and, of course, curious.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJulian Stodd: [00:00:00] If you’re curious, direct your curiosity more towards your certainty than towards the edges of the system.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:11] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:13] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] If anything, we should all be able to agree that generative artificial intelligence is a curious thing—a thing worthy of reflection and exploration and curiosity, beyond the bounds of good or bad or right or wrong. Julian Stodd is a researcher, an artist, an explorer, and a writer, most recently of the book Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI with co-authors Sae Schatz and Geoff Stead. The book is available as a free download or as a beautiful for-fee physical artifact. Julian is captain and founder of Sea Salt Learning, which helps organizations set strategy and change direction. He is also a firm believer in working out loud and a previous Leading Learning Podcast guest, as is his co-author Sae Schatz. Julian posits that we’re learning, working, and living in the Social Age, which follows the Industrial and Digital Ages, and the Social Age is the focus of the prior podcast conversation. This time around, the conversation focuses on generative AI but with Julian’s particular perspective, which is both technical and philosophical. Celisa and Julian spoke in late January 2024.

Working Out LoudCelisa Steele: [00:01:44] You embrace rather enthusiastically this principle of working out loud. Before we get to your latest book that’s out in the world, I would love to hear how you landed on working out loud and why.

Julian Stodd: [00:02:00] Yes, I’ll tell you because it’s, for me at the moment, a fantastic exercise in justifying myself because the way I landed at it was an act of desperation. It was really a term I used to prevent other people giving me bad feedback. I was so nervous and wary when I started sharing my ideas, I thought I’ll say, “Oh, I’m working out loud, so I don’t need you to tell me it’s rubbish. I already know it’s rubbish.” I started like that and ran like that for about three years, 2010 to 2013, and then I started illustrating the blog. When I look back, they’re terrible. They’re terrible illustrations.

Julian Stodd: [00:02:40] I’m not saying that out of false modesty. They’re rubbish, which is okay. You’ve got to start somewhere. But that drove this huge increase in engagement with my work. Then working out loud became something else. It became the mechanism by which I test ideas out. I find language, and I’m engaged with my community. Now, latterly, I’m in the last six months of a doctorate. I failed one before. I spent six years on one that I failed to submit, so I’ve come around to it again. I knew I would eventually, and I have, and it’s on the practice of working out loud, but it’s exploring it as a way of being, really. It’s a way of generating knowledge and capability and of holding yourself in your practice. At the end of it, I hope I’ll be able to tell you that working out loud is a real thing rather than just a made-up thing.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:34] I’ve seen it said of you—and maybe you’re the one saying this—that you frequently find new ways to be wrong. I’m curious about that willingness to be wrong—and to be wrong publicly because you’re working out loud. How does that fit with your own growth, your own learning and development?

Julian Stodd: [00:03:56] Yes, I guess when I say it, it sounds funny, tongue-in-cheek, or silly, but it’s not. It’s very real for me. I’m a scientist at heart. Although I say I’m an artist, which I am, I am a scientist. My work is rigorous and evidence-based, with the caveat that much of the research, inevitably in my space, is the social sciences. So it’s more ethnographic, social psychology, and such—like understanding how people work individually. One of the books I’m working on at the moment is a learning science book. Literally, how does our brain learn? But also, socially, collectively, how do we learn? How do we change? So being wrong is part of science. That’s the point of it really—finding new ways to be wrong. But I could argue that my work is an abstraction, as all models are.

Julian Stodd: [00:04:46] It says there is this thing called the Social Age. There is a notion of social leadership. There is social collaborative learning. These are things, but the pictures that I paint of them with words or with a pen are abstractions. It’s not really real, but it’s kind of. It gives us a frame to understand something. Now, to do that, you do have to try things out. You try out vocabulary, you try out ideas, and some of those things really persist and really grow. So the Quiet Leadership work I do at the moment talks about the organization as ecosystem, and that metaphor has spread widely through my work. Looking at it, it is useful. It’s a useful abstraction. Other things don’t.

Julian Stodd: [00:05:26] I published a book a couple of years ago called The Humble Leader, and that book was about eight years in the making, and it started off as work on social justice in San Francisco. It was really interesting, and it didn’t really go anywhere. So then I tried to make it a framework for fairness, and that became recursive. It started becoming like I was making it into a framework for the sake of making a framework. It didn’t go anywhere. And then suddenly, to be honest, out of the blue, I just sat down and wrote the book. It’s very short. It’s only 3,500 words. But it wrote itself. A funny thing is I’ll never do a second edition of that book because I couldn’t find that voice again. It was obvious to me that, through the years of playing with the ideas, the ways that didn’t work let me develop both the ideas and fragments of language that just came together. So, when it did come together, it was almost poetic. The language is quite poetic. It’s structurally different—the writing—than in something like the Engines of Engagement book. The sentence structure is different.

Julian Stodd: [00:06:42] I know that story might not make sense to other people, but it makes sense to me. Being wrong is part of my practice, and I’m perfectly okay with that. I’m comfortable with it. And the funny thing is, nearly all the time, people that I work with—when I’m running programs or sharing ideas at conferences—people generally love it when I share the ways that I was wrong. I can’t really think of a time when somebody has turned around to me and said, “Well, that just proves to me that you’re an idiot.” They might think it, but they don’t generally say it. And that’s interesting because it makes me think, well, why don’t some other people think they have that space to be wrong?

Julian Stodd: [00:07:21] Of course, there were very good reasons why they don’t because they operate in systems where people will judge them for being wrong. I’m running a program this year about navigating ambiguity, and one of the things we look at is why systems struggle to hear voices that they really need to hear. And they often do so because they’re really good systems, really well intentioned, but they view ambiguity as a threat to their efficiency and effectiveness or their structures of power and control, and so they silence it. And then people silence themselves. By talking openly about being wrong, in some ways, I create the conditions in which I can do so more safely, perhaps.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:08] We’re going to be talking more about generative AI. I’m just curious, though, while we’re talking about this notion of wrongness, do you think generative AI makes it easier or harder to be wrong? I’m thinking, if you’ve put out a thought and then you move beyond it, you come to not believe what you used to believe or what you put out, but now that’s out there. It’s being mined. It’s potentially feeding into what’s teaching AI. Any thoughts on that willingness to be wrong in public and what the impact of AI might be on that?

Julian Stodd: [00:08:46] That’s a big question. The first thing to be clear about is that my judgment of whether something is right or wrong is only one valid position. Sometimes I will say I had an idea, and it was really bad. Somebody else might think it’s good. Of course, more typically, I have an idea that I think is good, and somebody else thinks that it’s bad, but the things I’m measuring are typically, not always, but typically not absolute. They are subjective. So, in that sense, it’s good that it’s all out there. In fact, I’d probably go further than that and say I am pretty sure that if there are people in the world who have found value in my work, and I think some people genuinely have, which is fine and okay—that’s why I put it out there, in the hope that they will—but, if they have found value, I strongly suspect the value that they have found in it is value they have put into it.

Julian Stodd: [00:09:41] I don’t particularly think my work carries a great deal of knowledge or wisdom within it. It’s not rubbish. Most of it’s not rubbish anyway. And there may be a few bits of it that are really good. But, in general, I think what it does is it provides a context and a scaffolding in which people create a truth—their truth. And sometimes they mistakenly think that I give it to them, but I don’t think I do. I don’t think that’s unique to me. I think quite often I’ll do that with other people. I’ll read their book, or I’ll see them speak, and I’ll have a moment of insight. It’s interesting to think how often is that insight that they have given me, or it’s insight that I have created, I guess, in partnership with them, even if they don’t realize it’s in partnership.

Julian Stodd: [00:10:33] That’s, of course, an interesting thing about generative AI—it allows me to be in partnership through technology rather than in partnership with a person because these systems are dialogic, and dialog is a mechanism of sense-making and learning. In answer to your question—I think I danced around it—does it matter? Probably not. Generative AI operates at a vast scale, and a few books here and there aren’t going to make much difference to it, although there is a caveat to that. One of the things I look at in changes to social movement is how dominant narratives form. An easy way to think of a dominant narrative is like an art form, like, how did garage music come about? How did the genre of gothic horror come about? Sometimes one person writes a book, and it creates a genre. In that sense, ideas can scale and act as organizing features of culture or output. So that could be large enough scale to influence it.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:39] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

About Engines of EngagementCelisa Steele: [00:12:09] Let’s turn to this book Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI, which we’ll probably focus most of the rest of our time on. It’s a trilogue. You co-wrote it with Sae Schatz and Geoff Stead. I’m curious about that title. I said “curious” in part because there are two words in it that I would love to get your view on: “engagement” and then “curious.” What does that title mean to you and particularly those two words in it?

Julian Stodd: [00:12:39] Yes, I have to admit, I love the title. There is a metaphor in the book, of engines. In my mind, it was like the steam engine, symbolizing the Industrial Age. And we talk about that, these engines that drive something forward, the story engines and the art engines. The engines piece is about a thing that we’ve created that then serves us in some way. We invented steam engines so that they would serve us, so that they would lead to mechanization. We could pull the carriages out of the mine more effectively. We could go on a seaside holiday more easily. So they are engines in that sense. I like the idea that an engine drives something. It drives a changing culture. It drives a new way of creating.

Julian Stodd: [00:13:29] So they are engines. Engagement because they are fascinating. They have captivated us, or they have captured us. And so those were the two words that I liked. Engines of engagement is what we have, but what they are, what they do to us, what we do with them—that’s what we explore. The book is both technical and philosophical. Our guiding principle was to set out to write the book that nobody else was writing. We didn’t want to write a guide to prompt engineering, and we didn’t want to write some clever book about how the algorithms work, mainly because we couldn’t—or, at least, I couldn’t. Sae and Geoff probably could. But that’s not our expertise. We bring different perspectives. And it does tell you how things work, but, predominantly, it’s about informing a stage for debate. How will generative AI transform our world, our organizations, our notions of art, industry, and such like?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:38] And so the “curious” part, then, as I gather from having read the book, is this idea of we should approach AI with some curiosity and this idea of how might we, how can we engage with it? What might it do for us?

Julian Stodd: [00:14:52] The curious piece is important, is interesting. Normally, in my work, I quite often use a slide at the start of programs. I don’t use slides with words on them usually, but this one does have a few words. It says, “Hold your certainty lightly,” and I think that’s right. Any time you come up with something, any time in life where you hit something which is polar opposite or is a commonly held view, it’s fine to feel the comfort of believing it. But then you should question it. “Is that really true?” When I said I was writing a book on generative AI, numerous people said to me, “Oh, are you for or against it?” Well, I was like, “What a ridiculous thing to say. It’s like saying, ‘Are you for or against gravity?’ ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s kind of handy, isn’t it? It keeps my feet on the ground.’” So I’m not for or against generative AI.

Julian Stodd: [00:15:44] When people get too bogged down in their own certainty, myself included—I do this just as much as everybody else—if you get too bogged down in your own certainty, a key capability is to spot that and think, “I do feel really certain that bias is a big issue, so should I start thinking about bias differently?” Because what if I didn’t have all the facts? Or what if somebody can change my view? Or what if there was a perspective? Or what if that used to be an issue but isn’t an issue any longer? Why am I so certain about something? Because very few things in life are truly certain. So the curiosity is important. That the word is there for two reasons. It’s a curious book about generative AI because it represents our curiosity, and it’s a curious book about generative AI because the book itself is curious. I think sometimes people aren’t sure what to make of it. It’s poetic. It’s philosophical. It’s technical. Probably doesn’t fit easily into a box.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:43] Of course, it’s got lovely illustrations.

Julian Stodd: [00:16:46] The illustrations are wonderful, but that’s more credit to Sae, really. We have a whole chapter about how we created them. They are original illustrations. I feel idiotic saying it, but I should say it. We have written the book. None of it’s written by generative AI, and we have created the artwork. But what we actually did for that was Sae and Geoff used some of the art engines to create illustrations from the text in the book. I then sat down and took far too long to use those as inspiration to create entirely new hand-drawn illustrations. And Sae, as well as being an exceptional learning scientist, is a graphic designer and artist. She’s a phenomenal artist. So she then took my illustrations and added some digital textures to them. Sometimes that would mean breaking elements out and making them 3D or changing textures in the image. I would argue it’s a human collaboration, but it is a dialog with generative AI.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:53] It sounds like, from a comment you made earlier, the book that you and Sae and Geoff were originally going to write on learning science is still in the works. Is that correct?

Julian Stodd: [00:18:04] It is. Yes, it’s funny. The learning science book is a pretty good example of failure because I wrote it before. I wrote a book on learning science. It’s like 70,000 words or something. It was pretty hard work to write it, and I sent it to Sae. We’ve never worked together, but we’ve collaborated. We’ve written some academic papers, and I greatly respect her. We have a friendship, which is strong enough that she very diplomatically said to me, “Well, this is interesting. You’ve written two books somehow and smooshed them together into something that doesn’t really work in any sense whatsoever.” So I took that feedback, sulked for about 18 months, and didn’t touch it. I wanted to come back to it but was just too daunted by it. I was just at the limit of my capability. And then I had my moment of insight, which was, “Why don’t I just carefully ask Sae if she’ll write it with me? Because she’ll make it better.”

Julian Stodd: [00:19:08] And it took about 10 seconds for her to say, “Yes, let’s do that.” We’ve been looking for something to do, and, frankly, I don’t know why we were so idiotic. It took us years to figure out what to do. We’d been kicking around other ideas, and I was like, “Why don’t we just write the thing that we know about? Let’s write it on learning science.” So we started that. And then I said to Sae, “Do you know Geoff?” She didn’t know Geoff. Geoff is brilliant. He circles around the learning space, but he’s kind of a product guy, works in typically high-tech startups, scaling startups. He brings a brilliant perspective on things. And so I said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s do a learning science happy hour on a Thursday evening, and I’ll bring Geoff in. Let’s all bring our gin and tonic, and we’ll just talk for an hour so you can get to know each other.” We did that, and we just kept on doing it, and we still do it. Every Thursday we meet up—without the gin and tonic. We do a learning science happy hour. We did that, and we started writing the learning science book, and we’ve made good progress on it. It’s an 18-month project.

Julian Stodd: [00:20:18] And then, in July last year, as we were six months into it and really gathering steam, I said to them, “You know what? I think we should stop and write a book on generative AI.” And they both said, absolutely, immediately, “You’re an idiot. Why would we do that? We’ve just found momentum. We’re doing really well.” And so, I said, “Okay, well, why don’t we spend two weeks just looking at it, just to see if we’ve got something to say, that we could do really fast? I want to have this book out in 2023.” And so we did two weeks’ work on it, and then we went into our happy hour session, and I was all ready to say, “You know what? You were right. That was a really daft idea.” And they piled in, saying, “Yes, we should absolutely do it.” And so we did it. It came together really fast, the illustrations took a bit longer, and we managed to get it out last year. And now we’re switching our focus back to learning science. So, yes, we’ve probably written 30 percent of it. We’re hoping to have it out at the end of 2024.

The Interplay of Learning Science and Generative AICelisa Steele: [00:21:30] Great. I look forward to that book when it’s out. This book, Engines of Engagement, started or came out of that work talking around learning science, and generative AI kept popping into the conversation, so you paused. You decided to pursue it. I’m wondering if it’s possible for you to briefly talk about what you see as the impact of generative AI on learning science or the interplay of learning science and generative AI.

Julian Stodd: [00:22:01] It’s interesting. When we were arranging this conversation, you sent me that question, and I thought, “Oh, I should say, ‘Let’s not do that question because I don’t know what the answer is.’” But then I thought, “Well, you know what, I think it’s okay to use this as a chance to think about it.” My instinctive reaction is to say generative AI won’t impact on learning science because learning science seeks to understand the neurochemical, biological, social context in which we learn. So a new technology won’t change, at least in the short term, how our brains work. But then, when you think about the applications—where learning science takes us from learning science into the practice of designing, delivering, and supporting learning—it’s going to change a ton of stuff. The way to think of it is this—we’re writing the learning science book, not because people need to be learning scientists, but because there is a ton of research that tells us how people learn that, with a little bit of effort, will inform how we design and deliver learning.

Julian Stodd: [00:23:11] And generative AI isn’t going to make people learn better per se but can be woven into the design, delivery, and practice of learning. It’s probably more a matter of synthesis and using learning science to inform our understanding of learning and using that understanding of learning to think about how generative AI can support the process. I’ll give you some examples of that, but, again, I won’t make you the promise that these are good examples. But, in the program I’m running at the moment, I’m doing this module on navigating ambiguity. Just today I shared something with the group. I’d asked them to do some activities on describing what ambiguity is. We took, verbatim, the words they used, and we used that to generate some artwork—the way that different cohorts described ambiguity. And one cohort has come up with a series of brutalist buildings that people are staring at. Another’s words have been interpreted by the same engine as this beautiful, mountainous landscape.

Julian Stodd: [00:24:24] When I shared that with the group today, again, I wasn’t really sure how to share it with them. Because I said, “This is not analytic of your writing. View it as a reflective surface. I can show you the art that has been created in response to your words, and I can show you the art that was created in response to the other cohort’s words, and it’s clearly different. View it as being reflective, but view it as reflective in the way a shop window is when you walk past it or a muddy puddle. It’s not going to give you clarity, but what it might help you do is find new language or new ways to explore.” And that’s exactly what they did. They talked about it. They said, “Has our culture been reflected in this? Is our landscape full of these brutalist buildings and people looking lost? Has that something to do with the language we use in our organization?” That’s quite a good insight. I think that’s probably true as well. If you joined an organization, chances are I could predict the kinds of language you would use pretty rapidly.

Julian Stodd: [00:25:32] When we join, we conform to types of language and behavior. So we can use it like that. We can use it for dialog. In a previous iteration of this program, at the end of last year, I got people to do some free writing exercises. Write 150 words on how systems change. We then took those, collected them together, did the analysis through Claude (one of the generative AI tools), shared the story back to the group, and asked them to be in dialog with the story. So, again, we’re not using the generative AI to mark them, to score them. We’re not using it to design the course. We’re not using it to set learning objectives—because I never set learning objectives. What we are using it for is as a different partner for dialog. And, for me, that’s a key way of understanding generative AI. Not the only way and not the only value. But, for me, the primary value at this stage in my practice is as a dialog engine.

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Social LearningCelisa Steele: [00:26:47] I want to ask about the impact of AI on social learning, and I was really interested in Engines of Engagement around this concept of anti-social learning, where AI can help it feel like a dialog, feel like you’re having that social experience—except you’re not because there aren’t necessarily others involved. Talk a little bit about that potential for impact of AI on social learning.

Julian Stodd: [00:27:12] Yes, it’s quite interesting. In the book, what I say is that generative AI takes something that used to be unique, which was expert dialog. You will be able to find the key people in your network you can have a high-quality conversation with, and, to some extent, it commoditizes dialog. It makes high-quality dialog a solo activity, which is crazy, and it also makes it available everywhere all the time. That’s clearly relevant in social learning because sense-making is a matter of dialog, the creation of meaning. So, clearly, generative AI impacts heavily in social learning. But the chapter that you’re referring to, I was pleased that you said it because the chapter is the most imperfect one in the book, I would say, which it shouldn’t be. It should be the strongest one. I wrote that piece on anti-social learning, which was essentially to say social learning is about social collaboration except now you can do it by yourself. So it’s anti-social learning.

Julian Stodd: [00:28:12] I wrote the whole section, and I thought it was absolutely bloomin’ marvelous, I have to say. I shared it with Geoff and Sae and also with Donald Clark, Mark Oehlert, and Marc Zao-Sanders, who’ve made contributions to our book—all of whom are real experts in learning. And, to a soul, they all turned around to me and said, “What on earth are you talking about? It makes no sense.” They’re just like, “I just don’t know where you’re going with it.” I was a bit bemused by it because I thought I absolutely know what I mean. So I went back and rewrote it, and I shared it back out, and they were like, “No.” They would actually drop it. I really couldn’t figure it out. I said, “Okay, well, I’ll write it again.” I wrote something again, and I thought, “No, I’m just going to drop it. I don’t understand why I can’t articulate this idea.” And then they’re like, “Oh, yes, we’ve got it.” But I still think it’s only a shadow of what it should be, and I’m still a bit bemused by why I’m struggling to explain it.

Julian Stodd: [00:29:11] But that takes me back to that conversation about working out loud. Sometimes you have to develop your vocabulary over time, and then you have to find the structures of language and art, I guess, which help you to share it. I’m clearly not quite there with it yet. Or maybe I was having a bad Friday. But it’s interesting. I have no doubt that a couple of things will happen. The first is that students and individual learners will run circles around organizations because that’s what people do. Individuals and communities find the edges of systems and the permeability of boundaries, and they work around things. Good people work around systems to do good work in more efficient ways. So I’ve no doubt that will be happening. That is happening right now. And, secondly, I have no doubt that the real impact of generative AI will be driven within a model of profit and power because that’s how things get adopted, and we may make it right down the line, but too much philosophizing about social good and purpose will be overtaken by the sheer fact of the matter that people will invent things, sell them, and make a ton of money.

Three Ways Generative AI Will Impact Individuals and OrganizationsCelisa Steele: [00:30:32] In Engines of Engagement—I’ll quote a little bit—you write that “The impacts of Generative AI on both us and our organisations are probably best understood in three ways.” Maybe you could briefly touch on those three ways and, if possible, offer a brief example of what AI looks like in each of those three ways.

Julian Stodd: [00:30:52] The first way is a change within a system, the second is change that fractures a system, and the third is emergent capability. That’s a way of saying, most likely, the short-term impacts and adoption of generative AI will be within our systems as they are at the moment but in ways that make it more efficient. For example, when we started talking today, before we started recording, you said, “I’ll unleash my AI notetaker.” That’s straightforward. Neither of us have questioned it. It’s easy. It just makes life easier. In fact, I think you even said, “It just makes life easier.” Clearly, that’s going to be a first stage of adoption, and that will typically be within a model of efficiency for organizations. If they can do more efficient call handling, more efficient communication, innovation, if they can make something a slightly better quality, they’ll do all that.

Julian Stodd: [00:31:52] And people who invent systems that do that will be able to monetize them or sell them, so that’s going to be our space of innovation as well. That’s change within existing systems, typically driven by efficiency, economy, such like, so it saves us time and money, makes us better at doing what we already do. The second model is change that fractures our system. Instead of letting us do something more efficiently, it abstracts out part of the system, so it makes something within the system no longer useful. To make up an example, at the moment, if I want to remortgage my house, I can go to a mortgage broker. But, if a generative AI system can pull together the information I need, it doesn’t make the mortgage broker more efficient; it makes them redundant, so it will pull them out of the equation. There are probably plenty of examples of that.

Julian Stodd: [00:32:54] I’ve got a friend who’s an artist, who surfs on the line of making his living from art, as many people do. He doesn’t make a good living from it, but he does make a living from it. But a lot of the people he makes a living from are people who are writing their first book, putting out an album, or want to do a poster for their festival, and they pay him $300 to do something once a year. But, now, maybe they’re going to generate something themselves because they can use his artwork as a reference image if they want to. So that is going to cause some pain. But I suppose, on a larger level, change that fractures systems will start to have real impact. It’s not just about doing things more efficiently; it’s about doing them fundamentally differently. So that’s the thing a lot of people worry about—where our jobs will go, what won’t survive. And, of course, a lot of the research and the narrative is saying it won’t just be the low-paid jobs. Maybe it will be the solicitors. Maybe it will be the leaders. And so, clearly, a lot of our pain is going to be felt in that second stage.

Julian Stodd: [00:34:05] The third one is about emergent capability, which is what will we be able to do that we haven’t even conceived of doing before? And that’s quite interesting. I think I can most easily give you a historical example in a different context. One of the things I look at in my work on the Social Age is that I say we moved from an Industrial into a Digital Age and then into the Social one. Organizations used to have infrastructure, used to be a thing that they did. They had networks. They had buildings. They had fleets. They had printers. They had fax machines. They had infrastructure, and you needed an organization to have infrastructure. But, of course, today you don’t need an organization at all to have infrastructure. Infrastructure has become divorced from organizations and is available everywhere. In fact, funnily enough, as I speak to you now, on the floor next to me are two gigantic and expensive printers, which we’ve had in our office. We just all looked at each other—we’ve been moving office this week. We said, “Why don’t we just get rid of these? Because there’s a print shop down the road. And, you know what, it’s just cheap and easy, and these darn printers never work. They’re forever out of ink, or they’ve lost connectivity.”

Julian Stodd: [00:35:19] It’s like infrastructure has gone from being a defining feature of capability to being an albatross around our neck. So that was a shift in mindset but driven by collaborative technologies, driven by these different things. It caused us to fundamentally shift our understanding of organizations. Now, generative AI is most likely to do that again in all sorts of interesting ways because it doesn’t just speed up. It doesn’t just have the potential to speed up processes. It has the opportunity for us to conceive of different ways of doing things, of innovation, of communication, different ways of collectivism, different ways of learning. Most likely we’ll see this around education because education, in many ways, has already sold its soul by universities charging high course fees, and we see that markets rarely add social value to things in that sense. The making of money makes some people money and some people happy, but it’s not always a universal benefit. This type of technology has the potential to fracture that in a very real sense. You can just have a conversation with Claude, and Claude will tell you something of great value. No significant cost, and it’s essentially free. That’s bound to impact on our systems. Emergence is interesting, and that’s, of course, the biggest shift, but it will come after some of those others.

Expert Generalists, Specialists, and AICelisa Steele: [00:37:10] One of the other concepts in Engines of Engagement that I was struck by was this idea of expert generalists and the fact that I can work really well, or expert generalists can work really well, in partnership with generative AI. Would you just briefly explain to listeners what you mean by expert generalists? And then I have a follow-on question.

Julian Stodd: [00:37:34] Yes, in some ways, I think you should invite Sae on to give you the best view on that because she bought the expertise in that. But I would look at it from the point of view of the generalist. Essentially, what you can see is that we have two types of people. We train people with deep expertise, but we have other people who are generalists. I’m a generalist. The fancy name for it in my doctoral thesis is “transdisciplinary practitioner,” which means I’m a generalist. I know a little bit about quite a lot of stuff. The Victorians would describe a polymath as somebody who knows something useful. You have to know something useful. You can’t just be aware of it. You have to know something of vague use about a lot of stuff. Now, that’s not super useful if you’re trying to do the in-depth thing really well, but it’s quite useful if you’re trying to evolve what you’re doing.

Julian Stodd: [00:38:18] The expert generalist says you take people and give them some sort of core training, but the specific capability they hold is in learning how to do things. So they are people who have an advantage to an understanding of metacognitive processes, the ways that they learn, and the ways they develop performance. Of course, it turns out that very often they can outperform people with deep specialisms, so that’s quite striking. It indicates something very important for capability within organizations. You probably still need both, but you want to think about the balance between it. I used an illustration on the blog which shows an organization with people plugged into it. I think that’s a historic view of building organizations, to find all the things you have to do, plug people into the gaps to do them. And then, next to it, is a tree that grows out of people.

Julian Stodd: [00:39:12] How do you view your capability and your organization? Is it structural, and you plug people into it? I have a data analyst, they go and get a better job, so I just plug in another data analyst. Or, to some extent, does your capability grow out of people? And, if you take that view, you still have structure, but you also have this diversity—diverse capability—and you have the spaces where you can listen, explore, and experiment, which is a tricky thing in its own right. There’s a whole other piece of research I’ve been doing around experimentation and failure. I think that’s quite interesting. The notion of expert generalists is obviously supported by generative AI because you can be in dialog with yourself. You can access the literature, essentially, through those kinds of tools. Expert generalists will rely on dynamic, contextualized knowledge, and these kinds of technologies can bring that to them. Somewhere in that mix is probably a broader conversation about organizational capability and the function of learning within organizations.

Celisa Steele: [00:40:15] The question I had in mind was this—we work with learning businesses that are helping to develop adults who are fitting into those organizations, whether they’re being plugged in or whether they have that tree growing out of them. But I’m thinking some learning businesses are probably heavily invested in creating those specialists. They’re helping them go deep. An obvious example would be medical specialties. You’re really helping that doctor specialize in a particular area. But, given Engines of Engagement and this notion of expert generalists, it does almost make me wonder if learning businesses, if part of the impact of generative AI will be a change in what they’re helping adult learners learn how to do. Maybe it is more on that metacognitive side and helping them learn and think critically and do those sorts of things, rather than going really deep in a particular topic area. Any thoughts from you on that?

Julian Stodd: [00:41:19] Yes, it could be both. I generally hedge my bets and say we need both. I’m quite sure, at the moment, we need both. We will need people with deep specialism, but maybe we connect them up differently. I think that’s a reasonable view because we’ve seen, generally, a shift away from the structural organization to the organization with more ability to change, to be more dynamic. Maybe we need to think about the balance of ingredients. Do we actually, more explicitly, need to talk about these generalist layers? Because, in some ways, historically, in our organizations, the things that have gone horizontally are things like HR, finance, logistics. They’re not necessarily the elements that are going to give us the cutting-edge innovation. Maybe we want to pivot something across that isn’t administrative. When we think about things like data scientists, maybe they should be horizontal rather than vertical. I talk about diagonal connection, the way that you can connect between things. In the book on the Socially Dynamic organization, we talk about interconnection being key—connected within your structure but also connected into other pieces. And the more interconnected the organization, the stronger it is. So this idea of having specific capability, generalized capability, and being broadly interconnected, I think those are important.

The Importance of Experimenting with Generative AICelisa Steele: [00:42:47] Engines of Engagement is fairly philosophical at many levels, but I think there’s an attempt to be somewhat practical. I’m wondering, for those who are interested in helping others learn, what are some practical ideas to try or some questions to be thinking about in terms of how generative AI might factor into the work they’re doing to support those adult learners?

Julian Stodd: [00:43:15] I would say, try stuff out. I’m not explicitly going to tell you what stuff to try out, but I’ll try to give you a tool to decide and try out things that are small and local, things that you can use with small groups of learners to try it out. Stumble, graze your knees, figure it out. If you’re curious, direct your curiosity more towards your certainty than towards the edges of the system. You can do this by looking at “What do I read every week? What arguments do I hear where people have clear and polarized opinions? Where’s my opinion clear and polarized?” And direct your curiosity in that space. Don’t just think about how to make things more efficient within the system you already have. Think about different things that you can do.

Julian Stodd: [00:44:02] I said to the group this morning, “I’ve never done this before. I’m going to share a picture of the thing that you have created. I don’t really know how to introduce the picture. It’s not an assessment of you. It’s not research-led.” So I came up with that language: “Use it like a reflective surface. Use it like a poet has listened to you and written this poem, which is useless because you don’t need a poem, but also, if you listen to the poem, maybe it’s going to inspire you to think about something differently.” So do that for yourself. Just try stuff out, not just in the obvious ways. Look to break things apart slightly. Learning is a process of fracture and reformulation, so find something you can break locally and gently.

Using Generative AI to Cheat (and That’s a Good Thing!)Celisa Steele: [00:44:52] We always like to ask guests who come on the Leading Learning Podcast about their own approach to their lifelong learning. I know when you were last on the show that Jeff asked about the role that writing and illustrating play in your learning. Given our conversation today, I’d like to ask how you’re using generative AI to help you continue to learn and develop personally and professionally.

Julian Stodd: [00:45:17] Plain and simple, to cheat, at every opportunity. This morning I was having a conversation with one of the people I work with, Sam, and we were talking about Instagram and threads—what’s the difference between them? We were faffing about, and then we thought, “Let’s just ask Claude.” We asked Claude, and we got a really good answer. It’s like cheating. We don’t have to know it. We could find it out easily. So we did. I’ve been using it in the doctoral work when I need to read something. I’ll be like, “Oh my goodness, I’m supposed to know what this word means. Can you just explain this word to me like I’m 12?” And it does. And then I can go away and write something that sounds clever. So I definitely use it to cheat, and that’s about it. I don’t use it in my art. I don’t use it in my writing. Because, for me, the purgatory is the thing.

Julian Stodd: [00:46:14] I’m unpopular with my writer friends because I don’t really have writer’s block. I just tend to splurge stuff out. But the writing is the thing, so I don’t want to make it easier. Even when I write on LinkedIn, it says, “Rewrite this with AI.” I’m like, “No, I don’t want to rewrite it with AI.” If the sentence is—sometimes I deliberately let myself fall into this stream-of-consciousness writing. Sometimes I deliberately make my sentences disjointed, jarring, and awkward, and I don’t want it smoothed out. I want to feel it like that. I’m a really bad example of what you should do. I don’t listen to podcasts. I don’t watch TED Talks. I don’t read any of those airport books about being a better leader or learner. It just doesn’t do it for me, although clearly it does for millions of other people. I like to bump into interesting people, spend time in different communities, try stuff out. You’ve got to find your own path. So I do use it, but it’s in fairly limited ways.

Jeff Cobb: [00:47:27] Julian Stodd is founder of Sea Salt Learning and co-author of Engines of Engagement: A Curious Book About Generative AI. That book is available as a free download or, for a fee, as a beautifully bound physical artifact. Follow Julian on LinkedIn, where he works out loud.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Learning in the Social Age with Julian Stodd * Modern Learning with Sae Schatz * Working Out Loud with John Stepper * Learning Out Loud with Michelle Ockers * Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer

The post A Curious Conversation About AI with Julian Stodd appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbMany skills are needed to create and sustain a successful learning business: financial know-how, marketing acumen, instructional design, to name just a few. But one area that often isn’t invested in—or invested in adequately—is business development.

Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss what a business development professional should be able to do for your learning business and how having a skilled professional leading business development means the chance to improve your reach, revenue, and impact.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] Many skill sets are needed to create and sustain a successful learning business, and one skill set that may warrant more attention is business development. Having a skilled professional leading business development for you means the chance to improve your reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:21] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:22] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:31] Many skill sets are needed to create and sustain a successful learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:36] Yes, there are skills that clearly fall under the learning part of “learning business”: instructional design, andragogy, learning science, and so on.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:45] And there are skills that clearly fall under the business part of “learning business.” I’m thinking of things like all the financial acumen needed for projections, for profit and loss statements, and so on. I’m thinking also of all the marketing acumen needed for assessing the size and needs of a target market, for identifying products to develop, etcetera.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:07] Learning businesses almost always see the need for employing or contracting or somehow working with people who understand learning science and instructional design, people who can help with promotion, and people skilled in finance. But, in the business part, one area where we tend to see lack of investment and sometimes a lack of awareness and know-how is business development. So we want to focus this episode on the need for business development for learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:39] We’ll say up front that that need for business development applies most clearly and most strongly in business-to-business (B2B) situations.

Business Development for B2B SalesJeff Cobb: [00:01:50] That’s true. We’ll talk about what business development really means. And, certainly, it can play a role in helping to develop and expand your business-to-consumer (B2C), your typical selling to members, selling to customers, individual customers audience. But, if you are only in that B2C world, you really should consider branching out, and business development would be a part of that.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:17] And the reason we say you should consider branching out is that, because we are dealing with an increasingly competitive marketplace where there are so many more options for learners to choose from, it can be difficult for most learning businesses to thrive solely with that business-to-consumer (B2C) sale of their educational products.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:39] That’s right. They’re going to need to be able to sell in quantity to other organizations ideally, corporations, to health systems, to government agencies, and, in many instances, they’re going to benefit by being able to deliver customized and even premium-priced solutions to those organizations. Doing that requires a level of selling skill and relationship development that most organizations simply don’t possess right now.

Business Development for SponsorshipsCelisa Steele: [00:03:09] Another area where this business development role also will clearly play a role is around sponsorships and partnerships. If you think beyond the direct fees you can get from learning products and getting individuals or organizations to underwrite the cost of that, you might also have those sponsorships and partnership dollars coming in to help you deliver what you need to as a learning business. And, again, business development is going to play a big role there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:38] We should be clear that we’re talking about more than just pure selling here. This isn’t just hiring somebody to go out and sell your portfolio to organizations—though that’s certainly going to be part of it. But business development in its real sense, in its best sense, goes beyond just selling, though selling is a part of it.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:57] It reminds me of the point around “learning” being this umbrella term with “professional development,” “continuing education,” those sorts of, flavors of learning being underneath that umbrella. Similarly, I think of “business development” as an umbrella term, and clearly under that umbrella is selling, but there’s more under that umbrella as well.

What a Business Development Professional Should Know and Be Able to DoJeff Cobb: [00:04:17] Right, so we can talk a little bit about what is it that a business development professional—the sort of person you might want to bring into your learning business or develop within your learning business—what does that person need to know and be able to do?

Celisa Steele: [00:04:35] We’ll start with the obvious one, which is sell.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:37] Which we just said that that’s not all it is, but that is a big part of it.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:40] That’s a big part of it, and so a good business development person will know how to sell. That means they’re going to know how to articulate the value of your learning business’s products and services. They’re going to be able to articulate that value effectively. They’re going to be able to convert that value perception into actual purchases, into actual sales and dollars.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:01] Yes, that conversion part is important. You have to not just be able to talk about it but get people to take action relative to what you’re offering. So selling is a big part of it, but, along with that, really being able to execute on strategy, which, of course, means deeply understanding and appreciating your strategy in the first place, and then being a good steward of the overall business strategy and having the ability to actively cultivate the relationships that are needed for opening new channels and more broadly or deeply reaching the individuals and organizations that are the prospective audience for your learning and education offerings.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:42] And, related to that ability to execute on strategy, ideally they would have a skill set around contributing to strategy. They’re going to be really well positioned—anyone working in business development—to potentially help you shape your strategy or refine your strategy because they’re going to be having these conversations and exchanges with potential partners, and that’s going to give them a lot of insight into what potential changes might need to be made to make the learning business and its products and services be more effective. They might also be able to help identify new opportunities, an idea for a new product line or some sort of new service line that then the learning business could decide to pursue. Again, not just executing on the strategy, but also potentially thinking through where refinements and enhancements to that strategy might be beneficial.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:32] Yes, I think that’s critical in being able to find new opportunities because you understand the sorts of opportunities that are going to be beneficial to the learning business. I hope you’re getting the sense this is much more than just the “Here’s our portfolio; go out and sell it” sort of thing that we’re talking about. Integral to all of this, we’ve talked about executing on strategy, contributing to strategy, and a fundamental part of that is building and maintaining relationships. A good business development person has to be excellent at doing that. And not just personally—they’ve got a lot of buds at their meeting, at the convention, or whatever it is. They’re doing that in a way that actually accrues to the learning business, so they’re developing those relationships in a way that is going to have business value.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:16] To your point, Jeff, it’s not that someone who has a conversation with you, Jeff, thinks, “Wow, I’d really like to work with Jeff,” but then the learning business that you’re tied to then wouldn’t necessarily be as attractive if you left. And so you want someone who’s really building and maintaining relationships for the sake of the learning business, and that it’s not just tied to this one individual person, but that they are again clearly articulating the value of the learning business so that those relationships are grounded in that value that the learning business offers, and then the learning business is the one that benefits from those relationships over time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:53] And then a further extension of this whole idea of strategy and building and maintaining relationships is an ability to consult. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to send a business development person in to do consulting projects per se, but they need to be able to have that consultative relationship with the partners, with the organizations that you may be selling to, to really connect the dots between the value that you as a learning business offer and how that value can best manifest to meet the goals, the objectives of whoever that partner or prospective customer is.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:32] Tied to this idea of having some level of consultative approach to business development, also related to this idea of building and maintaining relationships, is the need to listen. It isn’t just selling. It isn’t—as you said, Jeff—going in with the prospectus. “This is what we have to offer. What do you like?” and pick and choose. But it’s really around listening to that potential partner to hear their pain points, their opportunities, and then, like you said, connect those dots with what the learning business either already offers or could offer.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:09:09] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you are looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

Relationships a Business Development Professional Can Help SupportJeff Cobb: [00:09:39] We’ve talked about those skills that the optimal business development person should have, and we’ve seen numerous situations in which this level of skill is necessary and would certainly be beneficial to learning businesses.

Working with Other Learning Businesses (Including Academia-Association Relationships)Celisa Steele: [00:09:54] We can talk through some of these types of relationships that often make sense for learning businesses, and this is where a business development professional would help that learning business. Academic relationships is one big area. You can think about academic partners both as potential sources for content and for delivery of content, and again thinking about what is that right relationship, and could you be bringing content to the academic partner? Could the academic partner be helping you with content? There are a lot of different ways that it can work, but clearly you have academic programs that are focused on usually whatever field or profession your learning business is also serving, and then those people that get that start in an academic program need to continue to learn. So there’s a lot of natural continuation between an academic program and what a learning business might provide.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:46] And that’s, of course, talking about learning businesses that’re outside of the academic setting. The reverse also applies if you are in that academic setting. If you’re a continuing education unit at an academic institution, then somebody who can develop relationships with, say, the association world [is helpful]. We talk a lot about academic and association relationships. We don’t really see a lot of activity, a lot of action there. It’s a really fertile ground for both of those types of learning businesses to look at how do we develop relationships across those aisles?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:20] It’s been a while, but you had a conversation with NIGP’s CEO Rick Grimm a while ago, specifically focused on this idea of academic relationships between an association and then that academic partner.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:31] That’s right. That’s something that NIGP had looked at. And we even convened a group a while back to talk about association-academic relationships, something we need to come back to and probably do more formally again. But just some very fertile ground there, doing things like embedding certifications into degree programs, which is something that NIGP was doing at that point. And we know a number of other organizations that do that sort of thing—sharing content as part of a curriculum, sharing subject matter experts across both the association and the academic audience. So there are a lot of opportunities there.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:05] This is the kind of thing that a business development professional can help you see as opportunities and then figure out how to structure it—what makes the most sense given all the parties involved.

Workforce DevelopmentJeff Cobb: [00:12:16] How to orchestrate all of that. So that’s that relationship across different types of learning businesses—talking here about associations and academics in particular. Another big area where business development is really needed is workforce development. Truly having an impact on workforce development in whatever field or industry you’re serving almost always means forging the sorts of relationships that we just talked about, but it also means developing corporate and government relationships and, in general, facilitating an optimal network for connecting new and prospective employees in your industry with your learning experiences, which then, of course, are going to benefit the employers in that industry.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:00] Workforce development has become increasingly important, increasingly an area of focus—this whole idea of upskilling and reskilling as professions change so quickly. Things like generative AI changed what it means to do a particular job or serve a particular function. All of these things mean having a clear bead on what those employers in your field or industry need and mapping that to what you offer so that you know what you have in your portfolio really is valued because the employers are going to value it, which means it’s going to be valuable to your learners. We have a number of past episodes where we talk about workforce development, some aspect of workforce development, so be sure to check out the show notes for links to some of those. For example, we talked with Scott Wiley about the Ohio Society of CPAs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:56] That’s right.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:57] He talked about their workforce development needs. And we’ve talked with a number of other organizations and individuals about workforce development and what it means to map what you’re offering to that. Again, this is where a business development professional can help you structure what this looks like, help you do some of that legwork to forge those partnerships that are going to give you that insight into what is it that the workforce needs and, therefore, what should you be offering?

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:24] Yes, and we’ve been using those words—“structure,” “coordinate,” “orchestrate”—a lot because that is so integral to all of this. It’s not just about making a transaction happen. Ultimately, there’s probably going to be a transaction that happens, but it’s really being able to step back and saying, “How do I take these pieces and make them into a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts?” That’s something a good business development person is uniquely capable of doing. So we just talked about workforce development. A specific area where workforce development, partnerships, and relationships can really benefit from business development is in health markets.

Working with EmployersJeff Cobb: [00:15:03] Obviously, not everybody listening will be in a healthcare profession, but a lot of people are, and what we’re saying here would probably apply to many different professions. Health just jumps out because, when you’re in the healthcare profession, most organizations are selling to doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals, and they’d benefit from developing relationships with a range of institutions that employ these people. Most of these institutions have that need for educational content for their employees, and working with them, those institutions, is typically a much more rapid path to reaching and impacting an organization’s target audience than trying to sell one nurse by one nurse, one doctor by one doctor, though, obviously, that can still be a part of your strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:50] We have an episode going way back, number 32, with Dana Woods talking about the success of nurses and reaching out for some of that partnering with employers.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:00] Yes. Dana, CEO of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses. They had a lot of success with their ECCO (Essentials of Critical Care Orientation) program into hospitals and health systems.

International ExpansionCelisa Steele: [00:16:10] Another area where a business development professional could help your learning business is in international expansion. This is something that’s become much easier to do in the past couple of decades, as so much has gone online, as there’s more asynchronous learning, as there’s more ability to globalize and localize content efficiently. This idea of expanding beyond a narrower geographic focus has become much more of a real possibility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:40] We’ve said before that, at this point, every organization should think of themselves as potentially an international organization because of what technology has made possible. It still tends to be true, particularly if you’re a U.S.-based organization. In a lot of places in the world, people are looking for U.S.-based credentials and content, and that’s attractive. But you’ve got to be able to form the right relationships, typically, to make that happen, the right sorts of partnerships, and, once again, having a business development person who has the right skill set, the right acumen for doing that, is critical.

Organizational AlliancesCelisa Steele: [00:17:14] Then another area is what we would put under the term of “organizational alliances.” In many ways, what we’ve been talking about all along is organizational alliances, but this is a little bit more of a taking-it-from-a-partnership approach. If you think about the area that you operate in, you’re probably not the only organization that is serving learners in that area. So you want to be thinking about what other organizations do your learners look to for support, for content, for help? And those might be places where you could form alliances. So, rather than competing, you figure out how to work together around some shared goal or goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:55] This can of course be tricky territory because you often do have some overlapping with those other organizations. You have to think about the competitive aspects of it. A lot of times organizations won’t even look at this because it does require some careful thought. It is pretty challenging to figure out, even if there are potentially substantial opportunities there. But this is just the sort of challenge that a good business development person relishes to figure out.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:21] I think of the term “other people’s networks.” There’s also a spectrum along which you could form an alliance with other organizations. It could be at the more casual end, where part of what you’re doing is making sure that you get in front of another organization’s or another potential alliance person’s networks.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:44] These days being able to leverage other people’s networks, other organizations’ networks is one of the most impactful and critical things you can do in terms of expanding your business. And, again, having somebody who’s in charge of making that happen is just so helpful. We’ll finish off the list here by mentioning, once again, partners and sponsorships. We brought that up early on. Certainly, it’s an area that benefits from going beyond a selling perspective and thinking about those relationships as not just a way to get some cash into your organization, getting the typical bronze-, silver-, gold-level sponsor for your annual event, but actually forging relationships that create value for you, your sponsors, and your partners. And, of course, it ultimately creates a value for your learners as well and attract more learners to you.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:38] That’s right—looking for that proverbial win-win-win, where everyone involved really is benefiting. But I do think, to your point, Jeff, that often we can think reductively about sponsors, about the cash that they can bring to the learning business. But, to your point, and what we were just talking about with other people’s networks, other organizations’ networks, those sponsors can help you get in front of people who would benefit from your learning products and services. So there is that potential value there that a business development professional can help you see, execute on, and realize.

Common Objections to Investing in Business DevelopmentJeff Cobb: [00:20:13] So those are just a few of the key areas in which a good business development person or, if you happen to be a large organization, maybe even a business development team can really generate some significant value. Hopefully, one or more, if not all of those, are resonating with you as you listen to this discussion about business development for learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:38] But that brings us to the “but,” which is that all of this may sound great, but typically we hear two objections around this. First, can we afford a business development person? And then, second, for people who’ve come to grips with “Yes, okay, we’ll figure out how to afford that business development person,” how do we find such a person?

Can You Afford a Business Development Professional?Jeff Cobb: [00:21:01] So let’s tackle each of those. First, there’s that cost perspective—can we afford it? I’m always tempted to say, “Can you afford not to have that business development person?” But we realize that the budget for adding a business development person can be a big item, and the good ones definitely don’t come cheap. But, if you’re thinking longer term, we’d argue that most learning businesses that want to thrive over that longer term want to grow, achieve new levels of maturity, substantially contribute to their field, they’re going to do themselves more harm than good by not having someone on staff who can devote most of their time to business development.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:41] In the list of areas that we talked about where a business development professional could focus time and energy, those were not easy things.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:50] No.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:50] All of those will take a lot of legwork to figure out exactly what they look like, what makes sense, to structure and orchestrate—to use those words again. And so it can be hard to make progress in any of those areas if you don’t have someone who’s focused on that. And the silver lining is that a good business development person should be able to and should be expected to—and should expect themselves to—return many multiples of whatever their salary is or whatever their costs are, by bringing in additional revenue to the learning business. It may be an investment up front, but the goal is that it will more than pay for itself over time. Once you really have that business development professional engaged, fully devoted, and focused, they’ll be bringing in more than they cost.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:38] Yes, they should represent adding a multiplier to your current assets and activities. But that leads to the second objection, which, for me, is the bigger one because we know this from our own efforts that finding someone who can do this, finding someone who is a truly excellent business development person is not easy.

How Do You Find a Business Development Professional?Celisa Steele: [00:23:01] In our experience, you tend to get one or the other, meaning you tend to get industry experience—so, whatever your field or profession, whatever your focus is, they might be knowledgeable in that. Or you’re going to get someone who’s a dyed-in-the-wool business development professional. They’re going to really have that skill set, but they’ll be lacking on your specifics, on your industry.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:27] Depending on which of those you get, you’re going to need to invest in learning to bring the person up to speed on the others. Your industry experts are going to have to get those business development skills. Business development persons are going to have to get those industry skills. I’ll say my bias is to go with the business development person and then train them on your field or industry, but I know others will have different perspectives on that.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:50] Even if you do manage to get both, if you manage to get that unicorn that has both industry experience and business development experience, even then it will take that person time to get up to speed on exactly your specific learning business, your specific products and services, your strategy, to begin having those conversations and building those relationships. All of that’s going to take time before it translates into any dollars. So this is a bit of a long game to play with business development.

Investing in Business Development Is a Sign of MaturityJeff Cobb: [00:24:20] As you consider and re-evaluate your strategy, we hope you’ll be sure to give some thought to the role that business development might play in increasing your overall capacity and contributing to your marketing efforts, both of which are domains within the Learning Business Maturity Model.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:38] That’s right. Capacity and marketing, those are two of the domains that we talk about in the Learning Business Maturity Model. Both of those are arguably cost centers. Capacity has to do with your human resources and your technology. Marketing has to do with that big-picture view of marketing—not just promotion but product development and all of that. Those things are typically cost centers, but they’re also absolutely integral to what a learning business has to do, so they are not costs where you want to try to go cheaply. Our main takeaway is that business development is very likely an area that your learning business could use some initial or additional investment in.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:27] Many skill sets are needed to create and sustain a successful learning business, and one skill set that may warrant more attention is business development. Having a skilled professional leading business development for you means the chance to improve your reach, revenue, and impact.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* The Critical Role of Learning with Dana Woods of AACN * Talking Workforce Development with Scott Wiley of OSCPA * Talking Leadership and Learning with Rick Grimm of NIGP * Transformational Partnerships with Bruce Rosenthal * Learning Business Maturity Model

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbWe’re at an important point in time for lifelong learning. Much is shifting and unsettled in how humans live and work. That unsettledness means opportunity if your learning business is willing to grapple with the uncertainty and shape a vision for its role in the lifelong learning market.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele look at the current lifelong learning landscape, near-future trends, and the implications—and opportunities—for learning businesses.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] We’re at an important point in time for lifelong learning. Much is shifting and unsettled in how humans live and work. That unsettledness means opportunity if your learning business is willing to grapple with the uncertainty and shape a vision of the lifelong learning market overall and its role in the market.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:24] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:25] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] Dear listener, how well do you remember your middle school math? For example, do you remember what a perfect square is?

Celisa Steele: [00:00:42] We’ll pause for a moment, give you a chance to try to remember, but we’ll also save you in case you don’t remember your middle school math so well. A perfect square is the product of some integer with itself. For example, 9 is a square number, or a perfect square, since it equals 3 x 3. And the reason we ask is because this is episode 400.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:06] And 400 is a perfect square because 20 x 20 equals 400. And 20/20 got us thinking about vision, and so we want to focus this milestone episode on our view of the market for lifelong learning and our vision for that market.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:25] We’ll roughly talk about this in three parts. First, we want to talk about the landscape. Then we want to talk about the current state of that landscape. And then we’ll turn towards some comments about the future state for that landscape. Actually, I’ll throw in a fourth—we also want to talk a little bit about some implications for learning businesses of all of this.

The Lifelong Learning LandscapeJeff Cobb: [00:01:46] Maybe it’s a good time to make sure we trot out some of our familiar terms as we’re talking about the landscape because there are particular phrases—words, terms, and phrases—that we’re known for. One of those is the “third sector,” and this whole concept of there being a third sector of education.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:06] Right, and the first two sectors are much better known. So the first sector is K-12, or pre-K through high school, and that system is focused on children. And then we have the second sector of education, which covers higher education—the colleges that are granting undergraduate and graduate degrees. Both of those sectors are really well known. But this third sector of education, it’s a little less well-known, but it’s definitely not new.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:35] That’s right. The third sector serves the millions—it’s probably billions, to be honest—of adults who continue to learn and grow in the decades that follow their secondary and post-secondary education.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:50] There are many providers that make up that third sector. There are many folks providing that learning that needs to happen in that third sector. There’s corporate learning and development—those L&D departments at companies and organizations. There are learntech companies. There are even social networking companies like LinkedIn that are providing lifelong learning. There’s community education. And then, of course, core to what we do at Leading Learning, there are learning businesses that are active in that third sector.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:19] And so that’s another phrase that we’re known for, that we talk about a lot—“learning businesses.” Learning businesses are a key part of that third sector of education. They include academic continuing education units (PCO units, as they’re often called), commercial training companies, solo edupreneurs, and trade and professional associations. No matter the organization type, what those learning businesses have in common is that they’re all in a market-facing business that sells education and learning products to adults. So it’s not internal corporate training. It’s not really academic degree programs either because we’re talking about this longer span of life after formal education. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:03] And so, for us, there are two main distinguishing characteristics of a learning business. First, a learning business exists to generate revenue through selling learning and education experiences to whatever its target market is. And then also the individuals working in those learning businesses recognize that revenue generation is a fundamental reason for the organization’s existence, and so they are conscious of and focused on that goal as part of the organization’s identity and part of their own identity. We think that second part is really important because it means that learning businesses are distinguished not just by their activities but also by a mindset, by an awareness of what they’re doing, which is needing to provide excellent educational opportunities, learning opportunities, but also needing to do so in a way that produces revenue that ensures their continued existence.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:53] Those are our two main landscape terms. We’ve got this idea of a third sector of education, which itself is carved out of the much bigger, broader landscape of lifelong learning that includes all sorts of informal stuff that’s going on out there. But we have this defined third sector. And then serving that third sector, a variety of different types of organizations, but learning businesses, particularly in our world here at Leading Learning, being a really key component of that.

The Current State of Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:05:25] Now, if we look at that current state of the third sector, I think that one of the things that we have been seeing over the past few years, past decade—roughly a little under a decade—we’ve really been seeing signs of the growing importance of lifelong learning, AKA the third sector, where a lot of that lifelong learning is happening.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:49] Yes, it’s been really, really heartening to see. We were fortunate, for example, to have Dr. Anthony Carnevale of the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce (CEW) on the show, and he’s pointed out that learning now contributes more to overall gross domestic product and productivity than technology does, which is a pretty amazing bit of information.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:12] Right. That’s in the U.S. And that Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, they put out a lot of research and free resources. So we recommend you check them out if you haven’t in the past. But they have, for example, a report called “College is Just the Beginning,” and then they break down in that report how the $1.1 trillion the U.S. spends annually on post-secondary education and training is spent. Let me just repeat that for a second—$1.1 trillion, with a T. So that is a big deal. The dollar figure to go with what you were saying, Jeff, around it contributing more to overall GDP than technology at this point.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:53] So that’s exhibit A here in talking about this current state in which lifelong learning is becoming so much more important. The third sector is becoming so much more important. Exhibit B is a 2017 Economist article that we actually posted and wrote a little about, and we’ve talked about on the show before.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:11] Yes, and, in that article, a feature of that issue, The Economist declared that lifelong learning is an “economic imperative.” And that’s just one example. There are other examples from mainstream media of lifelong learning getting played up. But you have a venerable publication like The Economist suddenly saying, you know what, this is a front cover-type issue here. We need to lead with lifelong learning right there on the cover.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:38] Yes, very heartening. Thinking back 20 years or so, 25 years, when we first got involved in this world, you did not see the phrase “lifelong learning” on the cover of a major media publication. Now you see it in places like The Economist. It pops up in publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal all the time. And it points to the importance of learning now in a world where the scale, the scope, and the speed of change seem so much higher than they ever have before.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:07] I think a big reason that The Economist chose to focus on it is because it does tie to business growth and productivity. And so you get, wrapped up in the discussions of lifelong learning, things like upskilling and reskilling and that real focus on what does it take to have the workers that we need to help the companies in our society do what they need to do? That leads us into, I think—it’s a little bit less of an exhibit—another outgrowth of this focus on lifelong learning, which is this concept of the 60-year curriculum. Dr. Gary Matkin is credited with coming up with that term, the “60-year curriculum.” But the fundamental idea is that the next generations are going to live into their 90s, probably even beyond, and people start to think about their first job in mid-adolescence. If you say, okay, 15 years of age, and then those individuals will have to work to the age of 75, assuming they’re going to live that long, and so that’s six decades. And that’s where this idea of the 60-year curriculum comes from—from that 15-year-old beginning to think about a job and what they want to do with their life in terms of a job, all the way up until they might be able to retire, if that continues to be a thing, around 75.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:27] Right, and this is really a disruptive idea, particularly in the world of higher education, academia, which is where Gary Matkin’s coming from and putting forth this idea because the fundamental approach, up until recent years, is that, basically, we’re going to spend about 95 percent of our efforts to prepare people for their first job through these other two sectors of education, K-12 and then, particularly, higher education, as if that’s going to be their only job and their only career. You’re going and getting that degree at college, and then you go get your job, and, hey, you’re done. You’re just going to work for the next 50 years. And it’s a recognition that that is just not the way things are working anymore.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:12] That’s right. I don’t think it surprises anyone listening that that is no longer the way things are, that we’re changing jobs and even careers much more frequently, somewhere in the scale of five to seven times. Obviously, some people, even more than that; maybe a few still changing careers a fewer number than that. But, in general, there’s just a lot of change, and some of those careers that people will change to don’t even exist yet. I will also note that we did have Chris Dede of Harvard on the podcast to talk about the 60-year curriculum because he’s also been involved in the thinking around that. So we’ll make sure to link to that episode in the show notes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:53] And I’ll note that this whole concept was something that really drove a lot of the thinking behind Leading the Learning Revolution back when I was writing that book, which was, boy, it’s hard to believe that was a decade ago. I was calling it “the other 50 years” at the time. This was before the whole 60-year curriculum thing came along. That was just my way of putting it. Again, it was this idea that you hit your mid-20s, and, if you’ve been lucky enough to be able to go all the way through some form of higher education and maybe graduate education, you are at that point then on your own to navigate those other 50 years of your productive life. And 60 might be a better number at this point because we know people are managing, on average, to live a bit longer and are having to work even in that late-life period.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:37] Yes, I think the 60-year curriculum puts the focus on this from age 15 to 75, which starts earlier than where you were focused, Jeff, and is this idea of, oh, well, when you might retire from your career. I think what you’re thinking about is more of once you finish a college degree, if you’re going to get one, up all the way until you die. Essentially, you’re taking the broader view of lifelong learning, where it’s not only tied to your job or your career, it’s….

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:04] A broader view. And I don’t think we had actually come up with the term the “third sector” at that point, but that’s really what I was pointing to—this third-sector area that people are moving through and how important that is.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:16] We’ve written some things about the other 50 years that we can, again, include links to in the show notes if you’re curious about understanding more about what we mean by that term. And then, in terms of the current state, one of the other big things that we would absolutely be remiss not to mention is COVID and just the absolute surge and spike in online learning. We saw that in terms of Big Learning—the Courseras and Udemys of the world and things like that. But I think pretty much every organization that we’ve had any exchange with, they’ve moved way more online because they had to. It was essentially do nothing or move online for a period of time anyway.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:01] Yes, online learning was already established, ubiquitous before COVID. But a lot of organizations, learning businesses, had not really stepped their game up to the level that they needed to, and there were still a lot of individual learners out there who were, “You’re going to drag me kicking and screaming into the online world,” and, well, they got dragged. They had to. It’s interesting, too, that you mentioned Big Learning. Just the presence of these Big Learning companies now is itself such a factor in the landscape, that you’ve got the Courseras, the edXs, the Udemys, and the LinkedIn Learnings, and they were all out there and ready for this to happen and, I’m sure, benefited quite a bit from that huge push online.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:13:43] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

The Current Unsettledness of Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:14:19] Another important view of the current state is—I think I’ll just put it under this umbrella of “unsettledness,” that there’s a lot that’s being questioned around learning and lifelong learning. What I have in mind, for example, is the value of a college degree. That’s being heavily questioned now, given the investment of time and money and given the short shelf life of that education that you get. Is it worth it? What does college need to be?

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:47] Yes, a lot of turmoil around that. And it is true, we should acknowledge, that it is still the case that a college degree is going to serve you well in life. All the data still says that you’re going to earn more over your lifetime—I think it’s a million plus more—than if you don’t get that degree. But a lot of those findings are based on old data, and a lot is changing awfully rapidly, so I don’t think you can be too sanguine at this point that a college degree is always going to mean what it has meant in the past. It seems pretty easy to envision a switch flipping on that when people aren’t fully expecting it.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:24] And we are seeing a lot of forecasting around a drop-off in college enrollment. A lot of universities are very worried about what the future may hold.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:33] Yes, the enrollment cliff, they’re calling it now.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:35] Yes, exactly. I think another thing we have to mention when talking about the current learning landscape is generative AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:44] I think you just have to mention generative AI 10 times a day, as a matter of course now. But, certainly, it is impacting the whole world of the third sector and learning businesses and really impacting our whole understanding of what it is that human beings need to know and learn and do going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:06] As a learning business, given that generative AI is impacting what humans need to know and learn, then it’s about what does that mean in terms of what we offer as learning businesses? How do we need to change what we’re doing and what we’re providing?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:22] AI is making things change fast. We’ve already talked about this other 50 years or 60-year curriculum, needing to continue to learn and change and knowing that the college degree, even if it remains valuable, it’s not enough anymore. We are seeing this different credentialing landscape open up around things like Open Badges and other types of alternative credentialing that, increasingly, learners are going to need to be able to navigate. Learning businesses are going to need to be able to provide guidance on and offer those. I think that unsettledness is around that right now as well. How is that going to pan out? What are these alternative credentials going to mean in relationship to traditional credentials, degrees and certifications? In general, how are we going to navigate this landscape that we’re seeing right now going forward?

The Future State of Lifelong Learning: AI, Credentials, and MoreCelisa Steele: [00:17:14] So that was a look at the current state of lifelong learning. Now, if we pull out our crystal ball and try to look at the future state, this is where our 20/20 vision gets a little bit fuzzier because, of course, we don’t know the exact impact of any of the trends and what it’s going to mean. But we can at least name some things that we feel like it’s very likely that they’re going to influence the future state of lifelong learning. I’ll mention generative AI again since we already mentioned it. But, again, there’s a lot of unknowns around exactly how that’s going to play out in terms of adoption and what it’s going to mean in practical terms, both for development and delivery of learning opportunities and then just for learners themselves and what they need or want to know going forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:04] Yes, and I think there’s every likelihood that what we’re experiencing around AI right now is something of a bubble. There’s just so much hype around it. In fact, Cory Doctorow did an article on this recently, very interesting—shout-out to Deirdre Reid for pointing it out—where he looks at past bubbles like the Internet and cryptocurrency, and what did they leave behind that was a value? That’s going to be the question. And, if you look at AI and say it is a bubble, it’s going to burst at some point, which seems reasonable to me, but it’s going to leave something behind that will persist, that it will have a legacy that goes with it, and it will continue forward, just like the Internet in general has. What is that going to be?

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:44] I think when you look at what you’re able to do with AI tools right now—assuming having the computing power to do this doesn’t completely throw us off the map in terms of global warming and things like that, that we’re able to maintain it—the level of analysis that AI is able to give us for looking at our markets, for analyzing what our learners need, how our learners are performing, the level of efficiency that it can bring to helping to create the experiences that we need to create, there’s just no way that those aren’t going to have a lasting impact, that we’re not going to see that as part of our toolset—how we approach being learning businesses and how we and our learners approach being learners—going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:26] I think another trend that will continue to have impact on the market for lifelong learning is the credentialing landscape that you mentioned, Jeff. I think that it’s highly likely that we’re going to see an increasing focus on standards, things like Open Badges, which you mentioned. I think, as part of that, we’re going to see that credentialing ecosystem center the individual learner rather than the learning providers. That individual will have much more control over her credentials, whom she shares them with, and how she shares them, rather than the focus being on the learning provider and that learner needing to go to the learning provider and say, “Hey, can you provide me a transcript for what I did there?” And maybe that transcript is only for that single learning provider, and maybe that transcript says nothing about what actually went into completing the courses or whatever learning experiences are represented there. I think that approach to more of an ecosystem and having those standards that are going to allow for interoperability could really change a lot about lifelong learning and how credentials are handled.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:35] Yes, both standards and ecosystem are so important there because, when you think about the situation right now with degrees, which are really the coin of the realm for getting into certain levels of employment and earnings and that sort of thing, there is a social agreement around those. There are established standards that go with your two- and four-year degrees, and there is an ecosystem in the employment market where they are seen as having a certain level of value, as having certain signals that go with them. So it works to get a degree at this point in a way that it doesn’t quite work yet with other forms of credentialing—badges and alternative credentialing. But we’re getting there. As the standards take hold, as employers start to see the flexibility that this offers, and more and more of them are using them for hiring purposes and promotion purposes, then that social agreement is going to be there, and we’re going to see a tipping point, at some point, around alternative credentials.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:35] One of the interesting aspects of some of the standards, like around Open Badges, is that that makes those credentials both human-readable and machine-readable, and so that allows the learner to potentially send that to a hiring manager or to a boss. But it also then opens up what can be done in terms of data mining, and I think that ties back into generative AI. We could see a lot changing, too, around even the timeline that it takes to get a credential that says something about what you know how to do and what you can do. You can almost begin to imagine real-time credentialing, driven potentially by AI, where you’re in the moment attesting to and demonstrating that you have whatever skill is potentially needed for a job.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:19] Right. We’re definitely in the world of forecasting and predictions right now. And, who knows, we might eat our words at some point. But there are things that seem clear about the future that we’re facing now, and the main thing that seems clear is that learning is going to continue to play a big role.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:38] Yes, I think “learning” is the right term there. We had a recent episode where we talked about learning and education, “learning” being the broader term, “education” being traditionally applied to things like the college degree and those more formal, structured, often even longer types of learning experiences. We might see the diminishment of education, but I think that the role of learning will definitely become increasingly important or, certainly, at least maintain its current level of importance.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:14] I think, at a minimum, we’ll see a lot more diversity in what represents educational experiences. But education is, always will be, a subset of learning, and I think we’re likely to see more emphasis on less structured learning experiences as we go forward. A lot of what keeps us from, I think, placing the value on informal learning that we could right now is we don’t quite know how to get a grip on it, measure it, evaluate it. With AI and some of the other tools that are coming along, we’re getting in a better and better position to be able to navigate the informal learning world and to better appreciate the significance, the value that it brings to our lives and to our work.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:59] We’ve talked about some key terms of the landscape—the “third sector” and “learning businesses.” And then we talked about the current state and the future state of the third sector of lifelong learning. But we would be remiss if we didn’t also spend some time on the implications for learning businesses.

Implications for Learning BusinessesJeff Cobb: [00:24:20] I’d say the big headline here is that there is a real opportunity. We’re potentially in a golden age for learning businesses simply because there is so much need out there. People know they need to learn—go back to The Economist saying this is an imperative. We get that. But we need help navigating that landscape. We need the guides. We need the people that are going to help us to structure the paths that work for us, that are going to provide the content, that are going to provide the experiences, that are going to help us evaluate that and actually make it useful in our lives. It’s a huge opportunity.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:56] Yes, I think this speaks to the chance for learning businesses to play the role of not only a learning provider but a learning advisor. This is about helping your learners chart out the path and helping them to understand what it could mean for them if they were to be able to learn something and then demonstrate that they know that thing. So, yes, real opportunity, huge opportunity. And, when there’s huge opportunity, there’s often a lot of danger. I think the danger is for learning businesses to continue doing what they’re doing and to not tune in to some of these trends and think about the implications for what they do and for their learners. If they just continue to provide the same courses and conference sessions, I think they’re going to end up missing the boat. There’s a chance here to really think about what does it mean to support lifelong learners moving ahead?

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:53] Yes, this is definitely one of those times where the biggest risk is to do nothing, to just continue on as you were. And it’s a good time to introduce another one of our concepts, phrases here. We’ve talked about the third sector. We’ve talked about learning businesses. We’re also very big into the idea of maturity, how you evolve and grow as a learning business to become the type of organization that can do the types of things that we’ve just been talking about. We do have a model built for this, the Learning Business Maturity Model, which we’ve talked about on various episodes and have various resources around. But this really is a time when learning businesses need to be looking at where do we stand right now in terms of our maturity, the five domains that we’ve defined there, the stages that you can be in, and how are we going to make progress on that?

Celisa Steele: [00:26:40] Right. The lower level of maturity is where you’re being reactive. You’re not actually tuning in to what’s happening on the landscape. Of course, you want to be more on the advanced stages of maturity, where you really are being more proactive and then, ultimately, even innovative, and you’re really thinking about what does it mean to provide lifelong learning today to the learners that we need to serve? The takeaway from all of this is that we really would urge you to do some homework and to do some critical thinking about what the current state and the potential future state of the market for lifelong learning mean for your learning business. Things change. If you go back to that question we opened with about a perfect square, the math that I learned in middle school is not what the kids use anymore. Now we have the new math, and I know that’s been the bane of many a parent, but it speaks to this need to continue to evolve, to not be too set in your old ways. There might be new methods, new things that you need to try.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:50] We’re at an important point in time for lifelong learning. Much is shifting and unsettled in how humans live and work. That unsettledness means opportunity if your learning business is willing to grapple with the uncertainty and shape a vision of the lifelong learning market overall and its role in the market.

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Related Resources Reflecting with Anthony Carnevale * The Economist: Lifelong Learning Becoming Economic Imperative—Special Report * The 60-Year Curriculum with Dr. Chris Dede * Digital Credentials Aren’t Valuable Unless… * Learning and* Education * Learning Business Maturity Model * Preparing for 2024 * The Market for Adult Lifelong Learning

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Leading the Learning Revolution: The Expert's Guide to Capitalizing on the Exploding Lifelong Education Market

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Bruce RosenthalTo realize their fundamental mission of developing and delivering learning products and services, learning businesses need revenue. Along with direct-to-learner fees for enrollments and registrations, sponsorship dollars are often a key part of that revenue equation.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Bruce Rosenthal. Bruce helps organizations create sponsorships and partnerships that increase revenue and value for all stakeholders.

Jeff and Bruce talk about sponsorship versus partnership; the importance of thinking of “partner” as both noun and verb; why logos, visibility, and recognition are no longer a compelling value proposition; the growing emphasis on ROI and other trends in sponsorship; and COVID’s longtail impact on how sponsors engage.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesBruce Rosenthal: [00:00:00] Most sponsorships in the past have been very focused on conferences. And most of those sponsorships have been focused on logos, visibility, and recognition. And, for a lot of companies now, they can get a lot of that logo, visibility, recognition, as well as thought leadership, through things like Google Ads.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:22] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:24] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:32] To realize their fundamental mission of developing and delivering learning products and services, learning businesses need revenue. Along with direct-to-learner fees for enrollments and registrations, sponsorship dollars are often a key part of that revenue equation. This episode, number 399, features a conversation with Bruce Rosenthal. Bruce helps organizations create sponsorships and partnerships with the goals of increasing revenue and value for their members, customers, or stakeholders. Jeff and Bruce talk about sponsorship versus partnership; the importance of thinking of “partner” as both noun and verb; why logos, visibility, and recognition are no longer a compelling value proposition; the growing emphasis on ROI and other trends in sponsorship; and COVID’s longtail impact on how sponsors engage. Jeff and Bruce spoke in January 2024.

Viewing Sponsorships As a Business RelationshipJeff Cobb: [00:01:39] Tell us a little bit more about what that work involves. So, if you’re going to go in and work with an organization, are you helping them to identify partnership and sponsorship opportunities, figure out who those partners are, how to manage it? What aspects, any or all of those, or things I’m not thinking about? What do you actually do in your work?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:01:59] Especially if we’re a nonprofit organization, so often we’re not thinking like businesses. It really is going in and looking at partnerships or sponsorships as a business relationship with companies. Most sponsorships in the past have been very focused on conferences. And most of those sponsorships have been focused on logos, visibility, and recognition. And, for a lot of companies now, they can get a lot of that logo, visibility, recognition, as well as thought leadership, through things like Google Ads. So it really puts associations and other organizations at a disadvantage in selling the old model of conference sponsorships. I think the two big things we’re looking to change are to expand beyond conferences. As one sponsor said, “It’s a fantastic conference. It’s three days a year. What about the other 360+ days a year? I need to be out there talking about my company, our product, our service, our success stories yearlong.”

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:02:55] And then the other thing is looking at—as one CEO told me years ago, he wanted to move their sponsorship program from the transactional to the transformational, to get away from just the logo placements, to really look at ways—what are the goals of the association and all sponsorship programs? Rule number one is focused on the mission, and rule number two is focused on the needs of the members—or for universities and others, the needs of their students. And, for the companies, what are their business goals? That could vary company to company. It could vary year to year. If it’s a company with a new name or a new geographic area, it’s very much around branding. If it’s a company that’s been out there for decades, or they’ve been a sponsor of the organization for decades, everybody knows who they are. If they were in there as a yearlong corporate partner, how would they be differentiated from the 5, 10, 20 other companies who are in the exhibit hall or on the roster of business supporters of the association?

The Path to Getting Involved in Partnerships and SponsorshipsJeff Cobb: [00:03:52] I definitely want to dive deeper into what high-value partnerships and sponsorships look like, how those are managed. Before we get there, though, it just occurs to me partnerships, sponsorships, it’s a pretty niche area of business to be in. I don’t think anybody in kindergarten is being taught, “Hey, you can go into the partnership and sponsorship business.” How did you wind up with that as a focus? What’s your background coming into thinking about this and then helping others think about it?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:04:23] Yes, it’s a good point, Jeff. I remember back in junior high, I think, the teacher said, “Two-thirds of you are going to be in jobs that have not been invented today, or they’re not even on your radar screen.” I had worked for associations for many decades and had been involved, and I had worked for a nonprofit research institute a number of years ago, and they had Fortune 500 companies that sponsored their research. So I got a little bit of a flavor of sponsorships and partnerships at that time. And then, about 12 or so years ago, I was working with an association, national association that did a complete revamp of its sponsorship program, brought in a consulting firm, and they did all the research and did the new packaging, new pricing, new prospect lists, and all that. And the last recommendation of the consulting agency was a senior-level person to run the program. So the CEO asked me to be that person, that VP of corporate partnerships, which I was glad to do based on my background with sponsorships.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:05:15] What was interesting then it was 2009. Just as the economy tanked, we had the priciest sponsorship program among the similar associations in that space, and I knew we had a number of sponsors—developers, banks—they were going to get no new business from our members in the next couple of years. That really set me on this path to figure out what is a true value proposition? One of the changes that we made in the next couple of years, we’re really moving away from the standard gold/silver/bronze sponsorship prospectus to having conversations with companies, almost like a marketing agency. And there’s a reason that marketing agencies don’t have gold/silver/bronze customer levels because it’s customized for each client, each company, or each organization that goes to the marketing agency. We really looked at what we could do with each company based on those conversations and based on definitely moving from the conference sponsorship to the yearlong.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:06:12] Also, around that time, I co-founded a group called the Partnership Professionals Network, which was, pre-pandemic, a discussion group and resource center for folks who were interested in sponsorships and partnerships. Because I think the other aspect of it, as you said, it’s a niche area for a lot of folks. Even if they had sponsorships or partnerships in their title, in their organization they were the only ones that did that, and they didn’t have anybody to go down the hall and bounce some ideas off of. So we created Partnership Professionals Network. So then, when I left the association, about seven years ago, I said, well, let me take the information that I’ve learned in revamping this program at the association and what I’ve learned from all these folks that I’ve worked with through the Partnership Professionals Network and help organizations identify ways to create those value propositions and work with companies to come up with those transformational partnership relationships.

Terminology: Partnerships Versus SponsorshipsJeff Cobb: [00:07:03] Let’s pause for just a moment here, because we’ve been using two terms that probably need to be clarified a little bit: “partnership” and “sponsorship.” I think a lot of times organizations will use those interchangeably. But, I suspect, from your perspective, there are some distinctions between them that are important. Assuming that’s the case, what are those distinctions, and why do they matter?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:07:28] Sure, you’re right. I think associations as well as companies use the term “partnership” and “sponsorship” interchangeably. I prefer the term “partnership.” I find it hard to change the lexicon of what people are used to using. There are also some associations where their attorneys have said the term “partner” implies some sort of legal entanglement that they don’t think is good. So I think the word “partner” is more of what we are aiming for. But I think it also, even with that term, depends on how we use the word. In some of my presentations, I have a slide that said, “Partner is both a noun and a verb.” A lot of associations say, “Oh, that company is our partner. We’re good to go.” But they don’t truly, in the sense of the verb, partner with companies. I think we want to look for ways—whether we call it a partnership or a sponsorship—to align with companies in a way that serves the needs of the organizations, members, customers, stakeholders, or students; meets the needs of the companies that are involved, as sponsors or partners; and serves the association, the organization, or the institution well.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:08:33] I also think that, especially as we’ve created these more engaging relationships with companies, they care a lot less what they’re called, and they care a lot more about how they’re treated. Going back to the old conference model, where we had the big display board with all the gold partners here and all the silver partners there, I don’t think companies really care what they’re called. I think they are much more interested in how can we achieve our company’s goals? Whether that’s brand recognition, whether that’s knowledge leadership around an area of expertise, whether that’s telling success stories of the good work we’re doing on behalf of the organization’s members or stakeholders. I think that’s what they’re most concerned about. So the word “partner” or “sponsor” might appear in the letter of agreement, but, in many cases, it’s really not used that much one way or the other.

Examples of High-Value PartnershipsJeff Cobb: [00:09:16] Interesting. I think, as is the case with most things, some examples could probably help with really illustrating what a good partnership or sponsorship looks like. Are there examples you can share of ones that you’ve felt really created high value for everyone involved? Because that seems to be the key to it—everybody needs to be getting value out of it. It shouldn’t be a one-way thing.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:09:40] Sure. Yes, it definitely needs to be the value for all three groups again—for the members, students, or stakeholders, as well as the companies and the organization. I think it starts with what do the members need? What do the stakeholders need? I think for membership associations, trade associations, it’s starting with what does the latest member survey indicate that members need? I talked to somebody a number of years ago who ran a sponsorship program with an association, and his strategy was he went around and met with staff the week after the association’s budget was approved and said to each department head, “What did you request in your budget that didn’t get into the budget?” Maybe that’s something where we could find a sponsor. We’ve already vetted the idea. We’ve already determined members need that, but it’s not in the budget. Maybe we can find a company to help with that.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:10:26] So a few examples. I was working with an association 10, 11 years ago when healthcare reform passed, and we were sitting at the senior staff table, and we were getting calls from members and state affiliates: “What does healthcare reform mean to me? What does it mean to my organization?” And nobody knew on staff. Public policy staff said, “Well, it’s a 1,200-page regulation. We haven’t read that. We don’t know what that means.” And so I sat down with the CEO, and we said, “Well, we have a corporate partner that’s a consulting firm.” We were in the healthcare, long-term care space. And then one of our corporate partners was a consulting firm, so we called them and said, “You guys have read all 1,200 pages, right?” And they said, “Oh, yeah, we’re talking to clients about it.” And we said, “So what if we worked collaboratively, partnered with your firm to do a Webinar for members? What are the implications of healthcare reform? What are the deadlines? What do members need to do now? What do they need to do next year? What do they need to report?”

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:11:23] So the consulting firm did 95 percent of the work on the PowerPoint. We looked it over. We developed a slide deck. We co-branded each slide with the name of the company and the name of the association. And then we launched that PowerPoint with a Webinar that was co-presented by the CEO of the association and the CEO of the consulting firm. Again, hitting all those marks—it was great brand visibility for the company; it met the needs of members; it positioned the company as a knowledge leader and positioned the association as bringing all these folks together. One other example. A number of years ago, when social media was just starting, I was working with an association where members were like, “Well, how do I use LinkedIn? How do I use Facebook? How do I do a LinkedIn profile?” We had a corporate partner that was a marketing agency. And we said, “Well, what if, at our annual conference, we put together a social media lab in the middle of the expo, and we co-branded with the name of your marketing agency, and your marketing agency can staff it?”

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:12:20] Again, it’s not a lot of work on the part of the association other than building the social media lab and renting some computers and some Internet lines. Company came in, did the trainings for three days during the conference, and I’m sure they got some business out of it because I’m sure there were some members that said, “Well, thanks for those tips on how to do a LinkedIn profile. Can I get your card? I think there’s some other staff that you can help in my organization.” So, again, a win for members—helped them with social media. The company was positioned as a knowledge leader and got some business out of it. And the association puts them all together. One other example, one of the more dynamic. I was working with an association client, an association of nurses in 2019 to build their new sponsorship program. We did all the research, developed new categories, new benefits, new pricing, the new take-it-to-market strategy, and delivered those findings to the association in their office in February of 2020, just as the pandemic started.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:13:16] And we thought, “Is this the end of the program? Have we just wasted six months of their time and money in building this program?” But we reached out again in the association of nurses, we reached out to one of their companies that had product and expertise around respiratory. Obviously, COVID, respiratory issues, how to take care of large numbers of patients in hospital and healthcare settings. So the company said, “We would be glad to put together a package of training programs and white papers for nurses on how to better care for patients with respiratory issues.” The company had been a $5,000 conference sponsor. Under the new program, they were a $40,000 yearlong corporate partner. So, again, members got information they needed, fulfilled the mission of the association—helping nurse members provide quality care for people in the hospitals and healthcare settings—and the company came out a rock star as a knowledge leader and really doing the right thing during a healthcare crisis.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:14:14] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

How to Evaluate Your PartnershipsJeff Cobb: [00:14:50] A lot of our listeners are probably in a similar position where they’ve got sponsors right now, they’ve got partners right now, they’ve been doing stuff for a while, but they may be thinking, “We’re not really getting the value out of this. The partners probably aren’t getting the value out of this.” What steps could they take to evaluate where they are and figure out how to potentially uncover some of those opportunities that you were just talking about—places where they can improve, places where they can make some changes? How would you advise an organization to get started with doing that?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:15:22] Sure. And I think for the other category of organizations, Jeff, if they don’t have corporate sponsors, I almost think they have an advantage because they don’t have any bad habits to break. But I think, in either case, whether it’s creating a new program or revamping an existing program, in addition to talking to staff, talking to board members, looking at some posts, LinkedIn, from other organizations that have created sponsorship programs, one of the first steps is ask your current corporate partners and sponsors and, if you don’t have a real robust program, the largest exhibitors. If you sell a lot of different things during the year, if there’s a company, well, they sponsored two Webinars, and they bought a bunch of ads, and they have the biggest booth at the convention, call them and ask them what do they see as a value proposition? Are they getting more value with other organizations? Try to talk to them about their goals and objectives more than tactics because we often gravitate back to tactics. “Oh, if I could rent a mailing list, if I could get a bigger booth.” All those are good things, but asking the company what their goals are with your organization.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:16:24] Do they want to reach all of your members? I think a huge opportunity now with a lot of associations, regardless of size, is the segment of members. With the old model, we used to price sponsorship based on the size of the audience. You sponsor the general session, it’s a lot of money. You sponsor some breakout session, it’s a smaller amount of money. You sponsor a focus group, a few dollars. For a lot of companies, the value proposition is the reverse of that. And there are companies that are telling me, “We would pay more to reach a small segment of the membership or the student body if it’s the right segment.” Because it’s very much an ROI model. That gets back to that value proposition around new business. If a company recognizes that they can get more, if their goal is two contracts a year, if they can get that from doing three focus groups of 30 people each versus introducing a speaker at a general session with 10,000 people, those three focus groups are where they want to be.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:20] That’s interesting. Maybe we could touch on what you are seeing as general trends in partnerships, sponsorships because that more focused but potentially higher-value engagement with an organization’s audience, I know I’ve seen things trending in that direction, that sponsors/partners really want that. You’ve already mentioned the other 360+ days of the year besides the conference. Are you seeing that more potential partners/sponsors want that longer-term, multiple touchpoint-type engagement? And what else are you seeing in terms of trends with partners or sponsors?

Trends in SponsorshipBruce Rosenthal: [00:18:00] I think even more companies are definitely interested, many of them are more interested in the yearlong as compared to the event-based or the pieces during the year. I’m afraid, even more so, that companies are looking for places other than the traditional association sponsorship model. And COVID was the real game changer there because I think that, even back when I worked with an association 10 years ago, there were sponsors, there were exhibitors who were not all that enamored with the sponsorship of the conference and the big exhibit booths, but they didn’t want to pull out. They had a board member who was one of their customers, and they didn’t think it would look good. Then COVID came, and associations, through no fault of their own, had to cancel conferences for two or three years. I think some of those companies looked at that as their ticket out. It was like, “Okay, stepping out the door, call me when you’re….” And so those companies could not stop marketing for two years.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:18:56] Some of them had to pivot their marketing. Some of them that had sales forces on the road much of the year, like the rest of us, went to virtual, went to Zoom meetings, went to other ways to sell, went to things like Google Ads, social media and LinkedIn posts, and all that. And then, when the lockdown ended, associations called those companies and said, “Come on back. We’re having our big show again.” The companies are like, “Hmm, I’m not quite sure.” Or, if they did come back, it’s like, “Well, we don’t really need that 20×20 booth because, actually, we found other ways to ramp up our sales.” Or “We’re doing Google Ads. We can get more traction out of $3,000 of Google Ads. Why would we pay $3,000 for a booth plus all the travel?” So some of those companies didn’t come back as large, and some of them didn’t come back at all. I think a lot of companies, because of all the shifts and the dollar and marketing pressures of COVID, really had to do an ROI calculation.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:19:54] And I found, just in my years of doing a lot of interviews with corporate partners, five, seven years ago, I would ask companies, “Well, how do you measure ROI of that sponsorship?” And they’ll be like, “Well, kind of finger to the wind. And, you know, it feels good.” Or “We’ve been a sponsor for years.” And now, the last couple of years, a few years since COVID, I ask companies about ROI. Very specific measurement: “We can measure every customer from exhibit booth to meeting to proposal to contract. We can calculate everything along the way.” It’s not as much the old model of “Well, we scanned 300 badges at the convention, so I guess it’s good.” They’re now actually doing the ROI models. So that’s, when I was talking to a company exec, a smaller company that does Web platforms for companies, and she said, actually, she gets the least number of good business leads at large conventions. She gets some business leads at niche conferences for 100, 200 people. She gets the most number of leads from her own Webinars. And those are not necessarily small Webinars.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:21:01] I was on a call a couple of years ago with an association client and one of their corporate partners, and the company wanted to be positioned for a certain area of expertise. We said, “Well, the association, the organization has these Webinars, and they attract 200, 250 people.” And the company’s senior VP of marketing said, “Well, that’s interesting. Our company does Webinars. We get 2,000 people in our Webinars.” However, we turned it into a win because the company said, “Well, what we actually lack on our Webinars is independent thought leadership. To be a more effective learning organization and to make sure it doesn’t look like we’re selling, even though we’re not selling on these Webinars, it would be great if we could have somebody with subject matter expertise from the association be on our corporate Webinar. If you have somebody who’s a committee chair, a staff person, or a board member who’d be a subject matter expert, it would be great for our company.” I hear that as increased sponsor value, and it’s an opportunity to expand the audience. I would think that some of those 2,000 people at that corporate Webinar are not currently members of the association. So it also could be an advantage to the association to expand its message and fulfill its mission.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:10] Definitely. Often that goes overlooked, that it’s not just about having the sponsors participate in your Webinars. You might be participating in the sponsor’s, the partner’s Webinars—a lot of value to be gotten out of that.

A Learning Spin on SponsorshipsJeff Cobb: [00:22:23] Now, of course, in fact, you’ve referenced it some throughout the conversation that our listeners are focused on learning and education. They’re typically in a revenue-center role in an association or other types of membership organizations or university continuing education, training firm. Do you see anything different or special about how learning and education folks need to be thinking about sponsorships and partnerships?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:22:55] I think that, since one of the key value propositions for sponsors is being positioned as a knowledge leader, that puts the education folks front and center in adding value, whether it’s an association, an educational institution, or even a private education training firm. I think those folks that have the education expertise—so back to the earlier model of the example that I mentioned with the company that does the Webinar for 2,000 people—it’s the education folks at the association that should be involved in that discussion. Who do we have? Who’s presented at the conference? Who’s on a committee? Who has expertise? I know, when I managed the sponsorship program at an association, the first team that I would usually go to when we talked about adding value for a corporate partner were the educational leadership development team because they were doing the Webinars, the podcasts, the conferences. Even when companies wanted to know what are the latest trends, what’s going on with the association? Who has that data? The education team. What sessions at the conference were most well-attended? Which Webinars are most well-attended?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:24:02] Or to bring in the companies onto those association platforms, especially—and this is where I think virtual sometimes got a bad rap. But, for some companies, they had better visibility and better opportunity to be a thought leader in virtual events because they could participate in the chat, and, again, educational content, not selling anything, and also use those virtual events like a large focus group. When I worked with that association, I was asking the director of education, “How can we truly add value for these companies and help better position them as thought leaders and to make sure they don’t sell?” And she said, “What we really need to do, Bruce, is work with these companies and help them educate to sell, not sell to educate.” So this idea of actually bringing in the education folks. While there are a lot of companies out there doing a lot of Webinars and podcasts, I think there are a lot of those companies that, if they came in as partners, part of the partnership could be the education and learning folks with the organization helping train those corporate folks on how to be better educators and trainers for the association’s members.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:15] I think that’s exactly right. We’ve seen that work well in so many circumstances. It’s definitely an area that anybody in the learning business should be focused on—how can we leverage that further than we already are? Or, if that’s not something we’re leveraging right now, how do we get started in doing that?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:25:34] Right. Well, I think it’s also for a competitive advantage because the other big change with COVID, now that everything is out there, easily accessible all the time—it’s not like people have to travel to go to a college, an association conference, or to a training site—people can access anything they want from their computers. And, if they can’t find what they’re looking for, they go to Google. All of a sudden, that has positioned associations, as well as educational institutions, training centers, as no longer the sole source. Just because you have a membership roster, a client list, or a student roster doesn’t mean they’re always going to come back to you. I think that’s where the opportunity is for the associations, educational institutions, learning organizations that are more creative, to go out there and find those companies that are looking for the opportunities. Because, while those companies could find opportunities on their own or do those Webinars for 2,000 people on their own, they truly value the brand affinity with organizations, especially nonprofit organizations. So that’s why that company said, “Wow, could you have somebody from your association’s board, committee chair be on our company’s learning platform?” Because the power of affinity is significant and, frankly, can be monetized by organizations.

How to Know If Your Sponsorship Program Needs to a RefreshJeff Cobb: [00:27:03] Let’s assume you have been doing partnerships/sponsorships for a while, but you have this sense your program just needs a refresh. It needs a revamp. What are your tips for how an organization goes about that?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:27:14] Sure. Organizations definitely don’t want to leave money on the table. I don’t know too many companies that have cut their marketing budgets in recent years. So there is money to be spent. It’s really a question of whether that money will be coming to associations and other organizations. So, 10 quick ways to know if your sponsorship program needs a revamp or refresh. If the program has not been evaluated recently. If board and staff are not supportive of the program. If you’re with an association, and the staff is saying, “Well, we don’t think it’s appropriate to sell sponsorships,” that would be an indicator. If you have a very traditional platinum/gold/silver/bronze/all the other heavy metals, if that’s the cornerstone of your sponsorship program, probably needs to refresh.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:27:57] If the sponsorships are primarily conference-focused because many companies are looking for ways to get outreach throughout the year. If the sponsorship prospectus is a takeout menu of benefits, of just 50, 60 different things, most of which you don’t sell most years. Another sign of a program in need of a revamp, most of the benefits are logo, visibility, recognition, and a shout-out from the podium. Those are pretty much across the board of lowest value to companies. If the basic sales pitch is “Our organization needs money.” We often see, when organizations think about sponsorship money, it’s like, “Oh, we’re launching a new program. We need $50,000. Let’s make some calls and get some money.” Companies don’t like to be treated like checkbooks or ATMs.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:28:40] If the sponsorship prospectus is just distributed en masse. I worked with an association years ago; I said, “Who’s your list of hot prospects for sponsorships?” And they gave me a list of 500 companies. So we just throw it at the wall and see what sticks. Another indication of needing a revamp, if the association’s competing with itself. If it’s selling a lot of different things from different departments, if somebody’s selling ads, somebody else is selling exhibits, somebody else is selling Webinar sponsorships, somebody else is selling something from an outside agency. Those are the companies I talk to, and they say, “Wow, didn’t I just hear from somebody else in the organization?” “Oh, they’re down the hall. They’re selling something else.” We don’t want to compete with ourselves. And, lastly, if the association doesn’t understand the business goals of its top corporate partners, if you really don’t know why they’re sponsoring, what they’re trying to accomplish, and if you haven’t had that conversation with them, it’s a program in need of a revamp.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:33] Ten great tips. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that probably most of our listeners can recognize themselves in at least one, if not many, maybe even all, of those tips. Thanks for sharing those, Bruce.

Approach to Lifelong LearningJeff Cobb: [00:29:45] I want to switch gears a little bit here as we’re wrapping up because you strike me as the type of person who probably is an avid lifelong learner yourself. That’s probably why you’re able to keep up with this so well and be so knowledgeable in what you’re doing. I’m going to make that bold assumption. Can you tell us a little bit about your approach to lifelong learning? What kinds of learning experiences, habits, practices do you engage in to be as good as you are at what you do?

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:30:15] Thanks, Jeff. Yes, it is, again, partly because of the impacts of COVID lockdown and the availability of so much information online. I think especially, whether it’s me as a solopreneur or students or anybody who doesn’t have a lot of money to travel, all of a sudden you can access this information anytime, anywhere. So a lot of what I rely on is that availability of online learning. Also, the rapid expansion of the number of places from which I can access information, which I’ve seen lists now that are…. In fact, when I do competitive analyses for associations and nonprofit organizations, I’m coming up with 40, 60 competitors, other entities that provide not only value to sponsors but often value to members. That can be other organizations, companies, colleges and universities, training centers, publications, LinkedIn, for-profit conferences. There’s this new niche called for-profit associations.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:31:16] I think the what for me is the number of places to access information, and the how is I try to be an active participant. When I’m watching a Webinar, my goal is to, when appropriate, participate in the chat and to answer questions, inject ideas, and follow up after Webinars with panelists or with other people who are on the Webinar to get more information or go to one of the panelists’ Web sites and find more information that he or she has to share. I think the other category is the who. I definitely look for anything I can find on sponsorships and partnerships in my searches for learning but also to broaden that into association management in general, since I work so much with associations, but also to broaden at one other level because there’s so much information on marketing, communications, sales, and corporate social responsibility, which has an aspect of partnership to it. I think it’s great.

Bruce Rosenthal: [00:32:10] I learned this from somebody at a conference years ago. I was looking at the conference program. I said, “Here’s something that relates exactly to what I do.” And she said, “Why didn’t you look for a session that’s not related to exactly what you do and go to that session and see what you can learn there?” I think as we expand…and I’m running into folks now that they’re involved in sales but have nothing to do with sponsorship sales; they have some great tips on sales techniques. I think that’s true in many areas now—that doing those sorts of searches and going to those sorts of Webinars can be very valuable for lifelong learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:51] Bruce Rosenthal helps organizations create sponsorships and partnerships that increase revenue and value for stakeholders. You can learn more at Bruce Rosenthal Associates and Partnership Professionals Network and connect Bruce Rosenthal on LinkedIn.

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Related Resources* Value-Based Pricing with Dr. Michael Tatonetti * 10 Years of CMEpalooza with Scott Kober and Derek Warnick * Webinar Pricing and Sponsorship Data

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbLearning businesses care about creating effective learning. Doing so is at the heart of why learning businesses exist. But what happens when effective learning practices clash with what learners want or what they believe is effective?

That clash is precisely what Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele explore in this episode, which looks at desirable difficulties and the specific difficulty desirable difficulties pose for learning businesses.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] Of the many discoveries that have come from learning science, the role of desirable difficulties in improving learning outcomes and retention has some of the most profound implications for learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:18] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] Learning businesses care about creating effective learning. Doing so is at the heart of why learning businesses exist. But what happens when effective learning practices clash with what learners want or what they believe is effective?

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:41] That clash is precisely why we want to devote this episode to talking about desirable difficulties and the specific difficulty desirable difficulties pose for learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:54] It’s a bit of a tongue-twister.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:55] That was a bit of a tongue-twister. I’m surprised I got that out.

What Is Desirable Difficulty?Celisa Steele: [00:00:58] Let’s start by explaining what desirable difficulties are. These are challenges or obstacles that can be used during a learning experience to improve the learners’ understanding and retention. It was a term coined by Robert Bjork, a prominent cognitive psychologist, and I think he first used the term in his 1994 study “Memory and Metamemory Considerations in the Training of Human Beings.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:27] You see him, hear him quoted very often since then in works around learning science. I remember this came up in Make It Stick, for instance, this whole idea. And really, desirable difficulties is a theory of learning in which challenge is seen as integral to true, long-term learning versus performance learning, such as cramming for a test and performing well in the short term. The fundamental point is that adding challenge to learning activities is going to result in better long-term retention. It’s important to note that while desirable difficulty is more effective, it’s also usually slower. So there can be a trade-off, a sacrifice of short-term, quick performance gains in order to achieve more durable, long-term results.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:20] We want to acknowledge here, at the beginning of this episode, that we owe a lot to Dr. Brian McGowan, in particular. He presented recently at the Learning Business Summit. One of the things he got us thinking about more was this idea of desirable difficulties and the related issues for learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:42] Indeed. Dr. McGowan does always get us thinking. This was something that we had in the back of our minds to come to eventually, but he brought it to the front of our minds, and we realized it is something that we need to tackle. And so we’ve got “desirable”; we’ve got “difficulties.” We’ll note that the “desirable” part of this is actually key. It’s not just about “difficulties” alone.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:06] Yes. This reminds me there’s a John Ciardi and Miller Williams quote where they’re talking about poetry, which they describe as being a game. They consider poetry, writing poems to be a game, and they talk about games being things made hard for the fun of it. And so I think desirable difficulties are lessons made hard for the effectiveness of it. If a game is too hard, people walk away. If it’s too easy, people may also walk away. So it’s about that right balance. I think the same goes with learning. If it’s too hard, if there’s not enough scaffolding, then a difficulty can demotivate a learner. If it’s too easy, then that can also demotivate a learner. I’m a board game aficionado.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:54] You are indeed, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:55] Which you are not, Jeff. But, even though I love board games, I can’t stand to play Chutes and Ladders. It’s just too mindless. It’s too easy for me.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:04] Yes, and this gets to the issue of appropriateness. What’s mindless for you as an adult may be pitched just right for a child who’s learning how to count spaces as she moves a marker around a board. So there’s that balance there. It’s just hard enough for her for it to be interesting.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:22] Right. So the difficulty has to be desirable, and what defines what’s desirable is going to be specific to the individual to a large degree.

What Contributes to Desirable Difficulty?Jeff Cobb: [00:04:32] Definitely. Maybe let’s talk a little bit about what desirable difficulties look like. What does this include when we’re talking about desirable difficulties?

Interleaving (Versus Blocking)Celisa Steele: [00:04:42] Well, one of the things that Bjork and others point to is interleaving instead of blocking. Interleaving is this idea of you would take related concepts and weave them together. You would practice and talk about them and learn about them all at once, rather than blocking, where you somewhat artificially pull out a singular concept or idea and focus on that. In the sports world, there are a lot of examples we could give there. Interleaving might be more of a scrimmage approach to basketball, whereas blocking might be “I’m going to go out and shoot 200 free throws.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:18] Right. Or stand at bat to bat the ball 500 times. Or just on your forehand in tennis. That sort of thing. So being able to mix it up and really do the full range of things that you need to actually be able to, in the sports analogy, be able to play the game, which is going to feel more frustrating at first because if—let’s say you’re just starting tennis—if you go out, and you’re trying to do all parts of tennis, it’s tempting to say, “No, I’m just going to focus on my forehand right now.” There are times when you need to do that. That’s useful. But, if you don’t get all parts working together in appropriate ways, then you’re never really going to master tennis. And the same is true of learning.

Spacing (Versus Massing)Celisa Steele: [00:05:58] Another concept that speaks to desirable difficulties is this idea of spacing instead of massing. Jeff, you already mentioned this idea of cramming for a test. That’s the classic example of massing. That’s where you’re like, “Okay, I’ve got this test tomorrow. I’m going to stay up all night and review these terms over and over and over.” Whereas spacing would be the kind of thing of like, okay, maybe you do still have that exam, but maybe you back up a month or several months beforehand, and you periodically review key concepts that you’re covering and that are going to be on that exam. So that idea of spacing allows you then to practice recall. That’s, of course, one of the key things that’s going to lead to longer-term learning, that idea of retention. Is it something that, okay, you’re not just cramming it into your head through mass practice for the next day? But is it something that really becomes part of what you know and understand how to do, which is usually better achieved through spacing and revisiting that concept or that content over time?

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:01] Yes, and you want to do this. Even if you’re in the context of an hour or two-hour traditional course experience, even within that shorter context, you want to make sure you’re coming back to things appropriately and practicing them within it. But then also, once you have done any sort of learning “event,” you want to be able to carry that out over time and have ways that you’re going to. If you attend a conference session, if you attend a workshop, then a week later, two months later, six months later, you want some ways to be able to return to those concepts and apply them. We’ll talk about this more in a minute because the bells are probably going off that that’s not what often happens with the typical learning business offering. But it’s incredibly important. This is an area that Dr. Will Thalheimer, who was also at the Learning Business Summit and has been, multiple times, a guest on the podcast just like Dr. Brian McGowan—we’re referencing our doctors today—has done a lot of research in this area in just how important spacing is to effective learning.

Varied Conditions (Versus a Constant and Predictable Environment)Celisa Steele: [00:07:58] Another approach that is often part of creating desirable difficulties is an idea of varying the conditions in which a learner is learning versus always having the same constant, predictable environment. This often naturally comes out of doing more spaced learning versus massed learning because, when you’re spacing it out, often you might then find yourself in different environments as you’re reviewing materials. Not always. So it’s important to call this out separately. Just this idea is it’s very different to be in the quiet of a classroom where the focus is 100-percent on whatever the topic is versus if you’re commuting to or from work and trying to review concepts, and you’ve got all the ambient noises, and you don’t have visual cues that might exist in a classroom setting that might help you with the content. It’s this idea of, again, if you can apply ideas and content in many different situations, that makes it more durable. That means it’s much more likely that you’re going to be able to retain it and call on it when needed.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:02] Yes, ideally, for the transfer of knowledge, for the transfer of skills, you want to be able to apply what you’re learning in conditions that are going to, as much as possible, mirror how you’re actually going to apply them on the job, in life, or whatever. And those circumstances always vary. I can think, just earlier this week, I was driving back from going skiing, and it started absolutely pouring rain. You’re sitting there driving in the rain, clenching the wheel, and having to pay a lot of attention. It’s a whole different deal than if you’re a beginning driver out there in the parking lot making circles. You’ve got to be able to practice in varying circumstances to then really be prepared to be the kind of driver you need to be in an unpredictable world.

Testing (Versus Presenting)Celisa Steele: [00:09:46] And then another area that can help us tap into desirable difficulties is testing, an assessment rather than presenting. This idea of pre-assessments or giving learners questions or exams that can be more or less formal, but this idea of you’re asking them to go to their current repository of information and knowledge and surface what is relevant versus coming in and being like, “I’m going to present the 10 top things you need to know about X,” which can often happen in especially conference sessions or other forms of learning experiences.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:27] Yes, there’s good research around this, that this is one of the most predictable, effective ways to ensure that learning is going to stick is by testing, particularly by self-testing. If you’re an adult trying to learn something, just testing yourself in one way or another to make sure that you can actually retrieve the knowledge that you want to be part of your learning, that you’re actually able to perform the desired skill repeatedly, this gets into the area of effortful retrieval, which is one of those forms of desirable difficulty. A lot of times it’s something that we shy away from in adult learning experiences. We think that people don’t want to be tested. They don’t want to test themselves—which, if you ask your average learner, they might tell you that’s true, but we know that testing is so important. It does create that type of desirable difficulty.

What Are Some Benefits of Desirable Difficulty?Celisa Steele: [00:11:15] Desirable difficulties can include things like we just went through: interleaving instead of blocking, spacing instead of massing, varying conditions instead of constancy and predictability, testing instead of presenting. Let’s talk a little bit about the benefits of desirable difficulties. Why leverage some of these approaches that we were just going through?

EngagementJeff Cobb: [00:11:39] That’s right. If we’re going to put ourselves through some pain, then what’s the gain that we’re getting from this? A big one is engagement. When learners are challenged enough to stay engaged without becoming overwhelmed, without the pain threshold being too high that they just shut it out and don’t want to have anything to do with it, but just enough of that challenge that it really hooks them, and they want to solve the problem, they want to get at the knowledge, they want to be able to do whatever the skill is, that’s really at the core of creating engagement.

Deep ProcessingCelisa Steele: [00:12:12] And then deep processing is another advantage that can come from desirable difficulties. When we introduce obstacles or challenges, that forces learners to process the information more deeply. This might mean that they have to elaborate on concepts. They have to make connections to prior knowledge that they’re bringing to the situation. Or maybe they’re even doing active problem-solving. All of those kinds of deeper processing lead to better comprehension and retention of the material over time.

RetentionJeff Cobb: [00:12:44] And that would be a third benefit here. So we’ve got engagement, we’ve got deep processing, and those are going to support retention. Overcoming those obstacles during the learning process creates stronger memory traces. When learners struggle and then successfully overcome a challenge, they’re more likely to remember the solution or information associated with that challenge. And, of course, that results in better long-term retention and moves things into long-term memory so that they’re there to be accessed again.

Learning TransferCelisa Steele: [00:13:15] And then another benefit is transfer of learning. Desirable difficulties can facilitate the transfer of learning to new contexts. We talked about that a little bit earlier when we were speaking of varying conditions. When learners encounter varied and challenging situations during the learning process, they’re better able to apply their knowledge and skills to different scenarios, which then leads to this idea of they’re better able to apply it in the real world.

MetacognitionJeff Cobb: [00:13:43] And so, then, a final benefit—there are more, I’m sure, but these are some key ones we’re highlighting here—but the last one we’ll highlight is metacognition. Dealing with desirable difficulty encourages learners to develop metacognitive skills, such as self-regulation and problem-solving strategies. Basically, learners become more aware of their own learning process and how to adapt their approach when faced with challenges. This may be more or less conscious, but, essentially, they’re becoming better learners because of there being a level of desirable difficulty in what they’re doing.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:14:26] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

The Sticky Wicket of Desirable Difficulty for Learning BusinessesCelisa Steele: [00:14:56] So we’ve talked about what desirable difficulties are, we’ve talked about some of the things that can tap into desirable difficulties, and we’ve talked about some of the benefits of desirable difficulties. But there’s a sticky wicket, which we alluded to at the beginning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:13] The old sticky wicket, yes. I’m not even sure I know what “sticky wicket” means, but I know it’s appropriate here.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:20] I think it might have to do with cricket. I should have looked it up.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:23] Maybe some ambitious listener will find that out and comment or e-mail in to let us know. But we know what sticky wicket means. It’s a difficulty for learning businesses because, yes, the truth is learners often don’t like things that introduce desirable difficulties.

Learners’ Reluctance to ParticipateCelisa Steele: [00:15:42] Yes. Again, we’ve already touched on this some, but it’s just this fact that often adult learners would rather kick back and listen to a presentation versus rolling up their sleeves and taking a pre-test or engaging in a role-play. You’ll sometimes get a lot of pushback on that. They just want to come and show up in the room, particularly if it’s more of a checkbox learning experience, where it’s something they have to do—they need it for a continuing education requirement or something like that—then you might find more resistance in those situations.

Learners’ Poor Judgment About What’s EffectiveJeff Cobb: [00:16:17] And then, to make matters even worse, to make it an even stickier wicket, is that learners are very poor judges of what actually makes for good learning. They don’t tend to believe in the effectiveness of what’s effective. So, if you ask them, “Is having this desirable difficulty a good thing? Is this creating a good learning experience for me? Am I learning because of this?,” the answer is usually going to be no. They didn’t enjoy the experience. So your evaluations, your smile sheets get bad ratings for that particular learning experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:47] Yes. In the session that he did for the Learning Business Summit, Brian shared study after study where learners are asked how they learn best. Maybe they’ll say that I’m going to learn best by massing, by having that blocked approach to practice. But then they’re shown that interleaving actually works better. When they have to try the interleaving approach, it produces better results. So, yes, people, not only do they not potentially like desirable difficulty, but they don’t even believe that it’s going to be effective, even when they’re presented with evidence saying it’s more effective.

Opposing GoalsJeff Cobb: [00:17:25] Yes, human beings are interesting creatures, aren’t we? Of course, the rub for learning businesses in all of this is that we have to essentially deal with opposing goals here. We have to convince learners to buy our courses or subscriptions or attend our conferences, and convenience and ease are valued by those consumers. So we’ve got that on the one hand.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:47] And then, on the other hand, ease, convenience, comfortability, and clarity, those aren’t always the best ways to deliver effective learning, which is also at the core of what we do as learning businesses.

What Should Learning Businesses Do About Desirable Difficulties?Jeff Cobb: [00:18:01] Now we get to the essential question. What to do about this?

Celisa Steele: [00:18:08] This is where we end, right?

Develop a Marketing Campaign to Explain the Value of Desirable DifficultiesJeff Cobb: [00:18:11] Yes, we’re flummoxed. We have no idea. We do have some ideas. One, for example, is using some good marketing around this, an educational campaign to show learners how to learn about what’s effective, to educate them on why we employ difficult strategies at times. This is something that probably needs to go hand in hand with educating your facilitators, instructors, or subject matter experts, who also often aren’t aware of desirable difficulty and how essential it is. Personally, I think, yes, you can educate people about this, you can give them the logic behind it, but I think there can also be pride behind something like desirable difficulty. I think of the old Army ads. Maybe they still run them. I don’t know.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:56] It’s the whole “Be all you can be” sort of thing, or “We do more before nine o’clock in the morning than most people do all day.” I hope that’s the Army. It might be one of the other branches, if I’m misspeaking. But you get the idea. You take some pride in that challenge and in overcoming that challenge, meeting that challenge, and really accomplishing something. I can see educational campaigns that bring that vibe to them, but then also educate people on what it means to be a good learner, how learning happens effectively. I know, for example, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association did something like this a number of years ago, and it did have benefits. People did tune in and started to have a better idea of what it meant to be an effective learner, what that actually involves.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:39] Yes, I think part of the answer might be making sure that you are helping to send the message to learners that we want to deliver effective learning, and we have spent time paying attention to what yields effective learning, and part of that is desirable difficulties, so that they understand why you’re doing it. You mentioned subject matter experts, facilitators, and instructors. They also need to get the importance of it. And I think they may need support from the learning business in a couple of ways. One is around that idea of pitching the difficulty at the right level. I think often, especially if it’s a facilitator or trainer who’s new to this idea and has done more of the presentation in the past, they might need help. What does scaffolding look like? What does it look like to provide the appropriate level of difficulty that doesn’t leave learners floundering and feeling like it’s not beneficial? So there can be support in that way. I think the other place where they may need some support is you, as a learning business, saying, “Look, we really want to evaluate you around the success of the learners, and we don’t really care what the smile sheets say—that people didn’t like the role-play or whatever.” So I think there can be some messaging there with that internal or external group of facilitators and instructors.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:57] Yes, and I think it’s an even more challenging situation for learning businesses and your average SME or facilitator that’s working for them. Oftentimes, you’re dealing with an audience of people who are coming from very different backgrounds, very different levels of learning, so what’s a desirable difficulty for one may not be a desirable difficulty for the other. It starts with understanding what desirable difficulty is, why it’s important, but then coming up with some strategies to modulate it across a diverse group of learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:29] That’s a good point. I was actually at a conference this past week where one of the things that came up in more than one session was this idea of choice. I think that a big part of that is it can speak to the different levels of prior knowledge that students and learners are bringing to whatever the situation is.

Choose When to Introduce Desirable DifficultyCelisa Steele: [00:21:46] Now, another potential approach to dealing with this sticky wicket of the difficulty of desirable difficulties for learning businesses is maybe you take a little bit more of a pick-and-choose approach. For some of your more informational or basic offerings, maybe you don’t need to introduce any or a lot of desirable difficulty, and maybe you focus the use of desirable difficulty in more of your transformational—I use that for a lack of a better word—but more of your advanced and some of your deeper dive-type learning experiences that you offer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:27] I think it probably is a hallmark of those experiences. We’ve made the distinction in the past between inform, perform, and transform in learning experiences, and that inform/perform distinction is coming, I believe, from Ruth Colvin Clark. She and Richard Mayer, I think, talk about that in some of their work. But something that is purely informational, that can be about presentation. That’s where your average Webinar falls, and that can be fine. You may not be challenging people a lot in that. They’re just there to get some information, but then recognizing that there are choices up from that. Make those clear in how you’re describing them to your learners, how you’re packaging, how you’re presenting those learning offerings to say, “Look, this one really is more about you getting information. Sit there, take notes, do what you will with it, but, this next one, we’re going to be asking a little more from you because, when you walk out of this, you’re actually going to be able to do some things, and so we need you to actually engage and do some things during your learning experience. And this next one is the one that’s going to help you make a leap in your career, and we’re expecting a significant commitment to that.” I think if that’s communicated well to learners, and, again, going back to this idea of there being a little bit of pride in that, building the right messaging around it, that could be very effective.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:37] This makes me think of the Value Ramp that we like to use a lot of times. I’m thinking there’s a potential application of the Value Ramp where part of that greater value and therefore those higher-price-tag items, part of what represents that value is this desirable difficulty. And so those types of offerings would be further up on your Value Ramp, further to the right.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:00] Right. You’re paying more for pain.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:05] I think that’s CrossFit’s business model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:07] That’s right. Exactly. There you go. CrossFit is a perfect example here. Those are two big ideas there: educational campaigns around this to make sure that learners really understand it, that your subject matter experts and facilitators really understand what’s at stake here in building in some pride, some positioning around this as a positive thing, and then that pick-and-choose from inform, perform, transform, and being intentional, being conscious about how you’re presenting the products across your Value Ramp in that way.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:41] So those are a couple ideas from us, but I don’t think we can end an episode on desirable difficulty without asking something of you, dear listener. What we want to ask is that you think about this particular-to-learning-businesses difficulty of desirable difficulties and think about what will you do with it? What are you doing with it? What would it make sense to do? So we hope you will pause, take time to do that, to think about it on your own with your team, and then we would love to hear. We’d love for you to share your ideas.

Other Ideas for Addressing the Particular-to-Learning-Businesses Difficulty of Desirable Difficulties?Jeff Cobb: [00:25:15] That’s right. Step up to that challenge, and take pride in it, in embracing that desirable difficulty. And, yes, figure out your solution, and share it with us.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:32] Of the many discoveries that have come from learning science, the role of desirable difficulties in improving learning outcomes and retention has some of the most profound implications for learning businesses. Ignore the value of employing desirable difficulties, and risk delivering ineffective learning. Embrace desirable difficulties, and risk turning off your learners, who are also your customers.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:58] Grappling with the difficulty of desirable difficulties and deciding on a stance would benefit every learning business. So we encourage you to carve out time on your own and with your team to understand the issue and think about the implications for how you serve your learners.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Tripling Learning Effectiveness with Dr. Brian McGowan * Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer * Make It Stick with Peter C. Brown * Designing Content Scientifically with Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra Roldan * Tool Talk: The Value Ramp

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbLearning, education, and professional development are not the same. Similar, yes, interrelated even, but fundamentally and importantly different. If learning businesses take the parochial view of learning as merely education, they unnecessarily limit their impact and their possibilities.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele explore the strategic importance of recognizing the differences between learning, education, and professional development. Learning encompasses informal experiences in addition to formal education and professional development, making it the broadest, more encompassing term.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Learning, education, and professional development are not the same. Similar, yes, interrelated even, but fundamentally and importantly different. We believe understanding learning in its broadest and deepest sense is not just an academic exercise. If we take the parochial view of learning as merely education, we limit ourselves dangerously.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:28] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:36] We thought about calling this episode “Learning Versus Education,” but we thought that sounded adversarial, so we settled on “Learning and Education.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:47] Yes. Versus suggests legal briefs and opposing parties, or even World Wrestling Entertainment-style smackdown.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:54] Yes. We don’t want to do anything that brings wrestling in, given the other Jeff Cobb. Because, dear listener, if you don’t know, Leading Learning’s Jeff Cobb has to compete with another Jeff Cobb on the interwebs—Jeff Cobb the professional wrestler.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:10] Yes, my nemesis. So, aside from wanting to keep wrestling out of this, the point we want to make is not that learning and education are opposed or at odds, but simply they are different. And, because the difference feels important at the strategic level, we want to devote an episode to walking through the distinction.

Why We’re Thinking About This NowCelisa Steele: [00:01:32] Maybe we can start by just sharing why this is top of mind for us.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:37] Yes. We had a question related to this recently from a consulting client who is trying to…well, they’re reinventing their education, transforming it, and want to now figure out what to call that department that used to be education and events. I won’t say what the exact title was before. But the question was, going forward, should it be education? Should it be professional development? Should it be learning? What terminology should be used for this new, transformed learning function within the organization?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:09] And so maybe we can just unpack some of those usual suspects when it comes to what terms tend to get used to describe this type of work. I think you just ticked off the three that are top of mind: education, professional development, and learning. I think education tends to be applied to conventional schooling, from K-12 all the way up through higher-ed degrees. We, as a society, tend to talk about things like a “high school education” or a “college education.”

Distinguishing Education from Professional Development from LearningJeff Cobb: [00:02:41] That’s right. Education tends to be about taking classes, earning credentials, acquiring and proving the acquisition of knowledge and skills.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:52] Education tends to deal with activities and outcomes that are set by others, so you might have the school board or the university administration making some of those decisions about what constitutes education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:08] Right. And the role of formal education, established knowledge, and the credentials associated with them get a lot of attention in society because formal education produces relatively clear signals that can be seen and used as social and economic capital. The college degree, for example, is a big one—that signals something to the job market that’s very important.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:30] So that’s a look at “education” as a term. Let’s talk about “professional development.” I think professional development tends to be applied to shorter but still structured learning experiences. These also tend to be focused on adult learners after they’ve completed their formal education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:49] Right, and professional development tends to be about preparing that adult to do a specific job or to do a job better. There’s that development aspect of it. You’re developing yourself as a professional, and so these experiences are going to help you do that.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:05] And so then that brings us to the third term, “learning.” Jeff, I know that you have put forth a definition in the past, and I think it’s a good definition for us to fall back on here, and that is that learning is the lifelong process of transforming information and experiences into knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:27] Yes, it’s amazing how much tweaking and wordsmithing it took over time just to get to that sentence, but I think that sums it up pretty well. “Learning” is an umbrella term that encompasses education and professional development, but also much more than that.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:43] That’s right because it includes informal experiences as well as those formal experiences that tend to get called “education” or called “professional development.” And, because it encompasses informal experiences as well, it’s a little bit fuzzier as a category.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:00] Definitely. But, really, it is everything that is impacting knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes, and that’s how we use that term, “learning.”

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:05:14] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Learning Is Broader, and Education Is More ConservativeCelisa Steele: [00:05:50] Our belief is that education can be a little bit limiting. To use that term “education” can have us think about just one part of learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:04] Yes, it can tend to keep us stuck in that “We’ve always done it that way” mindset, which was part of the issue there, like in renaming a department. Because, if you’re trying to take things forward, you want to transform, you want to do new things in a new way, “education” comes with that baggage that it’s about a certain set of activities, a certain set of rules and outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. And, if you’re transforming, you probably want to move beyond that.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:30] Right. Education tends to be conservative, and we’re using that term “conservative” in a non-political sense, meaning it conserves, preserves, passes along the established body of knowledge or the established narrative in whatever field you’re dealing with. And it tends to treat the narrative as epistemological rather than instrumental. Jeff, I’m going to leave it to you to unpack what we mean by that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:00] Yes, toss that hot potato to me. I think we need a bell to ring too whenever we use one of those words like that. One of my grandfathers would have called that a $5 word. But “epistemological” is basically the basis of knowledge and learning, so education tends to treat the narrative that way rather than as instrumental, which is just a means to an end. And, if I dig my hole deeper and go into philosophy here, back to the times of Plato, you can think of education as about being—what is, what is established, what can be, you can get your arms around—versus becoming, which learning is very much about becoming. What’s always in process can’t actually be nailed down. Learning is instrumental. It’s a means to an end that keeps repeating itself again and again.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:52] I think another aspect of education is that it tends to forefront the teacher or the subject matter expert. And, again, because there’s this idea of the established body of knowledge, there’s, therefore, this idea of the expert, someone who really knows that body of knowledge and can then, therefore, pass that body of knowledge along to someone else.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:12] Right. As you can already pick up from some of what we’re saying, if you’re stuck in the concept of education—as we’ve described it—that can really stymie innovation or broader thinking about what needs to be done, what needs to change, improve, and grow. Again, thinking about becoming, you really want to have that sort of direction to what you’re doing, which, again, we think “learning” encompasses better than “education” does.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:39] Even broader language like “education and events” can still be limiting because education and events tend to be about the things that you offer. They tend to be about the products, about what you do. And learning is more about the goal—it’s more about this outcome that you are seeking for your learners.

Embrace Learning As a MindsetJeff Cobb: [00:09:00] Right, so we encourage listeners to embrace learning, which is a mindset for the learners and for your learning business, as the way that you think about what you’re doing, what you’re delivering. Yes, education will be a part of that, but really think more broadly. We talked about education being more conservative, and we’ve talked about learning being more about becoming. Learning is inherently progressive. It’s always in the process of happening. The person who is learning is actively changing. Learning causes change, and change causes learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:38] Yes, there’s this virtuous cycle where the change and the learning are driving one another. I think another difference between the education focus versus the learning focus is that I said that education tends to forefront the teacher or the subject matter expert. I think learning forefronts the learner; it’s about her own active role in her development and growth, and, ultimately, learning is up to the learner. We, as teachers or facilitators, we can only lead the horse to water.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:08] That’s right. In all of this, too, we probably need to emphasize and then re-emphasize as we go along that there’s nothing wrong with “education.” There’s nothing wrong with “professional development.” It’s not like those aren’t terms that should be used, but it is simply important to recognize them as a smaller slice of this overall learning pie that we’re talking about.

Generative AI and LearningCelisa Steele: [00:10:28] Just as a small side note, we’ll have to see on this front, but I think that generative AI may further increase the importance of learning as opposed to, say, education or professional development alone because, as AI can readily tap into the established body of knowledge in any given field and support an individual in that kind of domain expertise, then it’s really going to be the individual’s ability to learn, to think critically, to ask good questions, to weigh choices, that’s going to become that much more important.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:01] Yes, you can even envision the structure that comes right now with education. Professional development tends to be put into structuring courses or classes—these defined, little bodies of knowledge and experience that a learner goes through in a point in time. But, when you think about how people really tend to learn, if they’re given the opportunity to do it, it is asking questions, applying, asking other questions, applying, adjusting. You think about your use of Google to solve a problem. When people are able to do that, they’re really learning in a way that supports them in the work they’re doing. We’re talking mainly about professional usage of learning here.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:47] If you think about what a ChatGPT-type experience does, if somebody can engage with that type of experience and be able to ask about what it is they’re trying to find out, what it is they’re trying to know, get a response, and then be able to continue a dialog, for me, that’s a better learning experience than a course or a class tends to be, particularly if you’re talking about online learning. You can see a world where that sort of education mindset is more applied to doing things like creating custom GPTs, a body of knowledge around a particular skill set or professional need within which the learner can then explore as a learner, and the experiences are driven by the learner within that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:33] I think we can see something like custom GPTs, and maybe it takes some other form. That’s the term for these sorts of GPT experiences right now. You could see something like that replacing the traditional education course experience in the future.

Learning Businesses Focus on LearningCelisa Steele: [00:12:57] We chose the term “learning business” to talk about the audience that we serve because we really do want to help organizations focus on learning broadly—that full pie, beyond the education and professional development pieces. We want to help them think broadly about how they can support learners in their learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:19] Now, that said, anybody who listens to us or follows our work in general will notice that we often talk about working with organizations in the business of continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning. We list the three together, and that’s mostly because we want people to understand what it is we’re talking about. People do identify with those terms, “continuing education” and “professional development,” but we want to make sure that the word “learning” is in there as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:49] I think that ties to what you ultimately recommended to that client about the new departmental name. You suggested perhaps “Learning and Professional Development” might be appropriate. So there’s that familiar term of “professional development,” there’s that commitment to serving the profession, but then there’s also that broadness in “learning,” that you really are interested not only in the received knowledge that already exists now, but you want to be part of the learning that goes into continuing that profession going forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:19] Right. Hopefully, that represented the best of both worlds, or the best of all worlds, I guess.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:25] We bring all of this up because, to us, language matters. And, if we go back and count, I don’t know exactly how many we would come up with, but I think we would come up with a lot of episodes where we’ve spent time defining key terms. It’s important to us to be clear about key terms, and that’s not only because we were educated in literature, but we really do believe fundamentally that words matter. Words are how we convey ideas, and, if we limit our words or if we use them inaccurately, we limit what we can achieve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:01] So we encourage you to be careful with your language, not to use the words “learning” and “education” interchangeably. Instead, use each in its proper place.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:12] I think we need to appreciate much more deeply, as part of this using the terms correctly and properly, the degree to which learning and life really are interwoven. Learning is not confined to the walls of a classroom or the structure of a course. Learning really does happen in the flow of life. It’s rooted in physicality, it’s rooted in emotion, and it’s rooted in those things as much as in cognition.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:43] And, when we shift to seeing learning in this way, it becomes much easier to recognize and take advantage of the myriad opportunities for learning that we encounter daily—and to help those we serve see and seize those opportunities as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:59] Yes, sure, some of those opportunities will, of course, arise in the context of education or in the context of professional development, but the vast majority will not because education and learning are not the same thing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:22] Learning, education, and professional development are not the same. Similar, yes, interrelated even, but fundamentally and importantly different. We believe understanding learning in its broadest and deepest sense is not just an academic exercise. If we take the parochial view of learning as merely education, we limit ourselves dangerously.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Redefining Lifelong Learning * 7 Metalearning Moves to Empower Lifelong Learning

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Park HowellEverybody loves a good story. It’s what draws us to good books, good movies, good podcasts. And we know that good stories can draw prospective learners to us and the learning experiences we offer. But telling a good story is harder than it looks, particularly in the realm of business, where often too much emphasis is put on numbers, data, and building a case rather than appealing to emotions, human connection, familiar patterns, and satisfying hooks. If you listen to this episode, you’ll get a mini class in how to tell a good story for your learning business.

Park Howell is the founder of the Business of Story. Park comes from the marketing world, where he ran his own advertising agency for 20 years. One of his big a-has is the and-but-therefore (ABT) agile narrative framework. Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele talks with Park about the power of storytelling, its connection to how the human brain works, and how the ABT framework works at a conceptual and a practical level.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesPark Howell: [00:00:00] Everything begins by teaching people this three-word framework because we find that it is the foundation—or, as I say, it’s the DNA of story.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:13] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:15] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] Everybody loves a good story. It’s what draws us to good books, good movies, good podcasts. And we know that good stories can draw prospective learners to us and the learning experiences we offer. But telling a good story is harder than it looks, particularly in the realm of business, where often too much emphasis is put on numbers, data, and building a case rather than appealing to emotions, human connection, familiar patterns, and satisfying hooks. If you listen to this episode, you’ll get a mini class in how to tell a good story for your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:59] Park Howell is the founder of the Business of Story. Park comes from the marketing world, where he ran his own advertising agency for 20 years before winding that down to focus on storytelling, specifically stories in the context of businesses and brands. One of his big a-has is the and-but-therefore agile narrative framework, and the ABT framework is the focus of this episode, number 396. Celisa talks with Park about the power of storytelling and its connection to how the human brain works. Park and Celisa walk through the ABT framework at a conceptual level and then at a practical level as Park puts Celisa on the hot seat and works with her to craft an ABT. So, sit back, listen, enjoy, and learn from this conversation that Celisa and Park had in January 2024. And, after it’s over, you might want to go back and re-listen to this introduction, which leverages the ABT framework in the opening.

Storytelling and the And-But-Therefore (ABT) FrameworkCelisa Steele: [00:02:12] Would you tell listeners a little bit about the work you do?

Park Howell: [00:02:17] Yes. Real quick backstory is I’ve been in the advertising/branding/marketing world for almost 40 years. I ran my own ad agency for 20 of those years in Phoenix, Arizona. In the early 2000s, I realized that the way we were marketing and branding, as we knew it, was no longer working, primarily because of the Internet, social media. I used to tell our clients, “You own the influence of mass media.” Well, we all know that the masses have become the media, and there’s so much noise out there that I had to go and find an answer. How do we communicate these important stories to the world? And that’s when I found storytelling and learned that, really, stories are the very first technology that humans ever used to communicate, to not just survive the savanna but thrive and evolve to where we are today. So, in 2016, Celisa, after studying story for almost 10 years and applying it in my ad agency, I wound that down, and now all I do is consult, teach, coach, and speak on the power of story in organizations and business, at universities, in any number of areas.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:34] Well, great. I have had the chance to hear you speak, and it was a wonderful message, and that’s part of why I wanted to have you on the podcast to share a little bit about that ABT agile narrative framework. I want to focus our conversation on that because it is, I think, both a practical and elegant tool. I think it’s going to give listeners a lot of ideas to try out. Now, we’ll get to what ABT stands for, but I’m hoping right now you could just explain how you came to arrive at this framework.

Park Howell: [00:04:07] Yes. When I was studying story in the early 2000s, I was lucky because our middle child, our son Parker, was going to film school at Chapman University in Orange, California. He started in 2006, graduated in 2010, and he’s made a really nice career in the film world ever since. But, while he was going to school there, like I was saying earlier, Celisa, I was looking for an answer. How do you hack through the noise and hook into the hearts of people? I asked Parker. I said, “Please send me your books and your recorded lectures when you’re done with them since we’re paying for them because I would like to know what does Hollywood know about communicating and being competitive in the most competitive storytelling market in the world?” And that’s Hollywood.

Park Howell :[00:04:52] That’s when I came across The Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, and it struck me right between the eyes the first time I learned about it. And I thought to myself, “This is such a marvelous framework for strategizing around brand story development and even long-form communication.” And I asked myself, “Why don’t they teach The Hero’s Journey in communications courses, in advertising courses, even in MBA courses?” I took that 17-step of The Hero’s Journey, and I mapped it to business with what I call my 10-step Story Cycle System. And, as you know, I wrote a textbook about how to apply it, and we had a lot of success with it. Still do. But it’s complicated.

Park Howell: [00:05:36] In all of my travels, I said, “Okay, how do we simplify this? How can we break down the elements of this so people could use it immediately?” And I found the five primal elements of a short story that was really inspired by a company out of Melbourne, Australia, called Anecdote that teaches these five primal elements in leadership, communication, and whatever, and realized you could take those elements and, in under a minute, share a story that makes your business point for you, that shows your impact in action. And I started adding that to my repertoire of teaching and found that that was still a little bit complicated for people. And then, in 2013, just over a decade ago, I was introduced to the work of Dr. Randy Olson. Dr. Olson is a Harvard PhD, evolutionary biologist. He does a really crazy thing in his mid-30s—he gives up tenure, he goes back to school at USC film school, he graduates, produces three documentaries on climate change and global warming, but realized that his mission in life was to take what he learned in Hollywood—much like what I learned from Chapman University—and translate it to the science and academic world to help those big thinkers, those scientists and PhDs, take their complex messages and make them simple. It was in Dr. Olson’s second book called Connection that he was just publishing in September of 2013.

Park Howell: [00:07:08] They sent me galleys of the book—his publisher did before it went out—and that’s where I was introduced to the and-but-therefore. It blew me away when I looked at this. From all my years in branding, always trying to make a complex message simple, I looked at this, and it struck me intuitively. But I was like, “Am I just drinking the Kool-Aid here, or is this really a thing?” And I contacted Dr. Olson. He and I have since become fast friends. He and I, together, have helped evolve the and-but-therefore. He, still in the science world; me, taking all of that finding and working with him in the science world and translating it to the leadership and the business world. And the rest is history. Now, in all of the training I do, like the one you experienced at the PAR RevUP conference, everything begins by teaching people this three-word framework because we find that it is the foundation—or, as I say, it’s the DNA of story. And, by the way, I love the fact that I beat a Harvard PhD evolutionary biologist to that title because, when I said, “Randy, you’ve found the DNA of story,” and he’s like, “Wait a minute, I’m the scientist here.” And I go, “Yes, but I’m the brander, so you got to put a tag to it.” And that’s where we are today, teaching it everywhere.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:29] Go a little bit deeper on and-but-therefore, ABT. Explain a little bit about how that works.

Park Howell: [00:08:36] Yes. The and-but-therefore, it’s not something we invented. It literally has been around since the beginning of time. In fact, the very first story of Gilgamesh that they found carved out of cuneiform tablets is based…as you look at the story structure, you’ll see the and-but-therefore throughout it. What and, but, and therefore does is use the three forces of story, and those three forces are agreement, contradiction, and consequence. We have determined that our primal, pattern-seeking, cause-and-effect, problem-solving, business-buying brain, the limbic brain, loves to get messages through these three forces, using these three forces of story. Because that limbic brain, that amygdala, hippocampus, that survival mechanism that sits at the base of our brain is a problem-solution dynamic apparatus. It has to be. So the algorithms, think of it like software. It takes in the algorithm of setup-problem-resolution, so that it can quickly make meaning out of it to determine what the next step should be. Let’s take, for instance…I didn’t share it a few weeks ago when you saw it in action, but I like to bring up this little story of Thog and Larry. We’re going to go way back to the savanna. These are cavemates, cavemen. Larry’s sitting around the fire inside the cave, and he’s warming his hands, and he looks up, and Thog comes into the entrance, and Thog looks pretty disheveled.

Park Howell: [00:10:17] And Larry says, “Thog, where you been?” And Thog said, “Well, I was down at river catching saber-tooth salmon for dinner.” And Larry goes, “Uh huh.” That’s setup. Then Thog says, “But saber-tooth tiger show up.” Larry goes, “Uh oh. What’d you do?” “Well, I give salmon to tiger. It like salmon better than Thog. Therefore, I’m safely back here at fire with you, Larry.” And Larry goes, “Aha.” Setup, problem, resolution—so easy a caveman can do it. “Uh huh.” “Uh oh.” “Aha.” So you now advance that to where we are today. Our limbic brain has not changed appreciably since Larry and Thog and everybody else who’s trying to survive the savanna. It’s the same brain that we use to try to survive this onslaught of communication coming at us. And we have learned that those three words, the three-word algorithm is that first learning technology that we still use and rely on today. But so many people in large organizations and businesses get stuck in their logic, reason brain, and they don’t use the power of story to connect with that crazy Homo sapien that’s sitting across from them, whose brain is simply trying to make meaning out of the madness of being human beings. The ABT enables you to hack through the noise and hook into that limbic, problem-solving, decision-making, buying brain.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:56] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

How to Write an ABT: A Working ExampleCelisa Steele: [00:12:26] Walk us through an example that might be an organization trying to sell an online course that they have or something that’s a little bit more practical in terms of today.

Park Howell: [00:12:39] All right. Celisa, can I put you on the hot seat?

Celisa Steele: [00:12:42] Oh, boy. We’ll try it. Yes, sure.

Park Howell: [00:12:44] Let’s build an ABT for your podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:49] Okay.

Park Howell: [00:12:50] So it’d almost be like your brand narrative, but we are going to make it so short and sweet and problem-solution-centric. Are you ready to play along?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:02] I’m ready to try.

Park Howell: [00:13:03] This is always fun. Here’s what I want you to do, and this is for all of your listeners too. Get out a pen and paper, and just follow along, and follow the coaching that I’m going to give Celisa here. Celisa, who is your number-one audience? Can you identify the number-one audience that you attract to your podcast?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:24] We like to say that we serve learning business leaders—the folks who are in a leadership position in an organization that has to develop, sell, and market continuing education, professional development, lifelong learning offerings.

Park Howell: [00:13:39] Awesome. So I’m just going to write down learning business professionals.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:45] Okay.

Park Howell: [00:13:46] Will that work for you?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:47] That works.

Park Howell: [00:13:48] What do they want? We are creating our statement of agreement here. Remember the three forces of story are agreement, contradiction, consequence. The “and” is the statement of agreement. The “but” is the statement of conflict or contradiction. The “therefore” is a statement of consequence—here’s the way forward. In developing your “and” statement, you want it to be positive. You want it to be aspirational. You want to communicate a shared vision with your audience so that they know that you understand who they are and appreciate what they want and why that’s important to them. So we now know that you know that your number-one audience is learning business professionals. What do they want relative to your podcast? They might not even know you yet, but you know them so well that you know that this is ultimately what they want, that you’re going to help them to get. What is it that they want that they can get from your podcast?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:47] They want to provide excellent resources to the learners that they serve.

Park Howell: [00:14:53] Okay. Provide excellent resources. And then why is that important to them?

Celisa Steele: [00:15:01] Because that’s how they help move the dial in the field, industry, or profession that their learning business serves. That’s how they make a difference in the world—by delivering those excellent resources that will support those learners.

Park Howell: [00:15:14] To make a difference in the world. Okay. We’re going to boil this down just a little bit. But, right now, our statement of agreement is “You are a learning business professional, and you want to provide excellent training opportunities that have real-world impact in the lives of your learners.” Is that fair enough?

Celisa Steele: [00:15:34] Amen.

Park Howell: [00:15:35] Okay. But what is the problem that they have? What’s frustrating them right now? What are they fearful of, and what’s causing that? This is your “but” statement.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:46] There are a lot of places where you can get support in terms of developing training—the instructional design, what needs to go into that. There are a lot of places where you can go for more generic leadership or management. But what a learning business professional really needs is a resource and someone who understands both angles of that. What does it mean to provide excellent learning, and what does it mean to run an excellent business, and combining those two?

Park Howell: [00:16:14] Would it be safe to say that maybe they’re not having the impact they currently wish to have because they’re not certain of the way forward or because there’s just too much information out there that doesn’t focus on their core need of building a business and training people in the process?

Celisa Steele: [00:16:35] I think the second piece that you said around there’s not enough focused resources for them. They have to sift through and figure out which way to go, and it’s a broad spectrum between developing the learning all the way to the business side of things as well.

Park Howell: [00:16:51] Because there are not the focused resources that they need to help move the needle. Then the “therefore.” Therefore, I want you to tell me what is an emotion that they are going to get when they really start dialing in their business practice.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:10] An emotion? That’s what you said.

Park Howell: [00:17:11] Yes, the emotion. I want you to focus on the emotion.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:16] Is confidence an emotion?

Park Howell: [00:17:18] Yes. Confidence is fine. Let’s work with that one.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:22] Okay.

Park Howell: [00:17:23] Now you can gain the confidence to build an incredible training program or training business, impacting hundreds of thousands of people around the world when you do what? By listening to your show?

Celisa Steele: [00:17:38] By listening. That’s right.

Park Howell: [00:17:41] Okay. So there’s a real quick ABT on the fly. We have setup, problem, resolution. I’ve kind of cobbled this together, Celisa. I always like to have people start with the pronoun shift of “you” being you, the audience you’re talking to, to get you as the storyteller to tell your story, in this case, your and-but-therefore from the perspective of your audience. And the best way to do that is with a “you.” So it’s something like, “You are a learning business professional, and, if you had focused resources to build your business, then you would have the incremental or the exponential impact on people’s lives you seek through your training products and services. But you’re frustrated because you’re not currently having that impact due to the fact that there are so many different resources out there you don’t know what to focus on. Therefore, you can now have the confidence to build your program and that impact by listening to one show, the Leading Learning Podcast.” Now, that’s not perfect, but it does show you the framework. I want you to always start with your audience. What do they want relative to your offering, and why is that important to them? What you’re doing, Celisa, when you do that is I talked about the three forces of story: agreement, contradiction, and consequence. What I’ve learned in this process, there are also three forces to trust-building.

Park Howell: [00:19:22] And the ABT is the framework in order to do that because it makes you, from the storyteller, number one, to first do the discovery and think about your audience so that you demonstrate to them that you understand who they are. They’re like, “Oh, Celisa’s actually taken the time to actually understand who she’s talking to. That’s cool.” Then appreciation. So understanding is the first force. Appreciation is the second force. You are showing them that you appreciate what they want and why that’s important to them. The third force of trust-building is empathy. That shows up in your “but” statement. “But you’re frustrated, but you’re fearful, but you’re annoyed because here’s the problem.” So you’re empathizing. They are hearing it through your story. They’re saying, “Wow, she gets me. She understands who I am. She appreciates what I want and why that’s important to me. And she empathizes with why I don’t have it.” The “therefore” then, the trust is built. “Therefore, here’s the way forward.” Setup, problem, resolution. Again, our primal, pattern-seeking, cause-and-effect, problem-solving, decision-making, limbic, buying brain loves to get messaging in this way because it doesn’t have to work for it. We are just simply feeding it the algorithm in the way it wants to take in information.

The Aptness of ABTs in the Learning WorldCelisa Steele: [00:20:50] I will say, even the minute I learned about ABT, it’s so easy to apply it. I think the next day I was working on a session description, and I started thinking and-but-therefore, and it gives you a really nice scaffolding to help you think about how can you convey the message about whatever this thing is. But I found it immediately useful. So simple and elegant.

Park Howell: [00:21:15] Yes, in our world, it really is. And I say our world, in the learning and development world, teaching and training, because I do this—share the courses online, and I do them in person, hybrid, virtual training, and that kind of thing. I am your customer. I am your listener. I have built a business about this and learned a lot from you all. It’s really effective, and I think maybe you found this too, because you can identify your audience being that learner. In particular, what is it that that learner wants out of the training that they may not even know is yet available to them, but you, as the training producer, can identify what that is and why is it important to them? What kind of growth do they want to get out of it? But, now, this is the gap that your training is going to help them overcome. But they’re frustrated. They’re not growing the way they are. They’re not having the impact because of this major problem that your training is going to bridge, to help them overcome. Therefore, as the learner, imagine when you have this new tool or this new skill, the impact you can have when you take this particular course, or by taking this particular course, or whatever. So it works. It’s a beautiful, great framework in the learning world.

Substitution Words and the Power of “Because”Celisa Steele: [00:22:41] I have one kind of nitpicky question, but I think you addressed it when I heard you speak. “Therefore” isn’t a word that I tend to use a lot in daily conversations, and so I think you suggested some potential substitutions, when I heard you talk, or other words that people might use that might sound more natural or conversational than a “therefore.”

Park Howell: [00:23:02] Yes. We start with and-but-therefore because that’s the framework. And everybody asks that question too. It’s a really good question. It’s not nitpicky at all because I don’t use “therefore” a lot either. But, when I’m first writing an ABT, I’m just going to use the and-but-therefore. They’re my markers to get me in. Quite often, especially in the business world, I’ll replace “therefore” with “now.” “Now, here’s the way forward.” All I’m trying to do with the and-but-therefore is to get the structure, the framework of setup-problem-resolution down in my mind. A lot of people are really concerned about using the word “but.” So you can use “yet.” You can use “however.” There are lots of other words you can use, but I would suggest go ahead and use “but.” We have found that to be the number-one trigger word.

Park Howell: [00:23:54] Now, people will push back and say, “Well, Park, I’ve always been told never, ever, ever to use the word ‘but’ in business communications or training or whatever.” And I think that’s true if you are reviewing someone. “Celisa, it’s so great to have you on the team. The impact you’ve had here over the last year has been marvelous. Everybody loves working with you, but….” Well, I’ve just negated everything that has come before that. And you don’t want to do it like that in leadership at all. However, if you are trying to shake someone out of status quo—and isn’t that really what learning is all about, putting them through the rigor of upskilling through learning?—the only way you are going to shake that status quo Homo sapien brain into action is to give them a good, what we call, “but bomb.”

Park Howell: [00:24:46] “You got this, and it’s important to you because of this, but you ain’t never going to accomplish it unless you do this. Therefore, here’s the course to get there.” It’s the way to shake the brain out of being complacent. And you’re talking directly to that person, saying, “You can stay in status quo if you like, but here’s the problem if you do that. Therefore, here’s the answer to that problem.” So we have lots of substitution words. There’s not really a substitution word for the word “and.” Sometimes you don’t even need to have “and.” Sometimes you can be so powerful in that first setup you don’t need it. But we find the power of story rests in the specifics, so, when you use the word “and,” it builds more momentum for your story in the context of your story. We even have—I didn’t really get a chance to go into in that training session—the if-then clause that we can use that adds even more specificity in your “and” statement of agreement. “If you do this, then you’ll get that.” And again, it plays to that cause-and-effect brain. In the “but” section, there’s a most powerful word in addition to that “but.” It’s a conjunction. It’s the word “because.” Celisa, being in the training world, you may be aware of this Harvard study on the word “because” in behavior change and that they found that it is the single most powerful word to create behavior change. You know how they did it? They had this silly little study. I think it was back in 1978 or something like that.

Park Howell: [00:26:17] There are lots of articles on the power of the word “because.” What they did is queue up a line of people, unbeknownst to them that they were taking part in a study. They were waiting in line for good old-fashioned Xerox machine to make copies. There might have been six or seven people waiting in line. They sent the first person in with copies and asked if they could cut in front of the line and would tell the person, “Can I cut in here? Because I’ve got to make copies.” Well, believe it or not, they got 60-percent compliance with just asking to cut in. But when they add the word “because” so the next person would show up, a different line, and say, “Hey, can I cut in front of you because I have to make copies?” that 60-percent compliance went up to 92-percent compliance. The third one was, “Can I make copies because I’m in a hurry?” That, then, went up to 94-percent compliance. And so they did some more study on this word “because,” and again it plays back that cause-and-effect thing. “I’ve got this thing happening here because of this.” And we have found when you add the “because” to your “but” statement of agreement, it makes it even more powerful. “But you’re frustrated because of this problem.” It really sets up the problem you’re going to solve for. “Therefore, imagine when you achieve your success by doing this to overcome that problem.” And that’s the way it works. Kind of crazy, isn’t it?

Celisa Steele: [00:27:46] Yes, that is fascinating because that second option in that story, it’s just stating the obvious.

Park Howell: [00:27:54] It is.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:54] “Can I cut in line because I need to make copies?” They’re all waiting in line to make copies. That’s fascinating, yes.

Park Howell: [00:28:00] Yes. But it went up to 92-percent compliance. Then you add some urgency to it, and you even tweak it by 2 percent.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:07] Yes. Wow. So another question. You mentioned earlier the limbic brain and the rational side and that sometimes businesses tend to think too much about the rational side in making their case and trying to convince the logical mind that this is the thing to do. But it seems like there is a place for both the storytelling and the data. How do you balance or marry them up? Or how do you think about providing some of that data that bolsters the and-but-therefore?

Park Howell: [00:28:37] I follow the lead—it’s a great question—I follow the lead of American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He wrote The Happiness Hypothesis, among some other really, really interesting books. He states emphatically…in fact, I had him on my show a few years ago, and we covered this a little bit. He said our brains, our minds are story processors, not logic processors. Yet, in organizational communications, we tend to lead with logic and reason. It has a place, but not until after you’ve set the context—the emotional context, the problem-solution dynamic—with a story, so that Homo sapien, storytelling ape sitting across from you can picture what that outcome is, what that problem is, or whatever.

Park Howell: [00:29:27] And then you’ve probably been there—we all have been there—when someone has really persuaded us, and then we’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, wait. Okay, I think that makes sense. Can you prove it to me?” Then you roll out the logic and reason. You sold to the heart. You are now squarely inside their heads. You get them nodding yes, like you are right now, but then they might go, “Well, wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, not so fast. Can you show it to me or prove it to me?” That’s when the numbers come into play. So there’s still a place for logic and reason. Just don’t start with it. Start with the emotional pull of story. Show the dynamic in action so that they can picture it, then they can feel it, and then back it up with logic and reason.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:10] So you started earlier saying how old storytelling is. It goes back to the earliest human, maybe even pre-Homo sapien, our instinct there, and so storytelling is very old. It’s this innate desire we have, and you’ve been involved with it for a long time. But I’m curious to know if you’ve seen anything that’s changed about storytelling. Maybe you talked about it a little bit when you’re talking about the noise and social media. But, in general, how have you seen storytelling change since you’ve really been focused on it?

Park Howell: [00:30:44] I don’t honestly think it has. I think it is as normal to us as our digits, as our arms, as our legs. Yuval Harari, who wrote Sapiens—I don’t know if you’ve read that book. I love, love, love that book. He says it is literally our first learning tool. Because our brains have not changed appreciably, it’s still how we make sense out of the world. So I don’t think storytelling, in how it works, has changed at all. I think we are very creative individuals, so we tell stories in lots of different ways. Look at Christopher Nolan, Memento—here’s a fabulous one of the world’s best storytellers. He’s a director from Hollywood and just did Oppenheimer. One of his first movies was Memento. And, if you remember Memento, he tells that story completely backwards. It worked. Not many people can pull that off. He was able to pull that off. But The Hero’s Journey, when you look at the archetype and the structure of The Hero’s Journey, it’s been around since the beginning of time, and it doesn’t change. So I think, in answer to that question, you can be as creative as you like in telling your stories. The frameworks that I teach are foolproof, and they’re not something I invented at all.

Park Howell: [00:32:08] They’ve been revealed to me by lots of different scholars, and all I’ve done is piece it together to make it work in the business world, in the learning/training world, and the organizational/communications world. I teach it to the likes of the US Air Force. I spent four years, twice a year, going out to Andrews Air Force Base, working with their brigadier to four-star generals and their staff, teaching them these frameworks so that they could recruit and retain more airmen and women, as well as be able to communicate their big ideas to Congress. But it was the frameworks that we were working on. The Home Depot, learning and development for Walmart Canada. I taught at Arizona State University as a professor of practice, never having taught in my life. It’s one of the reasons why I found that I loved learning and development and teaching. For five years, I taught a storytelling program within the School of Sustainability there. And, again, I go back to these proven frameworks, the chassis of communication, and then you, as the storyteller, can bring your own personality and creativity to it. But don’t deviate from the chassis, the frameworks, unless you’re Christopher Nolan and can pull it off.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:26] All right. Well, speaking of chassis, we’ll shift gears here a little bit and….

Park Howell: [00:33:30] Very nice.

Personal Approach to LearningCelisa Steele: [00:33:31] We always like to ask the guests who come on the Leading Learning Podcast about their own approach to their continued learning. Do you have habits, sources, or practices that you use to help you continue to learn and grow?

Park Howell: [00:33:46] Yes. My number one is what you’re doing right now. I host the Business of Story Podcast. I’ve done it for over eight years. I’m coming up on 500 episodes. And I bring in experts from around the world in some form of storytelling. People are like, “Park, how can you keep talking about storytelling after 500 episodes? You must have covered everything.” And I’m like, “No.” It’s even amazes me. People have a different approach to the story you’re telling. It’s like their own spoke coming in from the wheel, but it all comes down to that same storytelling hub of these frameworks. So my number-one way to keep growing is by interviewing great people like yourself and other story artists from Hollywood, from business, from learning and development, from—you name it—around the world. That’s what I do.

Park Howell: [00:34:36] Number two, because most of those people who show up have a book or a course they’re selling, I typically read that book and/or scan it very intensely and sometimes take their courses. So it’s ongoing learning for me. And then I just pay attention to what’s happening. I do a lot of media research on what’s happening in pop culture out there to figure out how story is already infiltrating our lives and we don’t know it—through the songs we love, the books we read, and the shows we watch, and the movies we watch—and how that impacts us as storytellers. You and I, I guess we could define ourselves as organizational communicators through our learning, teaching, and training. And so everything comes through all of these different channels, but with a focus on how can I help someone grow as a more confident, compelling, and persuasive communicator in their organizational role? It’s using all of this story that’s whirring around us that we see every single day. And so it sometimes shows up in the most surprising ways.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:49] Park Howell is the founder of the Business of Story. If you’d like to learn more about the ABT narrative framework, you have a couple of options. Park has put together a short, hour-long online course that goes into more detail and has you practice writing ABTs. He’s also co-written, with Dr. Randy Olson, The Narrative Gym for Business. The book only takes about an hour and a half to read, and every chapter has exercises for you to apply and start crafting your own ABTs.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbDigital credentials aren’t as valuable on their own as they are in an ecosystem that uses open standards to connect learners and employers and where relevant data about skills achieved, pathways to new roles, and the needs of the job market intersect.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa talk about standards-based digital credentials being at tipping point and the need for learning businesses to adopt them in order to adapt to what learners are coming to expect when receiving a credential.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] We’re not convinced that what adult learners really want is a credential. We’d argue that they want what that credential provides them in terms of career options or advancement or, most fundamentally, what it means when they share that credential with others.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:22] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:31] We’re calling this episode, “Digital Credentials Aren’t Valuable Unless…,” and you might be surprised to hear us questioning the value of digital credentials.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:41] Indeed, if you’ve been tuning in for a while, you should be surprised. Episode 295 of the Leading Learning Podcast was actually called “The Value of Credentials Now,” and that included digital credentials.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:54] In today’s episode, number 395—100 episodes later—we’re taking the stance that digital credentials aren’t valuable. At least on their own.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:05] Right, and, of course, we’re being a bit clever, being sophists, but we’re doing so to make an important point. Digital credentials in and of themselves are not valuable. They become valuable when they’re part of an ecosystem. You can think back, for example, to the early days of the telephone. Well, you probably can’t think back to that, but, at least based what you’ve read about it, you know that having one of those wasn’t that great. The real communications breakthrough came when people you wanted to call and who you wanted to call you actually had phones too.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:41] Same thing with e-mail. I remember, in the early days of e-mail (at least my early days of e-mail), I could easily go days without checking my inbox, even as I was in college and was actively engaged in coursework. It was during the semester. Now that’s pretty unimaginable. Even K-12 kids are checking their e-mail daily and doing important schoolwork facilitated through those e-mail communications.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:09] Yes, I’m just trying to process that whole idea of not checking my e-mail for days—something I need to do but very difficult to do. Of course, both of those analogies are about communication. I think that’s apt because digital badges, different types of digital credentials, really are about communication as well. They’re about a way to communicate someone’s skills and experience.

Digital Credentials at a Tipping PointCelisa Steele: [00:02:35] Yes, and, also, both analogies are about a technology hitting a tipping point, and it seems like digital credentials are at that tipping point now—or about to get there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:48] That’s right. We know that from a number of sources, and one of those is our data from the survey we did in late 2023 about areas of focus for learning businesses in 2024. We asked about new or alternative approaches to credentialing, including certificate programs, microcredentials, and digital badges. If we combine folks that are already working in those alt credentialing areas and those planning to start work there in 2024, it was 73.4 percent of respondents—or nearly three-quarters. Of course, that includes more than digital badges, but other data also supports growth.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:30] 1EdTech and Credential Engine periodically do a badge count, so that’s another data source we can look to. 1EdTech, they’re the stewards of the Open Badges standard—and we’ll probably touch on that a little bit more here in a minute—but, if we look at some of the data from their 2022 badge count, which is their most recent, it tells a pretty dramatic story. They got information from 53 badge platforms, and, across those platforms, over half a million unique badges exist. And then, if you look at the number of badges issued to individuals, it’s almost 75 million. Now that alone, I think, sounds impressive, but, if we look at their data from the badge counts done in 2020 and 2018, you can really see how steep the growth trajectory is. In the two years between 2020 and 2022, there was a 10-percent increase in the total badges available to be earned and a 73-percent increase in badges issued to individuals. If you look at the four years between 2018 and 2022, there was a 172-percent increase in total badges available to be earned and a 211-percent increase in issued badges. So lots of growth.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:04:54] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Digital Credentials As Part of an EcosystemJeff Cobb: [00:05:24] Clearly, we’ve seen a dramatic growth in the number of badges out there—the sheer volume of badges out there—which would suggest that we’re getting to critical mass. But we want to go beyond just critical mass because there’s more to it than that. There really is this idea of an ecosystem, where there’s this need among the people in the community, in that ecosystem, for making use of that technology, that new thing that has gained critical mass. And we know—or at least we think—it’s true that ecosystems tend to work best when there are some open standards that help to set the parameters for that ecosystem.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:07] And allow different players to interact effectively. We mentioned that 1EdTech is the steward of the Open Badges standard. An open badge is a type of digital badge that conforms to this standard that they manage, and it can serve as a portable credential. It can contain metadata, and that metadata can offer detailed information about whatever the achievements are that are being credentialed. It’s not a specific software, but it’s a method for embedding data into the credential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:41] It’s important that that becomes a shared method, that people understand the method. The method is going to be repeatable—as you said, it’s not a specific software—that can be repeated across different software platforms, different types of software. It’s really that there is that common standard. There’s that common method that underlies the creation and the issuance of those credentials. We were really lucky to get to collaborate with 1EdTech on a Webinar about “Adding Value to Skills-Based Credentials with Digital Standards.”

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Celisa Steele: [00:07:16] Western Governors University was also involved. And, in that Webinar, they provided an example of what they’re doing and a demonstration of their Achievement Wallet, which they’ve been beta testing. Seeing that really drove home, for us, the real value of credentials, which is not in them on their own but them in an ecosystem. Now, what WGU is doing is pretty sophisticated stuff. It’s still not even there 100-percent in practice for them, but it is there 100-percent in terms of conceptual value.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:51] That’s right. As the learner, you can decide which digital credentials to display and to whom, and your achievements can be automatically compared to skills and experience needed for your jobs.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:06] For your job or the job that you want to have.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:09] That’s right.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:09] And so this also gets back to where we see a real sweet spot for learning businesses—this idea of aligning credentials with workforce development needs and then also providing a really clear pathway to learners. That’s exactly what WGU is doing and able to show and hitting on all of those areas, and it’s really powerful when you do bring them together.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:32] We’ve talked about that, and you’ll hear us continue to talk about that, because we think that that really is, if not the biggest opportunity, certainly one of the biggest opportunities out there for learning businesses right now is to get to that sweet spot. And digital credentials—and digital credentials that are based on standards that make them part of this type of ecosystem—are a big part of that.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:52] Right. So those standards make the digital credentials not only human-readable but also machine-readable, and, when they’re machine-readable, that means that you can make use of vast amounts of data. You can mine that pretty easily. And, again, we’ll go to some old technologies for an example here. But it’s like VHS. You suddenly have that tape that you can put into a VCR machine anywhere, and it’s going to play for you. Or, in the learning world, this is like SCORM—this idea of interoperability so that you really can connect with a variety of different systems and pull in data from lots of different areas and make use of it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:32] Yes, and, in the ecosystem, you, as a learning business, might play a bigger or a smaller role. WGU has a lot of digital credentials, and it’s playing a big role—a huge role—in the world that it operates in. Your learning business could feed into some other organization’s Achievement Wallet, like WGU’s. Or you could decide to be the wallet for the people in your field, profession, industry.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:00] I think there’s room to play at either end of that spectrum. The point is that you want to have the vision, though—whether or not you’re the owner of something like the WGU Achievement Wallet, that can be debated, whether that’s the role for you to play in your space or not—but to have that vision of, somehow, your digital credentials are going to be part of that larger ecosystem where it’s really helping people, even beyond what your learning business can provide, but it’s allowing learners to take what your learning business does provide and connect it to other things that they’re learning other places and help them see the pathways that they need to build their skills or to switch into different roles.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:40] And I think, logically, that probably is the role that most learning businesses are going to play. If you’re, for example, a trade or professional association that really is the dominant organization in a huge field or industry that you serve, then it might make sense for you to be that sort of wallet. But most organizations are going to be smaller and feeding into something else within whatever field or industry they’re serving. So, again, those standards are so important. If you’re thinking about digital badges, other types of digital credentials, even if you’ve already developed them and you haven’t really paid attention to the standards so far, you’re going to do yourself a favor by stepping back and getting that right from the beginning so that you really are able to be a valuable part of a larger ecosystem.

Serious Credentials Need to Be Offered As Standards-Based Digital CredentialsCelisa Steele: [00:11:29] So our key takeaway is, if you offer a serious credential, if you offer a certification or an assessment-based certificate, and if you aren’t currently offering a digital credential to show that people have earned your credential, you need to be thinking about the timeline for transitioning to a standards-based digital credential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:52] Of course, a serious standards-based digital credential might not be needed or even appropriate for lighter-weight, less-intensive experiences like, say, conference attendance. But where a learner is likely to want to share your credential with a current or prospective employer, and where an employer is going to get value from being able to see via the metadata what went into earning that credential and that that credential is still valid, then it’s not a question of whether you should offer it as a digital credential, it’s a matter of when. When not whether.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:34] Learners are rarely looking for the chance to spend four hours in a classroom, three days at a conference, or three weeks completing an online course. Much more often, they’re looking for what they might be able to do differently or better after learning something in that course or at that conference.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:51] And we’ll go one step further and say we’re not convinced that what adult learners really want is a credential. We’d argue that they want what that credential provides them in terms of career options or advancement or, most fundamentally, what it means when they share that credential with others.

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Related Resources* Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech * The Value of Credentials Now * Peanut Butter and Chocolate: Workforce Development and Credentials * Rolling Out Digital Credentials with Stephanie Owen of NWFA

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbLearning businesses rely on the revenue that comes from their educational offerings. That means learning business professionals have to know how to determine the best pricing—the best pricing for attracting and converting prospective customers, the best pricing for maintaining and maximizing revenue levels, and the best pricing for achieving strategic goals.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele touch on three principles of pricing that can help: Prices prime perception, prices drive profit, and pricing is strategic.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] There is no one-size-fits-all, failsafe approach to pricing, but there are principles to keep in mind. As you do the work to understand the pricing landscape your learning business operates in, three principles will help guide your efforts. Pricing primes perception, prices drive profit, and pricing is strategic.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:27] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:35] We preach that learning businesses need to focus on reach, revenue, and impact to be successful, and pricing is a key factor in revenue.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] Learning businesses rely on the revenue that comes from introducing new educational offerings or the revenue that comes from getting better sales from existing offerings. That means that we, as learning business professionals, have to know how to determine the best pricing—the best pricing for attracting and converting prospective customers, and the best pricing for maintaining and even maximizing revenue levels.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:12] In today’s episode, number 394, we want to touch on three principles of pricing that can help your learning business in setting or revisiting prices for your educational offerings. Those three principles are prices prime perception, prices drive profit, and pricing is strategic.

Prices Prime PerceptionCelisa Steele: [00:01:33] Let’s dive in with that first principle and talk about prices prime perception. Our argument here is that pricing heavily influences how someone perceives whatever it is that they’re going to buy, and, as buyers, we aren’t as rational as we might like to believe that we are in how we make our purchasing decisions. We’re influenced by any number of factors that are unrelated to how much an item actually costs to make, and so pricing is one of those factors, but there are other things that also influence our perception.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:14] Yes. Things like brand, the way the product looks, what our peers think about the product, how it compares to competing products or other points of reference that we bring to the table. But price is a big factor. Basically, when we see a price, we’re using that to make a judgment about that product that we’re considering purchasing.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:37] A very simple example of this are the name-brand knockoffs. If you see a Louis Vuitton bag for $20, your immediate thought isn’t, “Oh, that’s a good deal. That’s a good bargain.” You’re like, “No, that’s a knockoff. That’s not the real thing.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:51] Right because the real Louis Vuitton is something special, and, when you see the….well, heck, I don’t even know how much a Louis Vuitton bag actually costs. I just know it’s very expensive, and people see that price, and it becomes something special, in my mind, almost just because of the price, because you’re paying a lot of money for it, and, when you carry that bag, people know you’ve paid a lot of money for it.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:09] The critical point for you, dear listener, is that, when you’re involved in setting prices, you have the ability to influence how learners and potential customers respond to and perceive the products that you’re offering based on the price that you ascribe to those things, the price tag that you put on them—that’s going to influence those buyers’ perception of what you’re offering.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:36] We see this happen all the time. As a general rule, all things being equal, a higher price point is going to be associated with a higher-value or higher-end product than a lower price point is. You can think about the world of automobiles. We’re all familiar with cars and the car market, to some extent. We happen to be in the market for a car right now, so we’ve been looking at this rather closely, and we’ve always been fans of Hondas in the past—very reliable, standard cars. One car we’re considering looking at is a 2024 Honda Accord, and the suggested retail price on that—that MSRP they tell you about—is around $28,000 for the standard baseline Honda Accord.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:25] Now, if you look at a 2024 BMW 5 Series Sedan, you see pictures of these two cars next to each other, and they don’t look terribly different. You can tell they’re in the same general class of car, or type of car, that somebody might be looking for in a sedan. But the BMW, the MSRP on that, that baseline price is $61,000. You can tell me all you want to about German engineering and how superior it is, but is there really that $30,000+ level of cost difference justified in those prices? No, that price is part of the perception of BMW as that ultimate driving machine in that brand. And you just have this feeling when you’re paying $61,000 that you’re paying for something that’s more special—that’s a higher-value product that you’re getting.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:18] Yes, and I think that part of why people will spend more on something like a BMW versus a Honda is because that’s how they perceive of themselves. They see themselves as someone who drives a BMW, who has a nice car, and, for them, the Honda isn’t going to be nice enough. Again, it gets back to perception of both the buyers’ own values and how they think of themselves and also then the perception of that product that is again heavily influenced by that price tag.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:50] You see this kind of thing all over the place. Like coffee. Back in the day, you used to be able to get a cup of coffee for 50 cents or $1. Then Starbucks came along and changed the perception of coffee. There were a lot of things that went into that, but price was one of the things that went into that. And it’s suddenly acceptable to pay $4 or $5 for that sort of coffee experience you get from Starbucks. Or you think about wine, the cheap bottle of wine versus the high-end bottle of wine. You’re paying $10 for one and $70 for the other. The fact is most of us can’t really taste the difference. In fact, most experts can’t really even taste the difference—there’s research to show this. But that price does something for you psychologically. And, of course, you may not be thinking about your learning products as BMWs or fine bottles of wine or Starbucks cups of coffee, but the same principles apply.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:40] So here’s a place where we would invite you to do some reflection. We invite you to pause—literally pause the podcast—and think about what you know about how your products and services are perceived. Are they perceived as high-value, high-end? Are they perceived as good value? Think about what you know about how your offerings are perceived. And then think about what you might be able to do to change that perception, to positively impact the value perception, which would then, of course, allow you to potentially raise your prices.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:17] And, of course, raising the price in the first place is one of the ways to change those value perceptions. Just by changing the price, keeping all else as it is, you’re going to influence how people think about your products. Now, of course, you don’t want to do that if your value isn’t actually commensurate with that price point, but our experience is that most learning businesses are, in fact, charging less than they should for the value they’re delivering.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:07:47] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Prices Drive ProfitJeff Cobb: [00:08:23] We’ve talked about the psychological aspect of pricing when we said that prices prime perception. The next principle that we want to talk about is how price is, in fact, one of the strongest levers you have for profitability. Prices drive profit.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:43] When it comes to selling products or services, there are three key variables that impact your net revenue: volume, cost, and price. Out of those three, price is by far the most powerful when it comes to the impact that changing it can have on your net revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:05] Let’s take a simple example. We’re going to wade into the realm of trying to do math over audio here, but we’ll try to keep it simple so that folks can follow along and hopefully get the point that we’re making, even if you can’t completely follow the math. Let’s say you have a self-paced online course that you’re charging learners $100 for. We’re picking $100 because it’s a nice round number for trying to do some verbal math.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:32] Let’s say you sell 100 of those $100 online courses. That brings $10,000 into your learning business. Now let’s say that out of that $100 price for the course, $90 of it goes to your costs—your learning management system, your course creation tools, your subject matter expert time, etcetera. So $10 of the $100 price tag is profit.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:03] Now say you increase the price by 10 percent, so the price goes from $100 to $110 per enrollment. Your costs are the same, so that extra $10 in the price goes straight to profit. So you go from making $10 per course enrollment, or $1,000 in profit, to $20 per enrollment, or $2,000 in profit. You’ve doubled your profit.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:31] So that was a 10-percent increase in price. What about a 10-percent increase in volume? Let’s follow this scenario down this line and say that the price for the course stays at the original $100, but, instead of selling 100 of them, you sell 110 course enrollments. So that brings $11,000 into your learning business, but the profit is still just $10 per enrollment. Instead of bringing in the original $1,000 in profit, now you’re bringing in $1,100 in profit. That’s only $100 more in profit with a 10-percent increase in volume versus the $1,000 more with that 10-percent price increase.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:18] So we can see that pricing is more powerful than volume increases. We won’t attempt the verbal math to walk you through the changes in cost, as that involves usually both fixed and variable costs, and it can be a little hard to follow verbally, so we won’t challenge you anymore, as far as that goes. But trust us that, if you’re going to change any of those three factors—price, volume, or cost—price is by far the most powerful one to change.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:48] Your exact results will, of course, vary based on your current prices, your current volume, your current costs. But, at the bare minimum, this should give you some food for thought to be thinking about, “Okay, what can we potentially do around price increases?” Selling more, refining your processes to cut back on costs—those are both great goals, admirable goals, but, again, the takeaway point is that they’re not going to mean as big a change in net revenue as increasing price.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:21] There’s even research that’s shown that a 1-percent increase in price will increase profit by around 11 percent. So think about that. If you’re thinking about whether to raise prices, you don’t actually have to raise prices by very much—just a percent or two—to have a significant impact over time. You may be able to get good results with a price raise that your learners are barely even going to notice.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:46] Now, on the flip side, if you’re going to discount to provide an incentive for bulk purchases of your products, for example, you need to make sure that you’ve done the math. Is the purchase volume that you’re requiring for a given discount going to be enough to make up for whatever you’re going to lose in profit? Make sure that you’re analyzing the way that price works relative to your net margins and your underlying costs, both those fixed costs and those variable costs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:16] Yes, because price is a powerful lever in both directions. And, if you cut price and think you’re going to make it up on volume, often that doesn’t actually work out. You don’t get the increased volume that you need to actually make that happen. And you need to look at, as you said, Celisa, how underlying costs, both fixed and variable, play out in your different types of learning products. Your self-paced online learning, for example, might have variable costs that are really close to $0. Once you’ve got a unit of that produced, you can keep selling it and selling it without really adding many more costs to it.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:49] On the other end, high-touch, facilitated, in-person learning tends to have smaller margins because you might have food and beverage tied into that, or you’re paying for that subject matter expert to fly in and be there in the workshop all day long. So those tend to have higher variable costs and smaller margins. Again, the takeaway is to be aware of the risks when you’re thinking about discounting and making sure that you really do have a clear view of what those discounts are going to mean in terms of your profit.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:22] Yes, definitely understand both your upsides and your downsides, and, just in general, you need to understand what drives profit in one direction or the other. I know we have a lot of people listening who are at nonprofit businesses. Most learning businesses are going to be very mission-driven or, in many cases, nonprofit, and so they may not be thinking about maximizing net revenue or profit. But, at the same time, we all understand that the revenue that we’re bringing in through our educational products can be reinvested, whether it’s into more educational products, better educational products, or other parts of the organization that the learning business is a part of. So that’s a reason to think about pricing. It’s a reason to think about profit and really understand how these different dynamics work.

Pricing Is StrategicCelisa Steele: [00:15:15] We’ve talked about the first two principles, that pricing primes perception and that prices drive profit. That brings us to our third principle, which is, pricing is strategic.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:29] That may sound a little flip to say that, but, the fact is, pricing often is not strategic. We witness, in organizations, that you go out and make a product, and you decide at the end of the day, once the product is completely built and ready to go, how you’re going to price it. But that’s really not the way it should work. It should be something that’s built into the decision to even make the product in the first place and then how you make the product, what it actually is in the end—all of that should be built in as part of the overall product strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:05] If we think about some typical strategic objectives that a learning business might have, we can tick some of those off and think about then how pricing can influence those. If you think about, for example, market penetration, maybe your goal is to go as deeply as possible into the market that you serve with your product or service. Maybe you have a goal of market share, so you want to claim as much market share as you can, maybe even get some of what your competitors currently have. Market penetration, market share, those are common strategic objectives. I will say sometimes those concepts can be a little confusing, so, just to be clear in unpacking them, market penetration is the percentage of your target market that you sell to during a given time period.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:57] Let’s say you serve ophthalmologists in the U.S. You might be looking to hit an 85-percent penetration mark—so 85 percent of those ophthalmologists are buying your education. Market share is a slightly different view of it—you look at your market’s total value. If education for ophthalmologists is a $50-million market, or whatever, then you might want to get the majority of that $50 million, but that’s regardless of how many individual ophthalmologists you serve. But, again, market penetration, market share, both of those are common objectives, and both of those tie to pricing. Again, penetration, you might think, “Lower prices are going to help me sell to more people,” for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:39] Right. And they’re both things that you think about at the beginning, as you’re thinking about actually building out whatever the offering is, and those objectives are going to influence your cost, they’re going to influence your design, and they’re going to influence your price. They should play a direct role in how you’re going to price. All of these things influence each other. Your pricing is going to influence your volume. How you’re able to price is going to influence what you can afford to invest in a product. All of these things have to be thought about at the beginning, not at the end, when you decide to tack a price on to whatever it is you’ve created.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:13] Other strategic factors that you would keep in mind when you’re deciding to create a product, as you’re creating a product and thinking about the pricing all along, one would be positioning. Pricing can really influence the positioning of your products or your organization. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier around pricing priming perception. Pricing is a powerful positioning tool. Are you going to be creating premium or exclusive offerings? It might have that high price to them. Is that how you’re going to position them? Are you going to be more of the middle-of-the range, go-to source? That also is going to influence how you think about pricing. Are you going to be the low-cost, beat-all-prices, all-of-your-CME-for-life-for-$300 provider? That’s all positioning. It’s all strategic. And price is wrapped up in all of it.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:07] Differentiation, that’s another strategic objective that you want to think about as you’re developing products, as you’re pricing them. Price can signal a lot about your product. If you have a $3,000 course on ethics, if someone’s looking at that, and then they also see on another site a $19.99 ethics video, that tells them something about the difference in the products, the difference in the experience—or at least sets a certain expectation there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:35] If you’re able to sell a $3,000 course on ethics, then we want to know your secrets. But the point is, any of these—market penetration, market share, positioning, differentiation—and there can be other strategic factors as well, these are big ones that relate to pricing. But all of them take into account much more information than simply what the product costs. They recognize the actions of competition, the preferences of your customers, and the potential power of your brand. Again, all of this is wrapped up in thinking about both your products and their pricing strategically.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:10] How you manage your prices, that’s inherently linked to how you manage your strategy—or at least it should be in our book—and it’s going to tie into how you achieve your objectives.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:22] Maybe just a fun little example that we have in our pricing stories portfolio that we could put out there.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:31] Yes. There’s this Barclay Prime Steakhouse in Philadelphia. We’ve never been, but it’s a steakhouse in a major city. We’re assuming that there’s a lot of competition. There are a lot of other steakhouses in Philly, we’re going to guess. One way that Barclay Prime has chosen to stand out is that they’ve taken a well-known Philly tradition, the Philly cheesesteak, and then they’ve created this ultra-premium version of it. It’s hand-cut Wagyu beef; it’s got black truffle; it’s got foie gras; and it comes with a half bottle of champagne. It’s this high-end, premium version of a Philly cheesesteak. And it’s priced at $140—$140 for a Philly cheesesteak.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:16] A hundred and forty dollars for a Philly cheesesteak. That’s crazy. It makes it kind of a novelty. But this offering is also very much in keeping with the image that the restaurant wants to present and how it wants to differentiate itself in the marketplace. So there’s positioning, and there’s differentiation going on there, and pricing is helping to do both of those things. It’s not just another steakhouse. It’s a place where you’re going to be able to get exotic, different, high-end things, like this specialized Philly cheesesteak. And this menu, well, it’s created a tremendous amount of word of mouth for this particular offering, which actually sells really well, this $140 cheesesteak.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:00] Yes, it attracts people who want to be able to say they’ve had the experience of the $140 Philly cheesesteak. It’s also a strategic move in which price played a really big role. It helps to position Barclay as this high-end, premium, different-than-the-others kind of steakhouse.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:21] And then another effect that it has—and this is an important one in pricing, kind of goes to that psychological end of it—is that that high price for a cheesesteak sandwich creates what’s called an anchoring effect. People are fascinated by this kind of product with a $140 price tag on it, and, once they have that $140 price tag in mind, $60 or $70 for a filet mignon seems like a really good deal.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:49] Yes, it does. Suddenly, you’re like, “Sure, I’ll have two filet mignons.” But another thing that’s also at work here is the magnet effect. When you have that anchor of $140, that higher-priced product, it tends to allow you to raise the price of other related products. If you put something out there at the high end, it’s going to give you the potential for raising the prices of some of your lower-priced products without it being perceived as a big deal. So we have the anchoring effect, and we also have the magnet effect at work.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:26] You can think about the impact of having some very high-end, premium education products on your menu—really, your catalog. What impact would that have? Where might you be able to carve out some things that are high-priced, that have an impact, that are going to change the anchoring that people have around your pricing, that are going to change the perception of all your products and potentially give you that magnet effect that can then pull up some of your lower-priced offerings to higher price tags? We’re talking about doing this with a Philly cheesesteak, but the exact same thing can be applied to any type of product or service, and we’re encouraging you to apply it to yours.

No Single Formula for Pricing But Guiding PrinciplesCelisa Steele: [00:24:10] There isn’t one, single formula for setting prices. But there are some levers; there are some principles, like the three that we covered today, that we think can help learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:21] Pricing is always going to be subject to your particular situation, of course, the context that a particular product exists in, and the expectations that buyers are bringing to the table.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:34] You’ll have to do the legwork. You have to put in the effort to make sure that you understand the environment in which you work, but referring back to these three principles can help you better understand pricing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:53] There is no one-size-fits-all, failsafe approach to pricing, but there are principles to keep in mind. As you do the work to understand the pricing landscape your learning business operates in, three principles will help guide your efforts. Pricing primes perception, prices drive profit, and pricing is strategic.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Pricing Educational Products: Two Essential Factors, Part I * How to Price Education Products, Part II * Value-Based Pricing with Dr. Michael Tatonetti

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Erica Salm RenchWith the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence broke into the mainstream and became a more practical rather than theoretical topic than ever before. AI has the potential to lighten the existing load and to enable new activities for learning businesses, particularly in the realms of marketing and personalization.

Erica Salm Rench is the chief operating officer at rasa.io, which uses AI to send personalized newsletters to every recipient on an e-mail list. Before joining rasa, Erica worked in digital media and advertising at an agency, leading a team of content marketers, SEO specialists, Web developers, and online advertisers. She also worked at Tulane University in undergraduate admissions. Erica is passionate about designing effective marketing strategies, and she’s an avid student of AI.

In episode 393 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Erica about the state of artificial intelligence, what’s on the horizon for AI, e-mail marketing, personalization, the importance of data, and the interaction and interplay of humans and AI to get work done well.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesErica Salm Rench: [00:00:00] In its very simplest form, yes, it’s “Dear first name.” But obviously technology allows us to do a lot more than that.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:11] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:13] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] With the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence broke into the mainstream and became a more practical rather than theoretical topic than ever before. AI has the potential to lighten the existing load and to enable new activities for learning businesses, particularly in the realms of marketing and personalization. Erica Salm Rench is the chief operating officer at rasa.io, which uses AI to send personalized newsletters to every recipient on an e-mail list. Prior to joining rasa.io, Erica worked in digital media and advertising at an agency, leading a team of content marketers, SEO specialists, Web developers, and online advertisers. She also worked at Tulane University in the undergraduate admissions world. Erica is passionate about designing effective marketing strategies, and she’s an avid student of AI. In this episode, number 393, Celisa talks with Erica about the state of artificial intelligence, what’s on the horizon for AI, e-mail marketing, personalization, the importance of data, and the interaction and interplay of humans and AI to get work done well. Celisa and Erica spoke in December 2023.

Using AI to Personalize E-mail NewslettersCelisa Steele: [00:01:46] Maybe just tell listeners who might not be familiar with rasa.io a little bit more about what you all do there.

Erica Salm Rench: [00:01:54] Absolutely. So what rasa does is we use AI to send personalized newsletters to each and every recipient on an e-mail list. We work a lot with professional and trade associations, publishers, and marketing agencies, like I said. But, oftentimes, the organizations that we work with say, “We’re sending too many e-mails. We’re not sending the right e-mails. We’re not sending the right content that people want to receive.” So that’s what our AI does—we pick up on users’ behaviors, their interactions with content in order to further refine the content that we send them through an e-mail, so that you’re really hyper-targeting your audience members and really treating them like a segment of one. And we also help you shave many hours off the send process. Newsletter production can be tedious, and we’re not ignorant to that, and so we help people automate some of those more tedious pieces of the newsletter production process. And then another piece of it would be that many of our clients do have partnerships and sponsorships and use their newsletter as a revenue stream, so we help them amplify those revenue streams as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:08] So you mentioned that rasa makes use of artificial intelligence for part of what you’re doing there on the newsletter front. And I know you’ve been working in artificial intelligence for a long time, certainly well before the recent explosion of attention that I think probably, we can say, started with the release of ChatGPT about a year ago, in November 2022….

Erica Salm Rench: [00:03:30] Just had the year anniversary of ChatGPT’s release. I can’t believe it’s been a year already.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:36] And so, given the fact that you’ve been thinking about AI for maybe longer than some of our listeners, I’m curious to get your take on, people who maybe haven’t thought about it until pretty recently, the last few months, what are they getting wrong about artificial intelligence? Or is there anything that surprises you about the layperson’s view of AI at this point?

Using AI for More than Content GenerationErica Salm Rench: [00:04:00] Yes, it’s hard to put myself in the position of not knowing much about it at all because, to your point, I’ve been trying to follow this stuff for several years, and there were pretty massive developments in computing technology over the past decade that have really built up to this point. And ChatGPT’s release, obviously to your point, was a major explosion. I think everyone experimented with ChatGPT and, in many ways, has dabbled in using it for content generation. But what I would say most people are leaving on the table is the ideation piece of how ChatGPT can help them strategically, like starting from scratch on a project, the big intimidating project that you might be procrastinating on. Using a tool like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard or Anthropic’s Claude to get you started and help eliminate that writer’s block piece. So that’s one way that I feel like people see ChatGPT almost as a content creator, which it does pretty well, but it’s good as an assistant to help you execute on various tasks. And also a way that I just talked to a colleague about recently is number crunching and data analytics. She was saying, “Oh, I just hate pivot tables, and I have to pivot out all this information.” I said, “Why don’t you just plop your spreadsheet in ChatGPT and have it analyze that information for you?” I don’t think people think of ChatGPT as the first thing when they think about that tool.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:34] I do like that idea of helping get past the writer’s block, as you said, the blank page, the blank screen. Just being able to turn to ChatGPT and ask an open-ended question, see what comes back, might lead you down an interesting path that then you decide to explore more. So we’re talking about the current state of AI. I’m also interested, given, again, your long experience with AI, what’s your view of what’s on the horizon? What is coming next? If we look at the release of ChatGPT as a big event in the recent history of AI, what’s on the horizon? What do you think is going to change next? What do you think we’re going to see that will really impact how we’re living and working?

What’s Coming in Artificial Intelligence: AI AgentsErica Salm Rench: [00:06:17] Yes. Well, for those of you who might or might not follow the saga of what’s been going on at OpenAI and with Sam Altman, there’s a lot of speculation that the reason he was let go from OpenAI is because of potential massive developments in what one would call general intelligence—machines that are not just smart machines but even smarter than humans on any particular subject and can begin to take actions. So like AI agents, which that’s probably going to be the next thing that we’ll see is agents being able to actually submit forms and buy things for you and take those actions and not just spit back out content, whether that be audio, video, imagery, written content, which is what I think a lot of people are starting to dabble in right now and start to use AI for. But bringing things to the next level and actually executing for you is probably going to be what comes next. How soon it will be widespread, I think, is a question still outstanding, but it’s coming.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:26] Yes, and that’s when it gets very much what everybody always has pictured about the future of AI—the sentient being, if maybe not in that shape, but able to do many more of those things that humans have done.

Erica Salm Rench: [00:07:39] Yes, exactly.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:41] I’m thinking about the learning businesses that listen to the Leading Learning Podcast, and I’m thinking about, for them and in their marketing, what are some easy or obvious first steps? If they’re looking at how can they make use of AI to help support them in marketing their offerings, what would you recommend?

Using AI to Market Learning Products and ServicesErica Salm Rench: [00:08:03] Well, I think, just even in asking that question, you’re spot on. Obviously, the folks that you work with, the creation of the content is this needs to be still human. Their learning content, they are the certifying body, or they are the teaching body, so it is probably very important that they’re that first-party source for the creation of the actual learning modules. But you said, “How can they market it?” I think that’s where AI becomes really powerful because, if you’re writing promotional content about the learning module, that’s a place where you can use some generative copy or have an image generated for you that goes along with the blog post or a social media post that it is meant to promote that particular learning module or using AI to summarize the content that’s in the module in order to create the various promotional pieces of content. And then there are so many great tools out there that allow for the automation of your social media posts going out, recycling out the promotion of any learning module, course, or certification program. So, instead of posting something once and just saying, “Okay, well, I already did a social media post about that,” there are tools out there that help you recycle back out those social posts and intelligently post them at the right times and promote them to the right audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:34] You just mentioned social there, but we’ve been talking about e-mail as well, and I do feel like e-mail tends to be the backbone of most of the promotion that the learning businesses, at least that we interact with, rely on for promoting their products and services. But I also feel like we’re hearing more about the difficulty or increasing difficulty of really getting the attention of their e-mail recipients. First, I’ll just pause that to ask is that a general trend that you’re also hearing, in terms of is it actually getting harder to get people’s attention?

The Growing Competition for Attention in E-mail MarketingErica Salm Rench: [00:10:08] Well, e-mail is the dinosaur that hasn’t gone away, or at least yet. That’s the world that we operate in. And e-mail is definitely going to… I hadn’t mentioned it in my first response, but it should still be a core piece of your marketing plan for anything that you’re going to promote because it is a channel that is far more reliable than social media or paid online ads. You have a much better chance of getting someone’s eyes with an e-mail than you do on a social platform or in a search engine results page. And, obviously, that’s the space that I operate in. In addition to just a one-size-fits-all e-mail having a better chance of getting someone’s eyes, we help people get their subscribers’ attention with e-mail because we personalize the content. So there is the opportunity to use a tool—some sort of tool, like rasa—to really hyper-segment or hyper-target people with the right learning content or promote your learning content in an advertising space within an e-mail that’s surrounded by personalized content relevant to the individual. But, to your point, e-mail should not be ignored. It’s still a very effective channel compared to the others out there.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:29] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

Tactics for E-mail MarketingCelisa Steele: [00:12:00] Talk a little bit more about any strategies, tactics, or approaches that really seem to work to help make that e-mail stand out. Because I know my inbox is incredibly crowded.

Erica Salm Rench: [00:12:09] Yes. It’s still a competition to get someone’s attention with an e-mail. Obviously, personalization of newsletter content is one way you can do it. And, as simple as it sounds, targeting people based on where you collect their e-mail on your Web site can also be really effective. And this is a very simple method that’s been around for some time, but, if you have a form where you collect people’s information, if they’re interested in learning more from you, just tagging people and putting them into a segment based on where you collect their information on the Web site, like what landing page they came in through, putting the forms throughout the Web site so that you can really capture where they came in, what converted that person so that you can give them more of what they’re interested in.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:00] And so, then, behind that answer is just that data is needed in order to make the personalization work and to make the e-mail stand out and be as relevant as possible to that particular recipient.

Erica Salm Rench: [00:13:13] Data and automation. Or else you’ll spin your wheel.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:17] Drive yourself crazy.

Erica Salm Rench: [00:13:18] Yes.

Going Beyond “Dear First Name” in PersonalizationCelisa Steele: [00:13:19] Yes. Okay, well, we’ve been talking about personalization, and I know that is a big area of focus for rasa. It does seem to hold a lot of promise for marketing because, if you can contextualize and really focus that message for that individual, it’s going to be more effective. We also talk a lot about personalization in the learning world. The more you can do to tailor that content specifically to that individual and where they are in terms of their knowledge and skills, it’s going to be that much more effective. But I also feel like personalization can be a bit of a vague or at least a broad term. Sometimes people might talk about personalization just being the e-mail says, “Hi, Celisa” instead of “Hi, Erica.”

Erica Salm Rench: [00:14:02] Yes, just like token, like first name token.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:06] Right. But I feel like you’re talking about a much deeper kind of personalization, where you’re really looking at what is the right content, and you’re talking about even down to this segment-of-one idea there. How do you think about the range, or different types, of personalization? And then are there types of personalization that are more effective than others?

Erica Salm Rench: [00:14:26] Sure. In its very simplest form, yes, it’s “Dear first name.” But obviously technology allows us to do a lot more than that. Another type of personalization would be like what we do at rasa—personalizing the content that’s served up within the e-mail. I also think about personalization from timing of e-mails. We have a pretty sophisticated way that we nurture folks in our database. If someone comes in seeking more information, but they might not have actually wanted to get the demo yet or sign up for the self-serve product, we have a way that we first start nurturing them at a faster cadence and then, if there isn’t as much interaction, it’s a little bit more spread out. After a certain amount of time, they might get added to our newsletter list. So it’s a bunch of rules to ensure that someone who has been interested, even who might not have taken an action, is still nurtured to an extent so that, when they are ready to make a switch and come over to us for an AI newsletter, we’re still top-of-mind. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do with the newsletter too. You’re providing really relevant and informative educational content so that, when it does come time to volunteer at the conference or sign up for the conference, your organization is top-of-mind because you’ve been providing such relevant, valuable content throughout.

The Relationship Between Quantity of Resources and Meaningful Personalization of ContentCelisa Steele: [00:15:54] We talked about the need for data—we were talking about understanding where people come into the Web site and being able to segment them based on that landing page. That need for data around how someone interacts with you or comes to interact with you is one part of it. The other part of it is that, if you’re personalizing this content, then you have to have enough content, enough volume of content or breadth of content, that it works to personalize. Can you talk a little bit about organizations that you work with. Do they typically come in already having that range of content, and what they’re really looking for is the help with automating it and making that easier? Or do they come in and have this aha moment of “Oh, this is the breadth of content we need to go out and build”?

Erica Salm Rench: [00:16:39] That is a fabulous question. We have clients all over the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have your ASAEs, and you have your American Bankers Association, and they are content powerhouses. The majority of the content in their rasa newsletters is going to be content that they’ve created in-house, and they might supplement a bit with some external relevant sources. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, we also have plenty of clients who don’t create any content, or they create one blog post a month, and so they’re going to lean a lot more heavily on the external relevant industry sources to supplement their own internal content, if they create any at all. And so what we’ll work with them to do is figure out what are the authoritative sources in the space. We’ll automatically pull those into what we’d call the content pool. In some cases, we’re filtering down those sources. So we’d say, “Well, we want this source to come in, but only if ‘online learning’ is the keyword or phrase.” And then, from that relevant pool of, let’s say, 30, 40 pieces of content, we’re going to personalize for the individual based on what we’ve learned about them and what we know they’re interested in reading about. But many of our clients lean on those external sources, so that, to your point, they’re not pressured to create so much content, that the AI has plenty to choose from.

The Interplay of Human Input and AI AutomationCelisa Steele: [00:18:08] Another question about how this works because you were talking about rules when you were talking about the cadence at which you were nurturing particular prospects. And, when we first were talking about AI and talking about the next step in AI being more of these agents that can do more, what’s the mix at rasa in terms of the human control or input versus what’s driven by AI around those kinds of rules or that sort of segmentation or any of what you’re doing there?

Erica Salm Rench: [00:18:38] Yes, that’s a great question. We use rasa and HubSpot together. A lot of our clients use rasa and HubSpot together. And the rules are developed within HubSpot, and then the AI and the recommendation algorithm, that’s within rasa. So, if there is such a rule in HubSpot that someone gets added to an organization’s newsletter, then that will sync with the rasa platform, and then, as soon as rasa picks up on the fact that Erica is interested in AI or marketing or branding or what have you, then rasa is going to learn that in order to recommend me the relevant content. But what rasa can also do—and this is a piece of why a lot of our clients work with us—is that we can also push those topical interests back into your CRM, like HubSpot, so that you can develop more rules off of people’s interests on the CRM or AMS.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:38] Cool. Yes, the integration of the tech stack there sounds very powerful.

Erica Salm Rench: [00:19:42] Yes, and we try to make integration not a scary word. We’ve pre-built a lot of our integrations, at least a lot of our subscriber-based integrations, so that doesn’t have to be a deterrent for getting started.

An Approach to Personal and Professional DevelopmentCelisa Steele: [00:19:54] I’ll shift gears just a little bit. One of the questions we always like to ask guests who come on the Leading Learning Podcast, given that this is the Leading Learning Podcast, is about their own professional and potentially personal development. And so I would be curious to know how you go about continuing to grow. Do you have habits, sources, or approaches that you use to make sure that you’re staying on top of things?

Erica Salm Rench: [00:20:19] I love that question. I’d love to talk about that. I am a big podcast listener, which is why I love to go on podcasts—because I love to listen to podcasts. I’m also, though, a mother of three, so I don’t necessarily have a lot of time to sit down and curl up with a book. Whenever I’m in the car, I’m always listening to podcasts to make sure that I’m staying on top of the various topics that I’m interested in. So that’s one way that I kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. And, also, when I’m running or exercising, I’m always listening to podcasts and not music, although I wish I could listen to more music, but I feel like that’s a tradeoff that I’ve had to make. In the car or when I’m on my feet, I’m listening to podcasts. So that’s one big thing. Or books on tape. Tape. Why did I say “tape”? Audiobooks.

Erica Salm Rench: [00:21:09] So I love the Amazon tool, the Amazon books, the audiobooks. You can subscribe. You get a credit per month. I forget what it’s called off the top of my head. And then what else do I do? I’m a big Morning Brew fan—that’s a good newsletter. I feel like it gives me a good synopsis of the current events that I might be interested in. I try not to listen to a ton of general news channels. I try to really hyper-focus my time on AI, marketing technology, and e-mail. E-mail is, of course, one that I like to stay on top of. Yes, so it’s making sure that you have your trusted sources identified and then making sure that you have the time to devote to those, to consuming those sources. Easier said than done.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:07] Erica Salm Rench is COO at rasa.io. Learn about the solutions rasa.io offers and Erica’s work at rasa.io.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer * Measuring Marketing with Greg Stuart * Trustworthy Marketing with Melanie Deziel

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbJust as taking time to look back and reflect is a good practice, so too is taking time to look ahead and plan.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele share survey data about what learning businesses plan to focus on in 2024. You can use the data for quick benchmarking and to help you get clearer about your learning business’s priorities for the year ahead.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] In addition to asking yourself about your priorities for the year ahead, also ask if your priorities are clear throughout your learning business? Is everyone on the team aware of and crystal-clear on your priorities for the year ahead?

Celisa Steele: [00:00:19] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:20] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:28] Welcome to episode 392 of the Leading Learning Podcast, in which we’ll focus on what 2024 may hold for learning businesses. We’re thinking of this episode as a companion to episode 391, in which we reflected back on 2023. Now we’ll look ahead.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:47] January is, of course, the time for that looking back and looking forward. January is named after Janus, the Roman god with two faces—one set of eyes looking to the past, the other set looking ahead to the future. Hopefully, dear listener, you’ve already been strategizing and preparing for the year ahead, but we hope our conversation will be further encouragement to you to be thoughtful about your priorities for 2024.

Areas of Focus for Learning Businesses in 2024Jeff Cobb: [00:01:13] To help us look at the year ahead, we’ll draw on data we collected via an online survey in the fourth quarter of 2023. We received qualifying responses from 115 organizations, learning businesses of all types—that is, organizations that sell continuing education, professional development, and other types of lifelong learning experiences to adult learners. Respondents included charitable or philanthropic organizations, educational institutions, for-profit businesses, and associations, which were the largest segment of respondents.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:48] We asked survey respondents to let us know which of 14 areas they are already pursuing, planning to pursue in 2024, or not planning to pursue. So those three answer choices for 14 areas, and those 14 areas are:

Creation of learning experiences that combine online elements with face-to-face elements
Implementation of technologies that leverage artificial intelligence to support or enhance learning
Microlearning opportunities
Providing a personalized learning experience
Creation of social, peer-to-peer, or cohort-based learning experiences
The use of virtual reality or augmented reality to provide new learning experiences or enhance existing experiences
The use of virtual conferences (And we defined a virtual conference as an online event similar to the traditional face-to-face conference, not just a single Webinar.)

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:51] The other areas are:

New or alternative approaches to credentialing, including certificate programs, microcredentials, and digital badges
Aligning offerings with specific career or job paths relevant to learners—for example, through a competency model, learning pathways, or targeted curricula
Integration of educational offerings into the learning and development programs of employers in a field or industry or into general workforce development needs
Development of strategies or tactics to help combat declining enrollments, downward price pressure, or “commoditization” of educational offerings
Increased efforts to gather and analyze data to inform new product decisions or improve existing products
Increased efforts to gather and analyze data that demonstrates the impact or effectiveness of the learning experiences offered
Implementation of methods to ensure that learning is retained and applied over time

Celisa Steele: [00:04:02] So, listener, what’s top of the list for your learning business to tackle this year? What are your priorities? It might be something that you heard in that list of 14 areas that we mentioned, or it might be something else. And I will note, because I know it’s probably hard to keep all 14 of those in mind, if you’re just listening, but you can find a list of those areas in the show notes at leadinglearning.com/episode392. Before we get to some data from the survey on those 14 areas, you might want to pause—literally hit Pause on the podcast—and think about your own priorities and which of these, if any, are on your radar and which you’re likely to act on in the coming year. In addition to asking yourself about your priorities for the year ahead, also ask if your priorities are clear throughout your learning business? Is everyone on the team aware of and crystal-clear on your priorities for the year ahead?

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:05:07] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Top Four Areas of Focus Per Survey DataLeveraging AI to Support or Enhance LearningCelisa Steele: [00:05:38] Now that you’ve hopefully paused and done a little thinking on your own, we’re going to share the top four areas from the survey results. These are the four areas that have more than a third of respondents saying they plan to begin pursuing these in 2024. Now, top of the list is probably not a surprise. It is what we would probably have all guessed if we had to: implementation of technologies that leverage artificial intelligence to support or enhance learning. So 44.3 percent are planning to focus on that in 2024, and 27.4 percent are already working on it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:21] This is the area where we saw the largest change in planning to this year versus planning to last year—a 15.7-point increase. It’s not surprising that AI has jumped higher in people’s plans. AI seems to be everywhere at this point. What’s probably more interesting is the fact that 28.3 percent aren’t focused on AI and don’t plan to in the year ahead. We’re thinking that only beginning to focus on AI in 2025 or later could be a little bit late.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:56] Yes, and I feel like we should probably spend a little bit of extra time on this area because of AI’s potential to color and impact so much of what learning businesses do and also the broader world in which we are all living, working, and learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:15] One of the ways we talked about this in a Webinar we did on the topic to f cap the year was referring to AI or thinking of AI more as infrastructure. This is an idea that comes from Dr. Philippa Hardman, who’s one of the leading thinkers about AI in education right now. She tends to go by Dr. Phil, if I understand correctly, but she did a Substack post in November, writing about AI as infrastructure. Many people see AI as a powerful tool or technology, but it’s really more than that. To quote what Phil says, “It’s an infrastructural development with fundamental implications for how humans live, work, and learn.”

Celisa Steele: [00:08:02] In that Substack post, she’s making the point that AI is less like a calculator, which is a tool, and it’s more like electricity, which is an infrastructure. So AI is really foundational and then enables and supports many technologies and tools. By adopting this view of AI as infrastructure, then the discussion about AI and how we can use it opens up. It gives us two ways to look at AI. There can be artificial intelligence for automating human capability, and then there can be AI for augmenting human capability. AI for automation means that artificial intelligence is taking over a task that was previously done by a human. That’s where, instead of someone having to manually add up those numbers, we get to use the calculator.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:56] I think that’s the one that gets most people worried about AI is going to take over. It’s going to automate all these jobs that human beings used to do. We’re going to have our robot overlords here in the not-too-distant future. I don’t want to dismiss those sorts of fears out of hand. AI is very powerful. But it goes beyond just automation in what’s possible, and so the second area is AI for augmentation, which means it’s assisting a human being in freeing up mental bandwidth so that they can prioritize high-value work. In this case, AI is enhancing a human’s ability, and this is, again, AI as electricity. You can think about all the ways that electricity has made individual humans and humans as a species much more effective and powerful than was ever the case in the past.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:52] Our takeaway with this point is simply that you really should be thinking about AI and hopefully thinking about it as infrastructure, that potential to both help with automation and to also augment what you’re already doing as a learning business. That idea, especially that idea of AI as infrastructure, is going to, in all likelihood, really impact almost every aspect of what we all are doing in the year ahead. It’ll be clearer in some ways, and it’ll be a little harder to tease out in other areas, but AI is having a fundamental impact on how we live, work, and learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:36] Definitely. It’s already here. I used to often say about social media, which I feel was the last big tech wave to wash over us, that, in many cases, we were already soaking in it—for those who are old enough to remember the old Palmolive commercials with Madge—where basically it’s just all around us already, and we’re not even aware of it. That’s already happening with AI. Start to be conscious of, okay, then how does that play out in automation? How does that play out in augmentation? How are we going to really harness this in our learning business in 2024? That should be a top-of-mind question, I think, for every learning business leader right now.

Creating Career Paths and Job Paths for LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:11:24] We’ll jump back to the survey data to share the other top three areas. The next highest area is aligning offerings with specific career or job paths relevant to learners. That could be through a competency model, learning pathways, or a targeted curriculum—those are all examples we gave. And 41.3 percent are planning to focus on that in 2024.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:47] And, anecdotally, we’re seeing a lot more of this. We’re doing a lot more work with clients around this. With there being so much competition for attention from other providers of learning experiences, really being able to offer experiences that do clearly relate to specific careers, specific jobs, and being able to show learners that the path—how that works, how you’re going to help them do that—is a way to stand out and deliver higher value these days with your learning offerings. So I would expect this one to continue to evolve, and we’ve talked about things that have become standard practice in another episode, in the companion to this episode. I see this one becoming a standard practice in the relatively near future.

Ensuring Learning Is RetainedCelisa Steele: [00:12:37] The next area is implementation of methods to ensure that learning is retained and applied over time, and 37.4 percent of respondents are planning to focus there in 2024. This is very heartening to us. It really speaks to what we see as the core mission of learning businesses—to provide learning products and services that make a difference, that move the needle, and aren’t just check-the-box transactions that don’t really have any lasting impact on the learner, the organization the learner works in, or the people that the learner serves. Very heartened to see that this is going to be an area of focus for 37.4 percent of respondents.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:20] Yes. Of course, our mantras or our themes here at Leading Learning and at Tagoras are reach, revenue, and impact, and this is very much the impact part of the equation. And it’s by actually achieving impact, by delivering learning effectiveness—that really is your product if you’re a learning business, to deliver that learning effectiveness—that’s going to drive greater reach, that’s going to drive greater revenue. So, in some ways, this is the root of it all.

Using Data Analytics to Inform Product DevelopmentCelisa Steele: [00:13:45] Then the last area where over a third of respondents are planning to focus efforts in 2024, that is increased efforts to gather and analyze data to inform new product decisions or improve existing products. We talked about this a little bit in the companion episode because it has tipped into being standard practice. Even more people are going to begin doing it in the year ahead. Again, this, to us, makes a ton of sense, to make sure that you are building products that really are going to respond to market needs, they’re going to have that impact that you were just mentioning, Jeff. One great way to do that is to make sure that you actually have data, that you’re not just operating on gut or instinct or somebody’s opinion, but you really have data to back up, okay, which products make sense, or how can we improve the products we have out there.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:38] We want to take a step away from the data, but we want to offer two takeaways, informed by the data too, but it’s not just reporting, you know….

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:48] We’re going to synthesize.

Pave the Path for Your LearnersCelisa Steele: [00:14:49] Yes, we’re going to move up Bloom’s Taxonomy a little bit to a higher level and, instead of just reporting the data, offer two takeaways and then unpack them. The first one is “Pave the path for your learners.” You were beginning to talk about that, Jeff, earlier when we shared a little bit of data around the idea of aligning offerings with specific career or job paths. But we also asked about two other areas that, in our minds, tie—or potentially tie—to that idea of pathways. One of those areas is new or alternative approaches to credentialing—that could be certificate programs, microcredentials, digital badges. The other area was integration of educational offerings into the learning and development programs of employers in the field or industry that you serve, or into general workforce development needs. If you take those three together—the paths (career or job paths), alternative credentials, and then satisfying an employer need or general workforce development—for us, there’s a Venn diagram where you have those three circles, and, right in the middle, you get something a bit magical where they all overlap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:06] Yes, it really is a sweet spot, and we’d encourage you to actually try to visualize those Venn diagrams. Or, maybe once you’re in a position, if you can pause right now, you can draw them, or if you’re in a position later to draw them and think about those overlaps. Because, when you’ve got offerings that align to that career path or specific job paths, you’re able to offer a credential around it that is seen as having some validity in the marketplace, and you’re really able to do that in a way that integrates into the programs and the needs of the employers in your field, industry, or into those general workforce development needs, that’s an incredibly valuable combination for a learner to be able to come to you, for employers to be able to look to you for. And, again, in a marketplace where the competition is high for learners’ attention, for their wallets, for employers’ wallets, being able to deliver that kind of value can really stand you out as a learning business serving your particular field or industry.

Plan for RISCCelisa Steele: [00:17:16] So that’s the first takeaway, “Pave the path for your learners.” The second takeaway is “Plan for RISC.” And we’re having a little fun here because RISC is actually spelled R-I-S-C in our version, but it sounds just like the R-I-S-K word. The idea here is that our kind of RISC is a little bit of an antidote to the R-I-S-K risk. And RISC, for us, stands for Rapid Intelligence with Strategic Confidence.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:49] In 2024, it seems like we’re bound to be in for a lot more uncertainty and maybe upheaval. We’ve got so many things going on in the world right now—climate change, international conflicts, the 2024 US presidential election (who knows how that’s going to turn out?), higher ed institutions that are trying to figure out how to survive in a culture that seems more and more skeptical of the value of a college degree, not to mention all the fire they’re coming under trying to navigate some of those other complexities that I just referenced. Throw AI into all of that, boy, there’s just so much going on right now to try to figure out, and you have to have an approach for doing that.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:36] To help cut through the noise, we think that you need to experiment because, in this time of uncertainty, it’s not necessarily going to be crystal-clear what is going to work, what is going to help you reach your learners, get their attention, convince them that you are trustworthy, and that they should spend their time, money, and energy learning with you. And so you’re going to need to experiment to figure out what works. You’re going to have to have some hypotheses and design some tests. You’re going to need to try them out. And you’re going to need to learn from those tests so that, then, you can put into action, at larger scale, what you’ve learned from those tests.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:17] And the reason we think this is acronym-worthy, R-I-S-C (Rapid Intelligence with Strategic Confidence), is that it shouldn’t just be an off-the-cuff or one-off thing that you’re doing randomly throughout the year. This needs to be institutionalized. This needs to become part of your operations, part of your culture, not just a solo or isolated activity. And, because it needs to be that, someone needs to be accountable for it. Someone needs to be responsible for making sure you’re doing it, making that part of how you operate as a learning business in 2024, having those experiments that give you that rapid intelligence and inform your strategic confidence is going to be essential.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:04] We encourage you to pause and think about what will you try in 2024? What plans do you have to experiment? How will you try out new things? Are you going to do some A/B testing? Potentially pilot a course? Are you going to play around with prompt engineering? It could, of course, be a multitude of things, but get clear on what you are going to try and what you hope to learn from that so you can have that clear hypothesis to go out, test, try, plan for those experiments in the year ahead, and then make sure that you learn from and implement what you learn based on the results of those tests.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Reflecting on 2023 * Reflections on 2022 * Centering the Learner/Worker with CAEL’s Christine Carpenter * Go Small to Deliver Big Results: A Look at Microcredentials * The Value of Credentials Now * The Value of Workforce Development Now * Peanut Butter and Chocolate: Workforce Development and Credentials

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbReflection is a good practice, in life and in learning, especially for those working in and for learning businesses. But it’s all too easy to skip because taking time to reflect often isn’t as pressing and urgent as other things on the to-do list.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele act as avatars and model doing the behavior they encourage others to engage in periodically as they reflect back on 2023.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Make time to reflect on the past, take stock, celebrate progress and accomplishments, and then set goals and intentions for the future. Do this for yourself and for your learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:18] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] Welcome to episode 391 of the Leading Learning Podcast. Though this episode won’t air until January, Jeff, you and I are recording at the end of December, and so we want to engage in some year-end reflection, which has become a bit of a tradition for us, taking time to take stock.

Reflection Is Important in Life and in LearningJeff Cobb: [00:00:45] That’s true. A good tradition. And we’re sharing our reflections as a reminder and encouragement to you, dear listener, to make the time to reflect on your own and, if it’s relevant, with your team. Reflection is just a good practice—a great practice—but it’s all too easy to skip since taking time to reflect isn’t as pressing and urgent as many things on our to-do list and since it doesn’t necessarily have a concrete outcome. But reflection is an important activity for a learning business and those working in and for learning businesses. Celisa, you and I are part of a learning business ourselves, and we’ll try to be avatars and model the kind of behavior and reflection we encourage others to engage in.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] So when we look back at 2023, I think it would be interesting, perhaps, to think about wins from 2023. And we’ve been asking this question, “What is something you would consider a win from the year past?” We’ve been asking that in a variety of contexts. We’ve asked it in a Webinar. We’ve asked it in a staff meeting. We’ve asked it in a mastermind that we’re facilitating. And, in general, it’s a good question because it both prompts the reflection that is so important that we’re talking about, but it also is this opportunity to celebrate, and I think there’s a lot of good that can come from celebrating. It can help keep us and our teams motivated. It can even be an inspiration when someone hears what you’ve accomplished, and they might think, “You know what? I’m going to do that next year.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:21] Yes, it’s nice to hear all sorts of winning going on. Not that every year doesn’t bring its challenges, but you get to the end of the year, you’re looking to the next one, and you do want to think about where you’ve been successful in that past year.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:33] So maybe we can share a few of our own wins, Jeff, and we can do some both personal and professional, perhaps.

Professional Wins at Tagoras and Leading LearningJeff Cobb: [00:02:40] Sounds good. I know a big one for us here at Tagoras, the central parent company of Leading Learning, was that we hired an operations manager, something that we were sorely feeling the need for as we’ve grown as a company and had those growing pains. And one thing we really needed to do that an ops manager could take the reins on was documenting processes and procedures, and we did end up making a lot of progress on that this year.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:06] I feel like operations can be described a little bit the way we were describing reflection, where you know it’s really important, but that idea of actually taking the time to document processes and procedures and get some of that buttoned up can feel like it’s not as important as getting the stuff done. But, actually, just as reflection is really important and foundational, so are all of the processes and the operations of learning businesses in general. So I think that was, for us, a win to get that person on board and then to make some really good headway on processes, documenting those. Not that there’s still not lots to do, but we’re going to celebrate that as wins.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:48] Yes, plenty, plenty still to do. And one of the reasons that we wanted to do that, a key reason we wanted to do that, is we’re continuing to grow and evolve as a company, as a learning business, and that meant introducing some new offerings, which we also did in 2023.

Learning Business MastermindCelisa Steele: [00:04:02] One of those that comes to mind is the Learning Business Mastermind. We kicked that off with a small group of a dozen learning business leaders, but we’ve really had it in the back of our minds for quite a while now that it would be really helpful, we thought, to those in the learning business profession to be able to have a context in which they could connect with other peers on a substantive, meaningful level on a repeated time-based level. So not just a one-off you’re meeting at a single conference, but something that’s going to last at least a year and really begin to form some of those relationships and be able to share enough about what you’re doing in your own organization so that others can potentially give you good input because they know enough about what you’re doing, and then to also get to hear from a range of other learning business professionals. So we’re definitely counting having kicked off our first Learning Business Mastermind as a win from 2023.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:00] Definitely. And this is an executive-level group, leaders of learning businesses. If you’re hearing this, and that describes you, and you’re interested, definitely drop us a line at leadinglearning@tagoras.com to find out more about where we’re going with that.

Learning Business SummitJeff Cobb: [00:05:12] In addition to the mastermind, we launched a new online event, a new online conference, the Learning Business Summit. I’m thinking of this as the best of two worlds that we created in the past. One is our annual Live Review event, where we do demonstrations of learning platforms, and they are facilitated, very targeted for market-facing learning businesses. And then, before that, overlapping back in the past, we had an event called Learning • Technology • Design, which was about being excellent in the learning business, in your design, in your technology, just everything about being in the learning business. And we’ve synthesized those and focused them into an event that’s really focused on being in the learning business and organized around three themes, the themes that run through all of our work—reach, revenue, and impact. And we’ll be kicking that off. We’ve already got registrations for it. We’ve already got patrons for it. And we’ll be hosting that in late January, early February 2024.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:13] Right. So we’re counting it as a win for 2023 in the sense of we got it launched, but it won’t actually take place until early 2024. And then, in terms of when I look back at the year past, I think one of the other areas that I’m going to call a win is that we’ve had an aha realization that we should focus much more clearly on learning businesses and that concept of learning business and really trying to build a sense of community, a sense of shared purpose in and among those serving that adult lifelong learning market. Whether they’re offering continuing education, professional development, all of those organizations that are targeting those adult professional learners, they have a lot in common. And so there’s a lot that can come with that clarity on our side around what we focus on, and you hear in the names of those two other wins we shared—Learning Business Mastermind, Learning Business Summit—already a greater clarity, a greater focus on that piece. And so, for us, I’m going to count that as a win because I think anytime you have something that helps you have greater clarity and greater focus in what you’re doing, that’s very helpful.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:22] One of the reasons we’re doing that is to try to cultivate this sense of identity as learning business professionals. A lot of the folks who follow us work in, say, a trade or professional association, so they identify as an association professional. Or they may work in continuing education at a university, and they identify as a higher education professional. But there’s this overlap. Same with commercial training firms. All of these types of entities are in the learning business, and it means something to be a person who is working in a market-facing business to serve adult lifelong learners, and we’re trying to cultivate and solidify that sense of identity.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:00] So those are some of the wins that come to mind when we think about Tagoras and Leading Learning from 2023. Jeff, do you feel like sharing a personal win from 2023?

Personal Wins from the Past YearJeff Cobb: [00:08:11] Sure. It took me almost the whole year to accomplish one of my biggest personal wins, which was to get into the studio and professionally record a record of my songs, something I’ve wanted to do for quite a long time. We did an earlier episode around some of the practice that went into this to polish and refine those songs, and I’ll be out playing them live in places. But this was a bucket-list item for me—though not quite because it’s something that I want to do going forward. It’s my first, I hope it’s not my last, record. But getting a record recorded. There’s still some stuff to do to mix it and things like that. It’ll actually be released in 2024, but the vast majority of it is done. I’ve recorded the guitar. I’ve recorded the vocals and looking forward to the final product now.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:59] I think with both the recording, you in the studio at that time, and then, as we were talking about with the summit, there’s something about the nature of wins. Even when we look back and look at what’s been accomplished, very often those things are ongoing. But it’s still useful, I think, to pause and see what has been accomplished. Even if it’s part of an ongoing effort, you can celebrate those little wins along the way. So congratulations, Jeff, for getting those songs recorded.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:27] Thank you. And, on your side, what’s…

Celisa Steele: [00:09:30] Well, I don’t think I have as clear of a win as you do, but I have a goal in the back of my mind. It came from a poet-friend who shared from a teacher that she had, and I unfortunately do not remember who that teacher was, but he said, “Send out at least 100 submissions.” I’m a poet, and so my goal is to send out 100 submissions, with the idea that that’s probably going to be 100 rejections, but at least you’re doing the work to put it out there. And so I did not hit 100, at least yet, and I don’t think I’m going to in the little remaining time in 2023.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:10] Yes, because in two weeks…

Celisa Steele: [00:10:12] But I got over…let me see…. I got over 50, so I’m at least halfway there. So, again, for me, I’m going to count that as a win, that it was at least doing the work of sending stuff out there. I can’t control whether they say yes or no, but I can do the work to send them out there. And so, for me, this is a win in the sense of it’s a reminder to control what you can control, and then don’t worry about the rest. So hit send, and then whatever happens. I think it’s also a reminder to me that it can be good to have these KPIs, to have a target in mind. At least having this idea of “Oh, I’m aiming for about 100” lets me know, well, I didn’t hit 100, but I made substantial progress that way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:55] Yes. As Teddy Roosevelt is so famous for saying, you got to get in the arena, and you’ll see how it turns out once you get in there. But, if you don’t get in there, nothing happens.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:04] We offer these wins from our side, not so much to say, “Ha, look at what we’ve done,” but more, again, as trying to walk the walk, trying to be an avatar, and encouraging you to really pause and take some time to think about your own wins from 2023. Once you’ve thought about them, share them. That can be with your team. And then ask to hear wins from others that you work with. It can be, as we said, inspiring, and it can create a good sense of energy. There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from having achieved something.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:38] Yes, and we’d love to hear about them too. You can comment on the show notes for this episode, or you can e-mail them to us at leadinglearning@tagoras.com, post them on LinkedIn—plenty of places to reach us. We always cover those throughout the episode.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:11:56] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Broader Reflections on the Past YearCelisa Steele: [00:12:32] So we’ve shared some more personal to us and our business reflections from 2023. But maybe we can widen the lens a little bit and look broader, bigger-picture at 2023.

DistrustJeff Cobb: [00:12:46] Yes. One of the things that kept evolving, continues to be a big issue, in 2023 is trust. Or, more accurately, the distrust. We highlighted distrust when looking back at 2022 in an episode that we recorded about this time a year ago, and it seems like an even stronger issue now that you’ve got deep fakes and AI taking off, all of this content being churned out that you don’t really know who’s behind it half the time or where it’s really coming from. We recently did an interview with Melanie Deziel, who really focuses on this, particularly around brands. And, of course, we all have brands. We have to develop the trust in those brands. It’s a really challenging issue these days.

Searching for the “Right” Mix of Face-to-Face and Online LearningCelisa Steele: [00:13:35] Another broader issue or current that lies under 2023 when I look back is the balance of face-to-face versus online interaction and face-to-face versus online learning as well. It seems like getting that balance right is very tricky. And it’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all. It really seems to depend on the audience, the subject matter, and all sorts of other things going on—perhaps whether or not there’s a new strain of a virus that’s out there and causing havoc. But I know we’ve certainly heard a lot about this in the Learning Business Mastermind that we mentioned earlier. We have a range of views and experiences there. Some folks are having great success at returning to face-to-face. Their audience is really hungry to be back there and be able to shake hands and have those informal hallway conversations. But then we’ve also heard from others where trying to go back to face-to-face has not gotten the numbers that they would have been able to draw pre-pandemic.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:40] Yes, it’s going to take years, I think, to really sort out this post-COVID world. But, of course, COVID just punctuated what we were already evolving towards anyway, with online learning really being mainstream at this point. Virtual events certainly had traction before COVID, got a lot more traction because of COVID. But the evolution and how people think about work now, how they think about work travel, how they think about networking at this point—different generations having grown up with different expectations around this. We’re going to be sorting this one out for a long time, but we definitely felt it really strongly in 2023.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:20] On a personal note, I know we went back to some in-person attending, some in-person conferences in 2023. And, in many cases, that was wonderful. It was great to actually see some people that we hadn’t seen in a couple years at that point, and so that was rewarding at some level. But there’s also then the hassle of getting out of the office, getting on a plane, wondering if you’re going to catch something while you’re traveling or at the event, all of that. And we chose obviously to keep the Learning Business Summit as an online event, and, for us, we felt like it helps a bit with the accessibility. Not in the sense of people with disabilities but in the sense of who is able to have the budget and carve out the time that it might take to participate in an educational experience like that conference. It would be very different if you were trying to fly somewhere for three days.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:16] Yes. And I still hear a lot from folks about “You just can’t have a great online experience”—that sort of thing, to which I say, “Hogwash.” We’ve put a lot of time and effort into understanding how to do it well and learning how to deliver well. Every organization needs to do that. Even if you’re mostly face-to-face, there are very few organizations where holding some form of online event shouldn’t be part of your portfolio at this point. And learning how to do that really well and deliver a great experience, that’s forever important going forward. That’s not going to go away.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:50] These are just a couple of broader issues—this distrust issue and then the balancing of face-to-face and online. Those are two broader issues that we see when we look at 2023. We encourage you, dear listener, to take some time to reflect on the broader 2023 landscape and think about what impacted you and your learning business. And then what has the potential to continue to impact you in 2024 and beyond? Being aware of that broader context can be very useful and perhaps give you some insight into what you might do to better respond to your audience’s needs.

Trends That Tipped into Standard PracticeJeff Cobb: [00:17:28] As we continue to look back on 2023, we thought it would be interesting and important to highlight some areas that we saw really tip and solidify in 2023, and these are areas where learning businesses are engaged in activities as a standard practice at this point. Let’s talk about what those are because every learning business needs to be aware of them at this point and probably needs to be doing something with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:58] Before we get to those areas, I’ll note a little bit more backstory on where this data is coming from. We ran an online survey in the fourth quarter of 2023. We got responses from 115 learning businesses that make up this data that we’re about ready to share. Thank you, thank you, for anyone listening who took the time to respond to that survey. We are truly grateful for that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:22] Absolutely. A lot of people love to get this data, use this data. As you might expect or suspect, a much smaller fraction actually contributes to it. Please, please, if we send these surveys out, boy, we’re so thankful if you do participate. It makes all the difference.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:38] Based on those responses that we got, what we noticed is that, while we asked about 14 areas—we’re going to talk more about the survey data in an upcoming episode, but, for now, what we wanted to share was that, out of the 14 areas that we asked about, we asked the respondents, “Are you already doing something in this area? Are you planning to begin doing something in this area in 2024? Or are you not planning to do anything in this area?” Basically we noticed that there are some things that used to be kind of fringe or bleeding-edge that have become standard practice. Over 50 percent of the respondents in the 2023 survey said that they are already active, already doing something in five of the 14 areas we asked about. And so we can just talk about what those are.

Combining Online and Face-to-Face LearningCelisa Steele: [00:19:26] The first one is combining online and face-to-face learning—70.4 percent are already doing something with combining online and face-to-face. I think COVID probably had to play a role here. It pushed everybody online for a time. Then face-to-face was put back on the table. But, as we were talking about earlier, learners had gotten used to the convenience and ease of learning online. But they missed gathering in person. And so it seems like this blending of online and face-to-face, this combination of online and face-to-face, has the potential to scratch all those itches and really provide convenience, effectiveness, and connection.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:10] Yes, and it helps learning take place over time and be reinforced in various ways, which we know in terms of learning being effective, for it to not be confined to a single event, whether that’s online or off, but to be extended over time. And, if you can switch it up online and off in different ways that people are connecting, communicating, and absorbing the information and the experience with each other, you’re going to be more effective with your learning experiences.

Social LearningCelisa Steele: [00:20:36] The second area where we saw more than 50 percent of respondents already engaging is social learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:43] I think, again, COVID probably helped tip this one. During the lockdown days of the pandemic, a lot of people gained new appreciation for the value of being with and learning from and with others. A real craving developed for this. And some organizations learned how to do that well online. I think all organizations need to learn how to do that well online. We just talked about this blended approach, online/offline. Again, I think people wanted to come together again, but we’re seeing now, as a standard practice, organizations are actively pursuing social learning in one form or another and making that a component of their learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:26] And social learning is really at the heart of the Learning Business Mastermind that we mentioned earlier. That is predicated on this idea of peers having value to share with one another and being able to help one another improve and learn. We’re very bought into and committed to this idea of the importance, the value, and the effectiveness of social learning, peer-to-peer learning, cohort-based learning—all things under that umbrella.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:52] Definitely. I think with social learning, all of this stuff, you have to learn how to do it well, and I think being thoughtful about social learning, helping to structure it, to facilitate it, to scaffold it—all of those things help to make it much more effective. Organizations are doing it. It’s a standard practice now, as we’re saying. How do we keep getting better and better at it?

Analyzing and Using Data to Inform Product DecisionsCelisa Steele: [00:22:15] The third area where more than 50 percent are engaged is around analyzing and using data to inform product decisions. This could be whether to develop a new product or how to improve an existing product. So 57 percent are doing something in that area, which is very heartening. I mean that’s sort of…

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:35] Thankfully, this one is finally tipped, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:37] And maybe it’s disheartening that it’s only 57 percent, but, to our mind, it’s just good practice. We really have to be careful to not assume that we know our learners’ motivations and needs. And, even if we do know them, we don’t want to assume that they don’t change over time. So this is where data really comes in to make sure we aren’t making assumptions. And then we need to gather new data, analyze new data periodically so that we are keeping up with an accurate view of our marketplace and our learners and their needs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:09] And, to be sure, we have a very strong bias on this one because a large amount of the consulting work we do, as Tagoras, is really around market assessment and getting this data and analyzing this data, helping organizations use that to make good decisions about the products that they’re going to create, the products that they need to revitalize, or whatever the case might be. But, boy, whether you work with a consultant or not, even if you do work with a consultant, you need this skill internally. You need first of all the practice of gathering meaningful data, but then having some capacity, some capabilities to analyze that data and use it meaningfully to make decisions.

MicrolearningCelisa Steele: [00:23:47] Microlearning was the fourth area, with 54.5 percent of respondents saying they’re doing something with microlearning. Adult learners, adults in general, tend to be very busy. Most of us aren’t spending whole days at a time on learning. And so, if we can learn something meaningful and valuable in a little 10-minute, 15-minute block that we can carve out of our day, then that’s a huge win. Microlearning right now fits so well with the realities of current demands on most people’s schedules. We also know from a learning science standpoint that microlearning is going to make it more likely that it’s the kind of thing you can revisit. If you can revisit over time, that’s going to help with this idea of spaced learning and repetition, which is going to help to build true learning in something that is maintained and held on to over time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:45] I haven’t read a lot or heard much discussion about this, but it seems like microlearning is going to fit so well into what’s now happening with generative AI. ChatGPT has been so useful because a big part of the way people like to learn is that they’ve got these questions. They want to ask these questions, and then they want to get some answers and some ways to address whatever it is—that challenge or that opportunity—in the moment. And sometimes that’s just a snippet of text that comes back and says, “Here’s the answer to what you just asked about.” But other times they need something a little more in-depth and for microlearning to be what’s available in those interactions. You’re asking ChatGPT about something, and here’s a 10-minute content module to address that. I would definitely be thinking about that as a learning business right now—how you fit into that flow with your microlearning.

Virtual ConferencesCelisa Steele: [00:25:34] Then the last area where over 50 percent of respondents are already active is in virtual conferences. I think we’ve already touched on this, that COVID probably had a hand in tipping this into an area where the majority are doing something. But people have gotten used to that convenience, and so this probably isn’t likely to go away even now that face-to-face is back on the table. There is a place, a use, and a good purpose for virtual conferences/online conferences, so we’re seeing a majority doing that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:09] They’re doing it, but, anecdotally, I’m hearing a lot of organizations that are dialing back on it. They’re dropping it now that they don’t have to do it. Again, I think that is a mistake. It doesn’t mean that your annual event has to be a virtual conference, but niche conferences that get—to go back to that accessibility question that you raised, Celisa, there’s a huge portion of most organizations’ audiences that aren’t ever going to show up at those face-to-face events. They can’t afford it. They don’t like the hassle of it. Whatever it is. But to do good, solid, niche-type online conferences, again, it should be a part of every learning business’s portfolio at this point.

Using This Data for Quick BenchmarkingCelisa Steele: [00:26:47] We’ll offer a quick benchmarking exercise here. Stop and think how many of these five areas is your organization active in. And so it can be anywhere between 0 and 5, and, once you have that number, make sure that you have a good reason if you’re not doing one of these things. These are becoming expected. They’re becoming something that learners are likely to think that they can get from you. So, if you’re not doing something in one of these areas, make sure you understand why. Maybe you do have a legitimate reason to not be active in that area. Or maybe it’s something you need to be thinking about for 2024 and beyond.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:29] Yes, and seriously, do ask that because we’re not saying by this, “Oh, you have to rush out and start doing microlearning, social learning, and virtual conferences right away if you’re not doing them.” But you should be seriously looking at it and understanding whether you should be doing them, where they might fit. And, in some cases, they may not. It’s possible that these don’t fit in terms of standard practices for your learning businesses, but make sure you know what that reason is if you’re going to make the decision not to do it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:03] Make time to reflect on the past, take stock, celebrate progress and accomplishments, and then set goals and intentions for the future. Do this for yourself and for your learning business. Doing so will help you lay the foundation for a successful 2024 for you and your team.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer * Social Learning with Nellie Wartoft * Evidence-Based DEI with Miranda McKie * AI, Data, and Optimism with Donald Clark * Reflections on 2022 * Virtual Conferences Now * The New Blended Learning

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Ed MorrisonStrategy and collaboration in open, loosely connected, complex networks require a different approach than the top-down planning that has long dominated organizational strategy-setting.

In this redux episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Ed Morrison, who pioneered Strategic Doing, an approach to strategy and collaboration in open, loosely connected, complex networks, and who co-authored Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership. Celisa and Ed talk about what Strategic Doing is, some of the practical skills needed to do it well, and how learning businesses might apply it.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesEd Morrison: [00:00:00] In strategic planning, intuition has no role. Planning is all analytic. It’s all based on numbers and facts. But, if we’re dealing with complex environments with open networks, we can’t analyze these things. We can’t predict them. But we can use the intuition—the collective, shared intuition—at the table.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:25] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:27] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:35] Welcome to episode 390, which features a conversation with Ed Morrison. This is an encore airing of an interview from our archives.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:44] Ed Morrison pioneered Strategic Doing, which is an approach to strategy and collaboration in open, loosely connected, complex networks. Ed co-authored the book Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership, which collects and organizes what he and his colleagues learned over many years of Strategic Doing with a variety of groups in a variety of situations. Strategic Doing gets at some of the issues and problems of strategic planning, which was dominant when Ed first began work on this new approach. Ed is a practitioner with lots of hands-on experience with the kinds of strategy work and collaboration described in the book Strategic Doing, which, as the full title suggests, explores 10 skills from a very practical, hands-on point of view.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:33] At the time of the original interview, Ed was directing the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue University. As you listen to the conversation, pay particular attention to Ed’s thoughts on appreciative framing questions. How might you reframe the questions you consider in your learning business to focus more on opportunities and hypotheses than on problems? What verbal jujitsu do you need to do? Also, pay attention to Ed’s explanation of the Big Easy. Are there decisions you need to make, decisions that involve a big group of stakeholders, where you might use the Big Easy tool to arrive at a path forward? Celisa and Ed spoke in August 2019, and this episode originally aired in October 2019.

The Origins of Strategic Doing and How It WorksCelisa Steele: [00:02:30] Would you start by explaining to listeners what Strategic Doing is and how it came to be?

Ed Morrison: [00:02:36] Yes. Strategic Doing is a protocol, a way of thinking about collaboration that enables people to form these collaborations quickly, move them toward measurable outcomes, and then learn and make adjustments as they learn by doing. So it’s a new protocol or a new discipline of forming collaborations quickly. It came about through the work that I was talking about, where I was dealing with complex challenges in communities, big and small, facing the challenges of globalization starting in the 1980s. Globalization started really undermining the economies of a lot of communities and regions. And, of course, they were focused on how do we adjust to this new world of global competition?

Ed Morrison: [00:03:28] Part of the challenge, of course, was bringing people together, and the only real approach that we had at the time was strategic planning, which I had learned in my corporate strategy work and had applied. I was a corporate strategy consultant working for big companies like Ford and General Electric before I went off on my own. But the problem with these big planning models is that they don’t work very well in situations where nobody can tell anybody really what to do. So open networks or these loosely connected networks, strategic planning just doesn’t work. In the early 90s, I started exploring a new approach to strategy based on open-source software development, and for about 12 years I worked on this. By 2005, I was convinced that I had a model in my head that worked, that I could replicate, but I didn’t know how to teach it. So I came to Purdue to learn how to teach it, and I’ve been at Purdue ever since. That’s, in a nutshell, where Strategic Doing came from.

Collaboration Is Key to Strategic DoingCelisa Steele: [00:04:36] You’ve already touched on it some, but collaboration really is core to Strategic Doing, and that collaboration then involves, of course, conversation. I know, in the book, that you and the other four co-authors unpacked 10 skills needed for collaboration. For me, this is really interesting because we talk a lot at Leading Learning around the idea of we often don’t know how to learn. So many of the educational offerings out there focus on content and not really helping people learn how to learn or learn how to learn better. Similarly, you and your colleagues are focused on this idea of collaboration and that we know collaboration is important, but that doesn’t mean we know how to do it. And so you’re down there digging into these different skills.

Framing Conversations with Appreciative QuestionsCelisa Steele: [00:05:27] I know we’re not going to have time to touch on all 10 of the skills, but I’m hoping we can get to a couple of them in our conversation today. I know one of them in particular focuses around using appreciative framing questions to design a conversation. So I’m hoping you can talk to us a little bit about what that means and maybe even some of the questions that you think learning leaders, those folks who are working in lifelong learning, continuing education, professional development, what types of appreciative questions might they be asking? Or, if you don’t want to suggest particular questions, maybe give us an idea of how we might arrive at those questions ourselves.

Ed Morrison: [00:06:07] Yes. You’re touching on a core idea around Strategic Doing and collaboration, and that is we have to frame a conversation. When you think about it, collaboration comes out of, is a product of conversations. What we learned early on, and why I came to Purdue, was an understanding that complex collaborations emerge out of a conversation that has an underlying structure and a trajectory. It changes over time. But part of the challenge is to frame the conversation, draw a boundary around the conversation that we want to have. It’s critical that this conversation be appreciative. And the reason is because we are dealing with really complex challenges. Collaboration is a complex, emergent phenomenon. It emerges out of our conversations.

Ed Morrison: [00:07:08] One of the challenges that we want to focus on initially is how do we frame the conversation so that we’re looking at opportunities and not problems? I think if I could digress a little bit into that question for a minute. If we focus on challenges and frame them around problems, typically we frame these problems, and they connect with each other. For example, in Flint, Michigan, when they approached us and asked us about, “How do we use Strategic Doing to reduce teenage homicide rates?” If we started out our conversation and framed it around a problem—the problem of teenage homicides—and got people to talk about the problem of teenage homicides, we’d have a lot of discussion about “Well, the problem of teenage homicides is we don’t have any jobs in the neighborhoods or where the families have broken down.” Or, “The schools aren’t doing their job.” You end up with these problem-centric conversations that end up going nowhere.

Ed Morrison: [00:08:06] However, if we reframe that conversation into an opportunity—“What would it look like if a child in Flint could walk home safely without worrying about being assaulted?”—then you start thinking about “What does that future look like? And how do we move ourselves toward designing that future?” So this is very tightly bound up with insights of appreciative inquiry, which you may be familiar with. David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University came up with some very important insights, which are that people move in the direction of their conversations. So Strategic Doing is designed to enable us to design a future that we can’t see yet, but it’s an opportunity for us to design something that produces value for us, something valuable for us that we can’t really accomplish right now. For example, again, in Flint, it’s a question of “How do we design a neighborhood in such a way that kids aren’t afraid of walking home from school?” And, when that happens, people start thinking about “Well, what could I do to engage in that future?” And so you start seeing people sharing their assets, their ideas of what they could do to contribute to that future. So it’s very, very important.

Ed Morrison: [00:09:33] Framing questions, we’ve learned, start with some fairly simple constructions. One of the ways to think about it is to start with “How could we…?” or “Imagine if…” or “What would it look like if…?” In a recent class, we had a professor from an engineering school, and he said just learning this one skill of an appreciative question changed the way in which he interacted with his colleagues on the faculty. He’s an assistant professor, associate dean, has an administrative position, and faculty would come to him with their problems. He immediately learned how to take that problem statement and flip it around, do a little verbal jujitsu, and talk about an opportunity. “What would it look like if…? Imagine if….”

Ed Morrison: [00:10:33] And, by doing that, he opened the door to a more productive conversation with his colleagues. So it’s interesting that you can frame a conversation in an appreciative manner to look for and explore opportunities for the future that we can’t yet see. If you address your conversation around problems, and you’re dealing with really complex challenges, all you end up doing is talking about more problems, and you end up sapping people’s strength and energy, and the conversation usually dies. So that’s one of the key insights. Frame the conversation. Use the framing question as an attractor or an invitation to conversation, and invite people into that conversation to think about a future that we could jointly work together and design together.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:27] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

Verbal Jujitsu to Focus on Opportunities Rather Than ProblemsCelisa Steele: [00:11:59] I think that’s a really important point to focus on those opportunities, not the problem. I’m thinking, in terms of a learning business. I can imagine, for example, perhaps a non-appreciative inquiry approach might be our enrollments are dropping, or our attendance at the conference is falling. But, as you were just saying, if you can apply a little verbal jujitsu instead, look at the opportunity to better serve the professionals in field x.

Ed Morrison: [00:12:27] Here’s an example. As a conference, imagine we had a conference in which people came to our conference seeking powerful learning experiences that they both created and shared. What would that look like? You invite people to think about this in a different way. Or how could we create memorable learning experiences for everyone every month, not just once a year, but how do we do that for everyone in our organization every month? Or what would it look like if our organization became a testbed for the latest ideas in adult learning? What would that look like? Now you’re starting to trigger some imagination on the part of your potential participants in your conversation, and you’re inviting them, as I said, to design a future that you can’t really see yet, but you think it’s out there, potentially out there. It’s a hypothesis. It embeds a hypothesis about a future that you could do together, you could work on together.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:35] That’s great. And I think, too, that the idea of the hypothesis is then that you’re going to go out there and be testing it. And that’s part of, again, that emphasis you have on doing. It’s not just talking. Ultimately, you’re going to move beyond the conversation.

Ed Morrison: [00:13:46] You have to because, again, if you think about what you’re trying to do with a collaboration—by definition, collaboration is an environment in which really nobody can tell anybody what to do—you’re working toward shared outcomes, shared value, and you frankly don’t know how that’s going to actually unfold. You can’t predict the future, but you think it’s there. You think you can create value together that neither one of you or your partners can create by themselves, and you’ve got to start then running experiments. As you run these experiments, as you start doing things together in what we like to call micro commitments, just small commitments, then you start building trust across the network, and that’s what really starts to move the network forward.

Using the Big Easy to Identify for What’s Easy to Do and What’s Important to DoCelisa Steele: [00:14:35] We touched just briefly there on one of those skills around that framing question and making sure that you give good, important thinking to what that question should be. Another skill that you talk about is making decisions, that choices have to be made. Ultimately, you have to sort through options and then pick one to move forward with, to test, as we were just talking about with the hypothesis. One of the things that I found really interesting in the book is that you have a tool for doing that. And so I’m hoping you would talk about the 2×2 matrix and the Big Easy flavor of that.

Ed Morrison: [00:15:15] Yes, we design Strategic Doing to think about networks, how do we build networks, and how do we do things together in a linked, leveraged, and aligned way, all of us taking small steps and growing our network and moving it toward an outcome, as I said, that we can’t see yet. And so the whole notion of this is linking and leveraging across your networks and engaging people in your networks to work with you on projects that they would find valuable as well. The challenge, of course, is we can come up with all sorts of great ideas, and we’ve all been in those brainstorming sessions where we fill the wall with butcher block paper with ideas on it. But, again, we have to figure out what to do next. We have to narrow things down. We can’t do everything. So we came up with this idea of the Big Easy. And the reason we want to evaluate our ideas along two dimensions is because we want to engage other people in this work. The big idea is one that creates a sense of transformation. It’s something that people can get excited about. So we ask people to rank, on a one-to-five scale, how big an idea is this?

Ed Morrison: [00:16:35] If we’re wildly successful, is this going to get us closer to answering our framing question? If it’s big, then it’s a five. If it’s small, then it’s a one. We also, however, on the second dimension, need to be developing small wins. We all know that, again, people won’t hang around if we’re just talking. We’ve got to actually do things. And so developing some small wins involves pragmatism. It involves coming up with practical ideas. And so we ask, “How easy will this idea be to start to implement? How easy will it be to generate small wins?” And so we ask people to evaluate each one of these according to how easy it is, again, on a simple five-point scale. By doing that, you’re evaluating, you’re figuring out the balance point between a big idea and an easy idea. And so, again, it’s a balance point. By asking your participants to do this in an open session, you’re creating a transparent way to do a fairly sophisticated analysis of these opportunities to rank them. And so the Big Easy is the idea that comes out with the highest score. Now, what we’re tapping into here is what we call “strategic intuition.”

Ed Morrison: [00:18:00] Now, in strategic planning, intuition has no role. Planning is all analytic. It’s all based on numbers and facts. But, if we’re dealing with complex environments with open networks, we can’t analyze these things. We can’t predict them. But we can use the intuition—the collective, shared intuition—at the table. The Big Easy creates a very fast way for you to evaluate a range of ideas, to evaluate them and start to put them into an order. Let me give you an example. We were down in Washington about two, three years ago, working on a big question about what the federal government could do to improve federal research at universities. How could we accelerate commercialization of federal research dollars across our research universities? And, of course, a lot of people have a lot of different ideas about what we could do. We had three tables. You can imagine the room. Three tables, about eight people at a table, and each table was generating about 10 to 15 different ideas. Well, you can’t start with that many ideas. But, by ranking them according to a Big Easy, in developing a score for each idea, we could then visually see which ones were more likely to be successful based on our collective intuition, and then we could quickly pick one to start with.

Ed Morrison: [00:19:33] We did the same thing out in Arizona with Arizona State University when they were doing a solar energy summit. We did the Big Easy. This was kind of cool. We had about 80 to 100 people in the room, and we did the Big Easy voting with text voting on our phones. It’s a way that you can quickly capture the intuition of the group, and you can do it in a transparent, open, and fair way. And that’s very, very important because, again, if you reflect a little bit back on some of your experiences, oftentimes people come up with ideas, and then somebody has decided, “Well, of the 15 different ideas, we’re going to do number seven.” And you say, “Well, how did that decision get made?” And nobody quite knows, of course. It doesn’t generate very much trust within the organization when people don’t know how these decisions are made. But, if you can make it transparent—we actually do finger voting—if you can make it transparent, and people can see what people are voting, then it becomes a lot more fair. A sense of trust begins to build.

Ed Morrison: [00:20:46] Another interesting insight is that if, for example, you and I were at a table, and we were voting on something, and you, Celisa, said, “I’m going to vote this one. I think this is going to be very hard to do.” And I look at it, and I vote five, and I say, “Well, this is going to be very easy to do.” We’re looking at the same opportunity, but what’s happening there? Well, we’re looking at the same opportunity, but we’re looking at it from different perspectives. And so, if we drive our conversation a little bit deeper and think a little bit more about why is it that you voted it one, and why is it that I voted at five, then you can see that there’s a deeper conversation to be had. It can be pretty short, can be only 30 seconds or a minute, but you start to recognize that we’re all looking at the world through our own straw. We’re looking at the same thing, but we’re seeing different things. When we listen to one another, again, we’re building trust, building awareness, and learning about the different points of view across the table.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:53] I think that’s an excellent point. This can be a tool not only for decision-making but, as you were just pointing out, for further conversation and to help build that deeper alignment among the team members who are part of the collaboration.

Ed Morrison: [00:22:09] This is one thing that’s really interesting to me. I don’t know because I’m not a social scientist, so I can’t really evaluate it. But one of the things we learn is that, by driving our conversations deeper, we actually bring people together. This is different from what we’ve learned with strategic planning. We’ve all been through the vision statement routine. In a vision statement, we think, well, we’re going to bring people together. We get higher and higher levels of abstraction. We play word games and, like refrigerator magnets, come up with our vision statement. The truth of the matter is you can exhaust people doing that. The conversation becomes more and more superficial, and, at the end of the day, people don’t care. But, if you learn to drive your conversations to a deeper level and to listen to one another respectfully, then you’re building trust, and you’re learning about the fact that your view of the world is only one view of the world and that we’re designing a future that actually involves a whole lot of different dimensions and a lot of complexity. It’s actually quite inspiring when you start to think, “Oh, we could actually put these three, four, or five ideas together and make it work.” But that does require you to sit and listen to what other people are seeing.

Using the Skills for Agile LeadershipCelisa Steele: [00:23:45] One of the other points you make in the book is that none of the skills are rocket science. They’re pretty simple. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re easy, but they are simple skills. Of course, they take time and effort to get better at them, to practice them, to learn how to frame those questions or to learn how to have these discussions around a Big Easy, for example. But one of the other things that you also make the point about is that the skills can be used independently, but there’s a great benefit in bringing them all together, using them in concert. So I’m hoping you can talk a little bit about that, how the skills can fit together. And then, as part of that, just the role of teams or groups in agile leadership.

Ed Morrison: [00:24:37] Right. Let me address the second part of that first, the role of teams. One of the things you learn—and again, I’ve been at this for over 20 years or so—there are 10 skills, but no one is good at all 10 skills. If you think of an S curve—you’re familiar with an S curve probably, the whole notion that living systems go through a period of birth, rapid growth, maturity, and then decline—teams or people can be situated along an S curve. In other words, you’ve got the entrepreneurs at the early stage of the S curve who are very horizontal thinkers. They connect all over the place. They think in new and different ways. You get people in the middle of the curve who are thinking more about systems: “How do I grow this thing? How do I make it work?” And you have people at the top of the S curve who are focused on efficiency or focused on the idea that “We’ve really got to get down to brass tacks here, folks. We’ve got to figure out who’s going to do what by when.” This is all part of the notion of cognitive diversity, and our 10 skills actually map pretty closely to an S curve.

Ed Morrison: [00:25:54] One of the things we have learned is that, when we’re facing these really complex challenges, a transformation of any sort is complex. We’re dealing with hidden networks we can’t see. We’re trying to align assets within those networks, find out what they are, link and leverage them, move them in a new direction. This is all very complex work. You need a cognitively diverse team. You need people that are good at all of these different skills. So, in the 10 skills, I’m particularly good at the first one, two, three, four, five, six. I’m not really good at seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten is about nudging. As I tell my colleagues, “I’m a great nudgee. I’m not a great nudger.” So you recognize that you’re not good at all of these and that you need complements. You need people who are good, and you need to recognize when their leadership matters and when that leadership can move. A good team starts to move leadership across the team as circumstances change. We learned this by studying what the folks up in Flint were doing, the core team up in Flint that really took on these challenges. But way before the water crisis, they were working on teenage homicides. The core team there was just an amazing group of people. And you watched leadership move from one to the next as they leveraged off of each other’s strengths.

Ed Morrison: [00:27:27] Now, the 10 rules. Let me give you a little background on how we came to the 10 rules. Remember back in the ‘90s, I was trying to figure out, “How do we develop a strategy process for open networks? Because our whole way of doing this strategic planning doesn’t work.” And so I started with the idea of, “Okay, well, what is a strategy?” Now, I’m a lawyer by training, so definitions matter a lot to me. When I was looking for a definition of strategy, I came across one that really made a lot of sense. And this is Kathleen Eisenhardt, out of Stanford, working in really complex environments, studying how teams and companies operate in these dynamic environments. And her point was that strategy answers two questions: Where are we going, and how will we get there? And so, by definition, we have to have an answer to those two questions. The next design challenge I faced was, “Okay, how do we design a conversation that answers those two questions?”

Ed Morrison: [00:28:40] And we came up with four questions. The first question was what could we do? What could we do to address the strategic challenge, the framing question that we’re talking about? And then, of all the things we could do, what should we do? Which is the question of the Big Easy, identifying the Big Easy. Then the third question is what will we do? And the fourth question is one we call what’s our 30-30, which is, when are we getting back together again in roughly 30 days to figure out what we learned and what we’re going to do for the next 30 days? The first two questions of that four-question series give us an outcome, and the second two questions give us a pathway. So we can structure a conversation around four questions and come up with a strategic action plan. Now, one level down deeper behind those four questions are the 10 skills. And so the 10 skills enable you to design and manage that entire process of building a strategic action plan or a collaboration going forward. The 10 skills are where the practice meets the research. And, if you really want to learn Strategic Doing beyond what you can read in the book, you’ll probably want to learn why does this work? Why do these 10 skills work? And that’s really where the practice meets the research.

Ed Morrison: [00:30:12] So, when we decided to write a book, we actually decided not to start out historically how this all evolved. But we said what really matters is people needing to be aware of these 10 skills. And so we wrote the book around the 10 skills. The 10 skills, as I said, are simple in the sense that they are common sense. I don’t think you read anything in that book that you said, “Well, geez, I don’t quite understand that.” But they require practice. They require practice to master these skills. Just like any discipline—just like playing tennis, playing the piano, or learning to swim—you have to practice them to master them. And that’s what’s so critical. So the 10 skills enable us to teach this discipline. And when I say I came to Purdue to learn how to teach this, it’s when we came across and designed the 10 skills that I realized that we had a discipline that we could teach people. About four and a half years ago, an incident happened in a week that I realized, “Oh, my gosh, I think we have it.”

Ed Morrison: [00:31:32] And that was I was talking to a community organizer in Flint, and I was talking to a weapons architect at a big defense contractor in New Jersey. We were talking about the same conversations, the same questions. I realized both of these people are dealing with really complex challenges. One of them is dealing on a neighborhood level. One of them is dealing with putting repair systems on big destroyers—also a very complex problem. And they’re structuring their conversation in the same way. I realized that, if we can teach these skills to people so that they can actually practice them themselves, then we can teach these skills so that people can actually use them. Now we wrote the book because we realized, “Okay, we now can teach these skills, and we can make this an open-source discipline. We can share these skills across our universities.” And so that’s really what we’re doing right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:50] Great. That’s wonderful. Thank you for sharing all of that. I really do think that the framework that you have out there, with these 10 skills underpinning it, makes a tremendous amount of sense, like you’re saying, across all types of different situations. And I do love the focus on application and on meaningful, useful tools.

Ed Morrison: [00:33:13] Yes. If people read the book, what we recommend you do is, when you get really good at this, you end up applying these skills not in a big process, which you can do, but you can also just pull them out, as my friend Philip did. He just pulled out the appreciative question, and, when people came at him in the hallway with a problem, he just flipped it around into an opportunity and had a different conversation. So that’s a great example of how you can use these skills one by one.

A Powerful Learning Experience Driven by PeersCelisa Steele: [00:33:49] What is one of the most powerful learning experiences that you’ve been involved in, as an adult, since finishing your formal education?

Ed Morrison: [00:33:56] I’ve been studying this challenge of how do humans collaborate? I’ve been fascinated by this. How do we do complex work together when nobody can tell anybody what to do? As I said, I’ve been thinking about this and working on it since 1993. It’s when I started really. I’ll tell you the most powerful learning experience happened when we had our first practitioner conference, which was four years ago, and we had Strategic Doing practitioners come to the University of North Alabama, which has been one of our hot spots for developing Strategic Doing. I spent two days in this conference, and I walked away with about three or four really cool ideas. I was just amazed that here it was—I’ve been thinking about this for 25 years, and I never thought of those things. And I thought, “Wow, isn’t that cool?” And so our practitioner conference, which we now hold every year, is amazing because we have these incredible people doing really hard problems. They’re working on hard problems, whether it’s opioids, K-12 student dropouts, or challenges of how do I take a strategic plan and make it work? All of these kinds of complex challenges. And they share what they are learning. As I said, I walked away amazed.

Ed Morrison: [00:35:28] We have one fellow, André Le Duc, who’s the head of emergency services at the University of Oregon. He’s been using Strategic Doing to teach people how to deal with emergencies on campus. And I said, “Well, why are you using Strategic Doing? Why are you doing that?” And he said, “Well, this is the way we think, and we need everybody in an emergency to think this way. We need to strategically do stuff, and we can’t sit around pointing fingers, getting into arguments. We actually have to just try stuff.” Building that discipline in groups is critical for dealing with emergencies. And so we’ve actually also had FEMA come to our workshops. Part of the exciting aspect of this is that this is like—I don’t know—a prayer practice or a meditation practice. I’m sure an artist…I’m not a pianist or a musician at all, but I’m sure that someone like Yo-Yo Ma, whom I was fortunate to meet, sees in their work, in the discipline, deeper and deeper levels. And that’s what I see in this, and I’m just amazed by it. It’s quite inspiring, and it keeps me going.

Celisa Steele: [00:36:49] Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. I think I also hear, in that example, just a shout-out to the benefit of peer learning, that you’re hearing from others who are applying this. And there’s a huge benefit in that social learning aspect.

Ed Morrison: [00:37:05] Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s all learning from your peers really. You see that they’re looking at the world slightly differently than you are, but you have a common language about these complex challenges, you have a common framework about how collaborations can be designed and guided, and so you’re working not on the rigamarole of strategy. We don’t talk anything about strategy. We talk about these really complex challenges of what are we learning when we apply this to, for example, opioids? How can we build healthy networks in these rural communities? How is that going to work? Where are the leverage points, and what are we learning by doing that? These are the kinds of questions and insights that we get at that conference. And so it’s just a wonderful experience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:38:14] Ed Morrison is co-author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership. You can learn more by visiting the Strategic Doing Web site or connecting with Ed on LinkedIn.

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Related Resources* “With” Strategy Not “For” Strategy with Lowell Aplebaum * The Strategy and Marketing Episode

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Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbGiving and receiving feedback is harder than most people think. Learning business professionals need to take the time to study the art and science of feedback because of the critical role feedback plays in learning.

In this redux episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss how to give and receive feedback effectively, common misconceptions about feedback, and the tremendous impact feedback can have on learning.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Giving feedback is a responsibility and, as we said, a privilege and, we’ll also say, a potential liability for learning businesses. A liability because, while feedback is so critical to learning, it’s hard to do well.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:19] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:20] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:29] Welcome to episode 389, which focuses on feedback. This is an encore airing of an episode from our archives.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:36] It’s not unusual to be asked for feedback by a colleague. Nor is it unusual to be offered feedback. These are in fact often daily occurrences.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:46] But giving and receiving feedback is arguably harder than most people think. It’s an art and a science. And it’s important that learning professionals take the time to study that art and science because of the critical role that feedback plays in learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:00] So we want to revisit a conversation Jeff and I originally had in 2019 that delves into the topic of feedback, including how to effectively give and receive it, common misconceptions around it, and the tremendous impact it can have on learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:17] We’ll note that in the conversation that follows you’ll hear some references to the show notes for the original episode, 209, but you’ll find the most recent show notes and a transcript at leadinglearning.com/episode389.

Giving and Receiving Feedback Are Parts of Daily Work and LearningCelisa Steele: [00:01:40] Jeff, what did you think of my last interview for the podcast? I’m looking for some feedback.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:46] That’s a question we hear a lot, and it’s not unusual to be asked for feedback by a colleague or a friend.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:53] Yes, and it’s not all that uncommon to be offered feedback. Even if we don’t ask for it, we might get unsolicited feedback, whether from a boss, a colleague, or a friend. As in, “Hey Jeff, I have a few thoughts to share on your last podcast interview. Let me give you some feedback.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:10] Yes, it seems like you always get that feedback you’re not necessarily looking for, but giving and receiving feedback is arguably a lot harder than most people assume. It’s an art and a science, and it’s really important that learning professionals take the time to learn that art and science.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:29] Feedback is an incredibly important part of learning. A few episodes ago, in episode 203, you and I talked about metalearning moves learning businesses can make to empower lifelong learning, and providing opportunities for feedback was one of the seven most important metalearning moves that we covered.

What Feedback Does Your Learning Business Offer Learners?Jeff Cobb: [00:02:48] And so, now, in follow-up to that, we want to devote some more airtime to feedback. In fact, we’re going to dedicate today’s entire show to feedback. So here are a couple of suggestions for what to key in on while listening. First, think about the feedback you typically offer your learners. As you listen to our conversation, think about whether the feedback you offer is consistent with what’s known about how to foster learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:15] Second, as we talk about the many different types of feedback, think about which ones you do and don’t use. After the episode, think about whether it might be beneficial to change the types of feedback you offer. Would codifying approaches to different types of the feedback be valuable? Now that you have those questions in mind—and, by the way, those are questions you can find in the show notes at leadinglearning.com/episode209.

Defining FeedbackCelisa Steele: [00:03:42] Let’s dig in in earnest. Let’s start by defining our key term here: feedback. According to Merriam-Webster, feedback is“the transmission of evaluative or corrective information about an action, event, or process to the original or controlling source.” And feedback is “also the information so transmitted.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:04] I think the “evaluative or corrective” nature is key. In the context of learning, that’s going to be evaluation or correction about skills or knowledge being learned, and, of course, the original source is going to be the learner herself.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:19] I had a university professor, an English teacher, who hated the term feedback. He thought that term should be used for its original, scientific meaning only. But I think, at this point, the feedback horse is out of the barn because Merriam-Webster lists the definition that I just shared first, meaning it’s more popular than that scientific meaning of the “return to the input of a part of the output of a machine, system, or process.” And I think there’s not a lot of benefit in trying to pull back on that broadened sense, and so I think we should forge ahead using that term. And I’ll note too that the university professor would also have really disliked that horse-out-of-the-barn cliché.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:01] Yes, university professors can be finicky that way. Maybe we’ll continue and mix some metaphors here and put that barn on a two-way street because feedback, of course, has two sides. There’s giving feedback, and there’s receiving feedback. We’re going to spend most of our time today on giving feedback because that’s a responsibility and, frankly, a privilege that learning businesses usually fulfill. But we’ll start by touching briefly on asking for feedback because, as lifelong learners, that side of the feedback skill set is worth working on too.

How to Ask for Feedback Celisa Steele: [00:05:36] It definitely is, and I’ll draw on a personal example here. I like to write poetry, and I’ve attended a number of poetry workshops over the years. I would say the vast majority of them have an instructor, and you might have 10 or so other poets in the room, and you just give feedback on whatever poem is put in front of you, and you give it to that person. Well, a few years ago, I had a different experience, one where the instructor had the poet whose poem was being critiqued, say upfront what type of feedback she was looking for. So I might say, “I’m really interested in knowing if the ending to this poem is working well,” and so then that lets all of the other people giving feedback in the room know to look at that ending and to really focus their time and attention there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:26] I’ve had a similar experience. I’ve done a lot of work at Heroic Public Speaking, which is a company run by Michael and Amy Port, where they focus on, as you might expect, helping speakers become much better at what they do. And one of their rules there is that you can be a performer or a critic, but you can’t be both. And so, when anybody’s participating in their programs, we’re told, “You do not offer unsolicited feedback. You only offer feedback that’s specifically requested by the person speaking.” As you can imagine, most speakers are very good at criticizing other speakers. So you have to really start thinking about, “Okay, how do I get the feedback that’s really going to make me better, ask for what I need at this specific time, on this specific speech in this specific context? Is it working? Is it not working?” and helping the people who are in teams and groups with you, going through the training, really give you the support that you need in your learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:25] So asking for feedback or—perhaps even more relevant for learning businesses—letting or encouraging learners to ask for feedback often works best at either end of the learner journey, for the novice or for the approaching expert learner. For the novice, there’s often so much corrective feedback that could be given that it might be overwhelming to the learner. So letting the learner pick where the people giving feedback should focus can help limit the sheer volume of feedback to a more manageable amount. As an example, let’s say there’s a novice tennis player. Maybe she has a bad backhand, a weak forehand, and a serve that’s unreliable. But that’s a lot, to work on all of those. So the player might say she wants to focus on serving and ask for pointers on that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:15] I know you were secretly thinking of me with that novice tennis player example, but I could certainly use some pointers. But, like you said, that’s one end of the spectrum, the novice. And then, for somebody who basically is an expert or is approaching that level of expertise, already has a lot of knowledge, a lot of skill, asking for feedback on a particular area can then really increase the odds that the feedback prompts action or elicits the kind of change that that person’s seeking. An advanced tennis player may not really care that much about improving her serve. Maybe she’s skilled enough that she knows she can consistently put the ball in play, and that’s good enough for her at this point. But she might feel that she really needs to put her time and energy into improving her backhand, for example.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:00] And so, if you’re going to ask for feedback or if you’re going to create learning experiences like the Heroic Public Speaking workshops and the poetry workshops we mentioned, if you’re going to create those experiences where you encourage learners to ask for the feedback they need or want, it’s a really good idea to provide an example to model. So the poetry workshop that I shared about, that instructor modeled it for us. He said, “Let’s imagine that Theodore Roethke is here. He’s brought his poem “My Papa’s Waltz” with him. It’s a great poem, by the way. Look it up. You can easily Google it if you don’t know it. And what Ted says to the class is, “I’m trying to walk this line between nostalgia and the terror, and I want to make sure that I’m not falling too much on one side or the other. Am I walking that line effectively?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:52] Yes. So definitely getting very specific about that. And whoever is hearing the feedback—whether that’s you or another learner or, in the case of a structured-type learning experience, the instructor or facilitator, whoever that is—needs to be ready to redirect the feedback-givers if needed to make it more productive. Or, if that doesn’t work, you should recognize that you or any other learner can always ignore the feedback if needed.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:19] That’s right. Feedback really is always up to the receiver. Even really good feedback can only be conveyed. It can only be transmitted, to go back to that word that was used in the Merriam-Webster definition we started with earlier. The feedback won’t necessarily be internalized, adopted, or put to use. It’s always up to the learner whether or not she’s going to apply that feedback, whether or not she’s going to make changes based on it.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:10:48] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

How to Give Feedback: Focus on Evaluation and Correction Jeff Cobb: [00:11:18] And now on to the other side of the road—I feel like there’s a chicken joke in there somewhere—but getting to that other side of the road, giving feedback. Giving feedback is a responsibility and, as we said, a privilege and, we’ll also say, a potential liability for learning businesses. A liability because, while feedback is so critical to learning, it’s hard to do well.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:42] Yes, it is hard to do well, and the feedback needs to be focused on improved performance. In the case of learning businesses, opportunities for feedback should focus on improving the learner so that the learner better understands the skills and information being taught and is better able to apply those skills and information. The corrective and evaluative nature of feedback needs to keep that goal of improved performance in mind, meaning you might have something that you can correct, but, if it’s not really achieving that goal of improved performance, that might be feedback better left unsaid.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:19] Yes, you keep that goal of improved learner performance in mind, and it’s pretty easy to see that, yes, indeed, there is such a thing as unnecessary feedback, gratuitous feedback, even just plain bad feedback. Anything that undermines improved learner performance is counterproductive, and it’s not hard to imagine—or perhaps even remember—examples of feedback gone awry. Feedback about how distracting someone’s facial expressions are while speaking turns into not more pleasant facial expressions but results in that person not speaking up as much, not presenting events at events, and so on. It’s completely counterproductive.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:57] Right. We have to keep the goal of improved learner performance in mind. Add to that the fact that feedback really needs to take that learner and that situation into account. You really want to be thinking about individual learners when possible. And, if it’s not possible to give feedback that specialized, that individualized, then you’re going to want to look at types of learners. For example, novice versus expert or native English speaker versus non-native English speaker. Knowing who’s receiving the feedback allows us to structure it in a way most likely to achieve that goal of improved performance. More expert learners are likely to be able to process nuanced feedback and feedback on a variety of aspects. Novice learners may be overwhelmed by too much feedback and may need help understanding what to do with the feedback. For example, a recommendation to a novice public speaker to be more engaging might not be as meaningful as that recommendation coupled with some examples of how to be more engaging, use more stories, or make use of strategic movement on the stage. We need to be more directive with novices, and we need to be more facilitative in our feedback to more experienced learners. We’ll include in the show notes a link to an article by Dr. Patti Shank. It includes a table that really nicely summarizes how to handle feedback differently at the different ends of the skill and expertise continuum.

Source: “Mastering Deeper Learning, Part 2: Feedback” by Dr. Patti Shank Jeff Cobb: [00:14:33] It’s also important to keep in mind what the feedback’s focused on, what it’s addressing. The feedback on a knowable, reproducible task or procedure—for example, something like giving an injection, if you’re in the health care space—it’s going to be different than feedback on a more open-ended topic, something like being a more strategic thinker. With the knowable task, the corrective side of feedback factors in. There’s a right way to give an injection, and you want to make sure that learners get that. You don’t want people out there giving bad injections. But, with the more open-ended topics, the feedback will be more evaluative than corrective. There’s not a single right way to be a strategic thinker, but there are some things you can say or do that might point a learner in the right direction—hints, cues, details that might get her thinking or experimenting.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:26] In addition to being aware of the individuals and the situations that the feedback pertains to, there are also various dimensions of feedback. From formal—think assessments, like a certification exam—to informal—the more insignificant day-to-day exchanges. Even the quick, unfiltered expression that I can see on your face, Jeff, when I suggest a particular topic for a podcast, that counts as feedback.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:54] Definitely. And there’s also a feedback spectrum that runs from formative to summative.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:01] And there’s solicited versus unsolicited feedback and, of course, shades of gray in between those two extremes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:07] There’s who’s giving the feedback. Is it coming from a teacher or an expert? Is it coming from peers? Peers with more experience or less? Or is the feedback coming from the learner herself, maybe through reflection or other activities and experimentation?

Celisa Steele: [00:16:22] And, of course, there’s the spirit of the feedback. Is it positive, constructive, supportive, or is it negative and remedial?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:31] Is it direct, written, or spoken? Is it implicit, like body language? Is it straightforward and clear or couched beyond parsability to preserve the appearance of politesse?

Feedback Is ComplicatedCelisa Steele: [00:16:43] With so many variables to feedback, it’s easy to see how quickly it becomes complicated and why some folks have pushed back on the idea of feedback ever being valuable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:55] Yes. There was a recent Harvard Business Review post on the blog there—we’ll link to that in the show notes—called “The Feedback Fallacy.” The writers there wrote, and I’ll quote them: “Feedback is about telling people what we think of their performance and how they should do it better, whether they’re giving an effective presentation, leading a team, or creating a strategy. And on that, the research is clear. Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel. And telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning.”

Celisa Steele: [00:17:31] Those authors go on to point out what they see as three fallacies around feedback. First, that other people are more aware than you are of your own weaknesses, and that the best way to help you is for them to point out what you can’t see for yourself. Second, that the process of learning is the filling of an empty vessel. You lack certain abilities that you need to acquire, and so you’re going to get feedback that’s going to teach them to you. Then, third, that great performance—getting to that expert end of the spectrum—is universal, analyzable, and describable, and so, once you have it defined, then it can be transferred from one person to another. Someone who’s an expert can pass that along to someone else who can then also become an expert. But, of course, all of those points are flawed. Others don’t always see us more clearly or understand what we need to do, and, by sharing what they see and what they think we need to do, we may actually move farther away from doing something well. I’ll note that this is probably truer for higher-order learning and for learning that aims not just for competence but mastery or, in the language of the HBR authors, “excellence.” For giving an injection properly, to return to that example, others may well be able to help learners do that better.

Neuroscience and FeedbackJeff Cobb: [00:19:01] We should note too that there is some basic neuroscience behind what the authors of that HBR article claim around feedback. There are studies showing, for example, that in the brains of students that are asked about what they need to correct in something that they’re doing, their sympathetic nervous system lights up and their fight-or-flight system comes online, and it tends to mute the other parts of the brain and makes them focus only on the information that’s most necessary to survive. So your brain is narrowing its activity, is sensing a threat from the criticism that’s often perceived through feedback. Now, on the flip side, if we’re able to highlight for somebody what’s working in what they’re doing, what’s working in their learning, that can stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is much more productive. That’s going to lead to neurogenesis, to the growth of brain cells. The authors’ view is that learning really rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly—and definitely not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly—and then also that we learn the most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate that intelligently. That’s the best kind of feedback.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:32] For example, if you see somebody doing something that’s really working, stop and highlight that, and recognize that, and point out what excellence looks like for that person. If you do that, then you’re offering her a chance to gain some insight. You’re highlighting a pattern that’s already there within her so that she can recognize it, anchor it, recreate it, and refine it. I’m basically loosely quoting from things that are in this HBR article. We definitely encourage you to read that. We’ll link to it. There’s a good chart in the article as well with some language substitutions and some example situations of how to give feedback, not so much in the context of formal learning events or experiences—this is in a more informal context—but much of what’s in that chart can be generalized to feedback you might give in a formal learning context. So, again, we’ll link to that in the show notes. Something definitely useful to reference.

Source: Harvard Business ReviewMindset and FeedbackCelisa Steele: [00:21:39] This dovetails very nicely with Carol Dweck and her work in her book Mindset because she spends a good bit of time talking about feedback and how feedback can foster or inhibit a growth mindset. What you were talking about there, Jeff, with what’s happening at the neurological level, it definitely is also supported by Dweck and her work. Feedback that stresses and praises the learners’ effort and process is much better in cultivating or encouraging that growth mindset versus feedback that judges learners’ talent or intelligence. Praising effort and process, that puts people in a growth mindset. But, interestingly, or something that is very worthwhile keeping in mind, is that praising learners’ intelligence—that’s certainly positive feedback, saying, “Oh wow, you’re so smart, Jeff”—but that can trigger the fixed mindset because that feedback is a label. I’m saying, “You’re smart, Jeff” versus “Oh, that was a really smart way to think about approaching that problem.” So even a positive label equates that person with their achievement or performance. To prompt the growth mindset in your feedback, you’re going to always want to focus on effort or the way of thinking. So, again, “That was a smart way to think about that problem” is a very different than saying, “You’re smart.” We’ll make sure to link in the show notes also back to that episode where we talked about mindset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:09] Yes, Dweck’s work definitely is very, very relevant here, and I certainly encourage listeners to go back and listen to that episode. As we’re beginning to wrap up this episode, I’ll note that, as with so much that we do as learning businesses, it’s really important and meaningful to not only talk the talk but walk the walk, to be avatars for the kind of behavior we want and expect from our learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:37] While it’s a different kind of feedback, asking for feedback from learners, asking them to complete post-course evaluations is a way of modeling the importance of feedback. And it shows we’re open to feedback and, hopefully, that we’re also open to making changes and improving based on that feedback.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:56] Of course, remember to ask for the specific types of feedback that are going to be most useful to you in those evaluations. I know that you’re still going to get the stuff about the room being too cold, but, nonetheless. So that’s it for our look at feedback.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:19] Now that you’ve listened—or re-listened—to this conversation about feedback, spend some time, on your own and with your team, reflecting on the questions we offered near the beginning. What feedback are you offering your learners? Is the feedback that you’re offering consistent with what’s known about how to promote learning?

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:37] Would your learning business benefit from revisiting and perhaps codifying the types of feedback you offer?

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Related Resources* Practice and Feedback: Evidence-Based Tools for Learning * 7 Metalearning Moves to Empower Lifelong Learning * Diving into Deeper Learning with Dr. Patti Shank

The post Redux: The Art and Science of Feedback appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast Interviewee Melanie DezielTrust is fundamental in marketing. Without trustworthy marketing, products and services, no matter how excellent, will languish because today, by default, audiences doubt what marketers say. What this means is learning businesses need to do the work to collect and use evidence to back up their marketing claims.

In episode 388 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Melanie Deziel about exactly how to do that. Melanie is co-author of Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust.

Drawing on an elegant and simplifying framework from Prove It, Melanie and Jeff discuss five types of claims businesses often make—claims about convenience, comparability, commitment, connection, and competence—and three types of evidence that can back up those claims—corroboration, demonstration, and education.

The conversation is both thought-provoking and highly practical. If you’re looking to make sure your learners see you as a trustworthy source of content—and you should be looking to do that—then this episode is for you.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesMelanie Deziel: [00:00:00] For us as marketers, what that means is that all the messages we are putting out, our audience is meeting them with doubt. By default. We have to acknowledge that reality. All of the recent studies on this back it up, that folks just don’t believe what we say.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:20] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:28] Trust is fundamental in marketing. Without trustworthy marketing, products and services, no matter how excellent, will languish because today, by default, audiences doubt what marketers say. What this means is learning businesses need to do the work to collect and use evidence to back up their marketing claims. In this episode, number 388, Jeff talks with Melanie Deziel about exactly how to do that. Melanie is a former journalist who’s spent the last decade helping individuals, teams, and organizations unlock their creative potential and organize their creative effort, with a big focus on trust.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:07] Melanie is the co-founder of the Creator Kitchen mastermind for creatives and the author of both The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas and Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust. Drawing on an elegant and simplifying framework from her book Prove It, Melanie and Jeff discuss five types of claims businesses often make—claims about convenience, comparability, commitment, connection, and competence—and three types of evidence that can back up those claims—corroboration, demonstration, and education. Their conversation is both thought-provoking and highly practical. If you’re looking to make sure your learners see you as a trustworthy source of content—and you should be looking to do that—then this episode is for you. Jeff and Melanie spoke in November 2023.

Journalism Skills Help with MarketingJeff Cobb: [00:02:09] Can you say a bit more about that background as a journalist? Because I think that’s so important to the work you do and really stands you out.

Melanie Deziel: [00:02:15] Absolutely, yes. I studied to be a journalist. I always thought I would end up in a newsroom, and, timing-wise, I studied when we weren’t going to digital newsrooms. We were going to the analog style. I thought I would work in a print newspaper, and that’s what we were doing. I studied investigative reporting, arts and cultural criticism, and a lot of the things that have gone by the wayside as things have transitioned more digitally. So there wasn’t necessarily a home for me in the more modern newsrooms. And that’s when I realized that a lot of the skills and things that I had learned as a journalist—being able to find stories, being able to interview folks who may not want to be interviewed and pull out their expertise as a broader context, the ability to take feedback from lots of different stakeholders on a deadline—a lot of those skills were really as useful in a marketing context or a sales context as they were in journalism. So I really thought this is an opportunity for me to share what I know in a way that’s going to help other folks in the industry hopefully be able to tell better stories and create a deeper connection with their audience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:12] I think it’s almost certainly going to come out in this conversation how that background and those skills have served you well. You speak frequently. You write, obviously. We’ll talk about, particularly, one of your books, I think, in our conversation.

A Mastermind for CreatorsJeff Cobb: [00:03:25]I know you’re also doing this initiative. I don’t know how you characterize it—a project, initiative, company—the Creator Kitchen. Can you say a little bit about that?

Melanie Deziel: [00:03:32] Yes. The Creator Kitchen is a mastermind group for folks who consider themselves to be creators. We’ve got about 55 members, but that varies from filmmakers to podcasters to authors. We’ve got all kinds of different creative folks. And really it’s a partnership between myself and Jay Acunzo, another great speaker, author, prolific podcaster. The two of us had been chatting about how there’s so much advice today about how to 10x your business and make 10 times more content. We wanted a space where we could take a step back and really focus on the quality and the craft and honing those skills because, at the end of the day, if your message isn’t powerful, if it isn’t resonating, then having 10 times more of it’s not going to help you much. So we have assembled this crew of amazing creators from all different walks of life, and we’re really just focused on increasing all of the core functional skills of being a great communicator and effective storyteller. It’s been a whole lot of fun to get to work with these folks and see the growth alongside. It’s just as much fun for us as facilitators as it is for the members to watch that growth happen in real time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:37] I think those kinds of groups can be so powerful. In fact, we do something similar ourselves with a part of our audience. And certainly there is so much content out there that anything that’s going to help to raise the quality of that content and really make it much more meaningful to people is, well, very much appreciated these days. I know you’ve put a lot of thinking into how you do that effectively. And so let’s dig into some of your thinking around this.

Why Marketers Need to Focus on TrustJeff Cobb: [00:05:01] I want to first reference your most recent book, Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust. And, in that, you make the point that trust is just fundamental in marketing and sales. For the sake of our listeners, could you explain what trust is in the context you’re talking about? And I’ll ask you to do that first and then make the case, in brief, for why organizations need to focus on building trust.

Melanie Deziel: [00:05:29] Yes. So the two—why and what it is—I feel are really intertwined. What we know from looking at data is that historically our audience would trust the things we say as marketers. They just believed it. They thought we were giving them face value, with few rare exceptions. They thought, if we’re saying these things, surely someone somewhere is regulating it, and it must be true. And, in this day and age, in this digital-first day and age, the age of fake news, AI, deepfakes, and all these other things, the audience no longer has that liberty to be able to believe the things they see or to take them at face value. So, for us as marketers, what that means is that all the messages we are putting out, our audience is meeting them with doubt. By default. We have to acknowledge that reality. All of the recent studies on this back it up, that folks just don’t believe what we say.

Melanie Deziel: [00:06:18] Now that could be depressing. We could get upset by this, but it’s also an incredible opportunity to realize that, if we are willing to acknowledge that fact and to build that reality into the work that we’re doing, we can then create more trustworthy content. We can bring in outside sources. We can peel back the curtain and show folks what’s happening so they can see it with their own eyes. It really gives us an opportunity to make it so that they don’t have to decide to trust us. They can see the truth for themselves, and they don’t have to rely on our word as the sole source of information about our brand, our products, our services, our courses, any of these opportunities that we’re putting forth. If we acknowledge that they’re going to meet it with doubt before anything else, we take that as an opportunity for us to really go out of our way to provide backup for all the things we’re saying, so that hopefully we can build that trusting relationship with them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:10] It’s really serendipitous because we’re in the midst of some work where, just this week, we got some survey responses back for one of the organizations we’re working with that showed that the people who are attending their events and their education do not actually view them as an unbiased source. That’s one of the things they rated lowest in, which really knocked their socks off that that’s the way. But the fact is, even if everything that they’re saying is truthful and valid and they’re doing their job, people bring a lot of baggage to their purchase decisions these days, don’t they?

Melanie Deziel: [00:07:41] Absolutely, yes. They’re not only bringing their own personal experiences, and more so than in the past; they’re also bringing their values and the things that they care about in the world in terms of causes and things like that. But, yes, they also have a whole bunch of past experience of getting ripped off, of having bought a course, and it wasn’t what they thought it would be, or ordering a product, and it came, and it was a cheap knockoff imitation. They have these experiences now that make them even less likely to trust us, through no fault of our own sometimes. Like you said, we may be fine, upstanding citizens. We may be providing awesome products, delivering on every promise. But it’s that whole “If one of the M&Ms is poison, you’re a lot more careful reaching into the bowl,” and that’s the view that a lot of customers take, where we may not be the bad guy in terms of not delivering on our promises, but there’s always a chance, and they don’t know who’s who until we take the opportunity to show them the truth.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:08:35] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

Convenience, Comparability, Commitment, Connection, and Competence: Five Categories of Marketing ClaimsJeff Cobb: [00:09:10] In the process of marketing and promoting themselves, companies, organizations are always making claims about themselves, and you categorize those claims, which I think is very useful as a way to think about things and then be able to do something about them. And those categories are convenience, comparability, commitment, connection, and competence. Could you give a little explanation of each of those, and what kinds of claims are generally entailed in those?

Melanie Deziel: [00:09:40] For sure, yes. So these buckets, I don’t claim that they represent every possible claim type that a business can make. But what we looked at—my co-author and I on the book—as part of that research, we looked at tons and tons of business copy and sales assets, and, by far, those five categories where most of the claims we saw could be categorized. It’s a useful thought exercise when you’re looking for your own claims but also identifying them in the wild, so to speak. Convenience is one of the biggest ones, and we see that anytime a business or a campaign is making a claim about something being easy, being accessible, being cheap, being quick, being simple.

Melanie Deziel: [00:10:18] There are lots of synonyms out there, but where we’re really arguing that this product is going to, in some way, make your life easier, cheaper, simpler, more streamlined. It’s giving that promise of “This is going to be an easy experience to work with us.” We tend to see this a lot with regards to shipping times. So anywhere you’re seeing overnight shipping, free shipping, or same-day delivery, those kinds of things are often a convenience promise. We see it a lot with return policies. You have a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there’s very little risk. Those kinds of things. But, really, convenience—if you have an element of your messaging where you’re focused on telling folks it’s going to be easy to work with you, that’s probably a convenience claim that you’re seeing there. So let’s see what’s next up. We have comparability.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:03] Comparability, yes.

Melanie Deziel: [00:11:04] Yes. This is really where your claim is based on a comparison point to something else, and so you may be saying we’re the strongest of all the options. We are the most experienced. We’ve been around longer than anyone else. We have worked with more companies. We have more partners, more awards. Whatever it is, it’s a comparison point against something else. Now, in most cases, we are comparing to a competitor of some kind. We are the only accredited one. You’re saying that the others may not be, but it can also be in comparison to doing nothing. That’s also a valid comparison—that, in working with us, you’ll achieve five times greater results than if you didn’t work with a partner on this. So anytime that your business claim about yourself really relies on some other comparison point, whether that’s a competitor, a different type of solution, or inaction, that’s a comparability claim, and you’re going to have to prove that comparison is valid.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:58] Right. And then commitment.

Melanie Deziel: [00:12:00] Commitment, yes. This is the values point we were talking about earlier. Increasingly and especially with younger audiences like Gen Z and Millennials in particular, they’re very inclined to make purchases based on alignments with their own values. So that would be a commitment to sustainability, to equal pay, to supporting a particular social or political cause, for example. It could also be things like diversity, equity, and inclusion. There are lots of different values that fall into this category. They may want to support only companies that offer their employees a fair wage. So anywhere where, as an entity, your business having a commitment to a particular value or cause is part of what’s driving that desire to work with you or part of what’s making it more likely that they will return and provide loyalty to you as a business.

Melanie Deziel: [00:12:50] And this is one of the categories where not providing proof is one of the most damning, honestly. Because, in many cases, when we’re making a values-based purchase, it has to do with our identity. I consider myself to be sustainable and eco-conscious. Therefore, I’m making this purchase because you are also sustainable and eco-conscious. If I find out that’s not the case, that I, as someone who’s sustainable and eco-conscious, have made this very wasteful purchase because you are not telling the truth, that’s not just a disappointing purchase. That’s like an insult to identity. It feels like a betrayal. You’ve made me do something that I don’t agree with. So that is where we often see the most backlash, if you can’t actually back up the claims that you are sustainable, committed to diversity, that you offer a fair wage, and all these other cause-based claims that businesses are often making.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:37] And then connection and competence.

Melanie Deziel: [00:13:40] Connection and competence, yes. So these two, oftentimes I think there’s a little bit of confusion between commitment and connection because they can feel the same. You could be very committed to your employees, for example, or committed to your customers. But, when we talk about connection, that’s really a two-way relationship. So when we say connected to our customers, that’s that I know your name. I know your birth date. You’re not just a number. It’s Olive Garden, ”When you’re here, you’re family.” It’s a different standard. It’s not transactional. It’s truly relational. And so we see this a lot with service-based businesses, where you have your dedicated point of contact who knows you, who you can call any time.

Melanie Deziel: [00:14:18] It’s really about that relationship, that they’re going to be there for you. This is also especially true with services and businesses that are of an ongoing nature. So, if it’s supportive in nature—maybe it’s therapy, or it’s a coach; it’s fitness or health support, these kinds of things where that ongoing relationship is really important—we tend to see more of those connection claims too. You’ll have your dedicated, committed, connected advisor, coach, or point of contact that’s going to work with you. So that’s very important too. It’s often one of the reasons people will make a purchase, one way or the other. It’s based on where they feel they’re going to have the deepest connection with the person they’ll be working with. And competence we put last in the list not because it’s least important but because I think it’s kind of table stakes.

Melanie Deziel: [00:15:03] I joke at the beginning of the book that, if your claims aren’t true, this book will not help you at all. I cannot help you trick people. That’s really not what we’re talking about here. The baseline understanding is that hopefully all of us are good at our jobs. We’re delivering a quality service, a quality product, and what we’re hoping to do is prove that to the audience. Now we still have to back up that claim. You still have to prove that you know what you’re doing, and you get good results, and you have, in fact, worked with X, Y, Z partners that you said you’ve worked with, things like that. But it is sort of table stakes. I think people will often make their own judgments on competence based on the evidence they see. So it’s some of the others where we have the most control to make the biggest difference on. If we’re creating good products, that stuff often speaks for itself, but we do need to be able to prove a lot of those other ones much more strongly.

Which Kinds of Claims Are Most Valuable for Learning Businesses?Jeff Cobb: [00:15:51] Right. Thanks for taking the time to walk through those because I think it’s just helpful to be able to categorize things in that way. I’m wondering—and the answer may just be it depends, and that’s certainly fair if it is—but, from the standpoint of an organization whose product is knowledge, education, learning, that’s what they’re selling, that’s what they have to convince people on, I’m wondering if any of those are more valuable than others. And part of what’s in my mind is certainly the competence box you have, you definitely have to check that if you’re actually trying to convince people you know what you’re talking about. So I’m thinking, particularly out of the others, maybe some of these learning businesses need to be focusing on one or more of those others more than they are right now.

Melanie Deziel: [00:16:32] Yes, I think you’re spot-on. As is often the case in marketing, the answer is it depends, but I can steer you close to one or the other, depending on your particular challenge or your particular focus right now as an organization. So, if you are worried about market share, if you are trying to take business from another entity, or you have really stiff competition, then I would focus on comparability. That’s a place where you’re going to be able to say that our course or our offering is, again, the only accredited one, or it’s faster to complete. You’re really anchoring your offering in comparison to what you know to be another choice that you may lose out to on occasion.

Melanie Deziel: [00:17:08] Comparability will be big if you are focused on market share or worried about a particular competitor, especially if they’re a new competitor that’s really splashy, and it’s got a bunch of ads out there. That’s a place where you may want to focus on comparability. And, particularly for adult learning, I think if you’re focused on adult learning, convenience is more important than ever. If that is a selling point for you, for the offering that you have, really lean into that. Talk about how flexible the hours are. Talk about what’s available online or replay. Talk about the timing and pacing of the learning. Talk about the different ways it can be accessed. Can I watch this on my phone, for example, versus having to be at my desk? I think if convenience is one of the selling points, if that’s something that’s important for you, then I would really be focusing on proving that out with as many backup examples as you can to help make the case that this really is something that could fit in their lives. It really is something they have time to do.

Corroboration, Demonstration, and Education: Using Evidence to Back Up Marketing ClaimsJeff Cobb: [00:18:07] An important follow-on to these categories of claims that you set up is that you offer three ways to actually use evidence to back up the claims, which is really important. So you talk about corroboration, demonstration, education. You’re very systematic, I have to say. It’s really nice. In each of those three ways, you have two methods or approaches. For example, under corroboration, you have experts and witnesses. Under demonstration, you have stories and documentation. And then, under education, information and coaching. This is all coming out of your book that I’m referencing, Prove It. I really like the approach—very clear, elegant, simplifies what really could be a messy process. I’m wondering, is that your journalistic background coming out, or how did you arrive at that approach?

Melanie Deziel: [00:18:52] It’s funny. I think it’s a combination of two things. One, it is definitely the journalistic background. Like I said, the process of writing this book involved a lot of analysis and not in a rigorous academic sense. I didn’t conduct a statistically significant study. It was more me looking at a lot of the things that I know have been successful with brands I’ve worked with and out in the marketplace, seeing what those trends are, seeing what’s been working well, and identifying that these are some common categories. But I also happen to be autistic, and so systematic thinking is very core to me. I can’t help but think in this way, in this organized, structured way. My first book is actually a matrix in its organization as well. It’s a 10×10 matrix. So it’s just the way my mind works, which is really valuable, hopefully, for creating clearer systems.

Melanie Deziel: [00:19:38] But where a lot of the organization and the naming for these types of content came from, this type of evidence that you can use, comes from the world of law. You mentioned corroboration with experts and witnesses. I felt like that was a really familiar framework. Most of us have either had some experience in a courtroom or have seen a courtroom drama—there are plenty of them out there. And so we’re familiar with this idea that, okay, our defendant, which is us, as the brand, as a marketer, has said something, and we need to back it up with experts, somebody from outside of our organization who can lend some credibility. And then witnesses, people who have experienced it themselves—our past students, our faculty, whoever it is that has seen this stuff in action and can say, “They’re not just saying that. I was there. I learned. I grew. I achieved these results myself.” So I tried to combine the simple format but also a familiar analogy that I thought people might be able to have a reference point for.

Branding Specific Products and Lines of Business Versus the Overall Organizational BrandJeff Cobb: [00:20:32] Fantastic. It really does work. It does help to systematize it, bring it together in a way that you can really make it useful. Now, so much of what you talk about applies to brands. We’re all familiar with big brands out there, and certainly they make plenty of claims that they have to back up. One of the interesting things about our audience is oftentimes they’re operating under the umbrella of a bigger brand. So they might be within a trade or professional association, or they might be within a university. Those institutions, those organizations have their brand out in the marketplace for the larger audience they’re serving. But then, within that, there’s this learning business that’s offering the continuing education, professional development that often doesn’t necessarily have a brand of its own. What you’re saying about the overall brand, can you take that down to a business line or the specific products that business line is offering?

Melanie Deziel: [00:21:24] Yes, absolutely. I use brand just because I think, for most marketers, that’s the common language. But, absolutely, it’s whatever you’re offering. It works if you have a service-based business. It works if you’re a small business. If you have different products that do different things, you may rely on different types of evidence. I think the advantage that many of your listeners will have is that they do often have a big brand that gives them that competence proof just by being there. If you get to come in and say you’re associated with this university, this association, this well-known organization, that’s a stamp of competence and approval that comes with that. It’s wonderful to have that. And I think, even operating within that, you don’t have to feel like you are building that credibility for your sub-brand, but really for the product, course, or program that you’re selling at that particular time.

Melanie Deziel: [00:22:12] So thinking of, as an example, if your larger organization is sending out an e-mail about a particular program, course, or offering that you have, thinking, “How can we, in this piece of communication, make sure that we are emphasizing and providing backup for how convenient this is? We know the audience is busy, and they might think they can’t fit this in. How do we provide evidence for that? What experts could we call in or witnesses could we have to back up the fact that this is doable within their current schedule, their current lifestyle?” So looking at every sort of communication opportunity as a chance to sprinkle some evidence in there. And I like to think of the evidence as seasoning. You can sprinkle it over whatever you’re doing. You probably won’t be using all six types of evidence in a single Facebook post or something like that, but it’s a seasoning you can add where it makes sense and where it would enrich the value of that communication.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:02] That’s true. You probably don’t want to overdo it. Pick your battles, basically.

Melanie Deziel: [00:23:07] Yes.

Building Trust Around Education-Focused ProductsJeff Cobb: [00:23:07] We’ve touched on this a little bit already, but I think it’s worth spending a little more time on, just given the nature of our audience. In a lot of cases, for a brand, when you’re building trust, it might be a consumer product. It might be a car. It might be something physical that’s being sold in a retail-type situation. But, when you’re talking about information—you’re talking about courses, coaching, all of that stuff—anything different about building trust in that environment?

Melanie Deziel: [00:23:37] Yes, I think what’s interesting about this—and please correct me if I’m wrong—but my instinct says that most people are not engaging with info products for the product itself. It’s for the results that those products will create for them. Surely that’s true of other things. Health and fitness—they want to lose weight, whatever. But I think, particularly for adult learners especially, they’re hoping to be qualified for a promotion. They’re hoping to go into a new area of business, a new industry. They’re hoping to advance their career or make themselves better positioned to be hired for a job. There’s some broader goal there. My goal is not to take a course. That’s not the goal. My goal is not to get the certificate. That’s a means to an end. And so I think particularly focusing on the results that you are creating…. I work with a lot of universities in terms of messaging, and we often focus on graduation rates or how many are hired within a certain period of time after graduation, those kinds of results. The degree, the certificate, the completion of the program are a means to an end, so let’s make sure we talk about that end so folks understand that this is the correct means to that end.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:44] I think that is so important because I think many of the organizations that we work with are much better positioned to deliver that desired result than some of their competition is because the competition is really about how can we put it out there cheap and easy for people to go through and check the box, which is fine—you’ve got to do that—but it doesn’t necessarily achieve a bigger result.

The Impact of Emerging Trends on Trust in MarketingJeff Cobb: [00:25:09] A lot is changing out there right now and impacting the world of marketing. What are some emerging trends in marketing that you think have the potential to impact how organizations go about building trust with their audiences?

Melanie Deziel: [00:25:23] Yes, I think there are a couple things that I’m keeping an eye on, and I know consumers are too. I think, in marketing, we’re a little bit navel-gazing. We tend to worry about things that are insular, and I think AI is one of those things. I think the average consumer is probably not thinking about AI and the impacts of generating text out of nowhere, impact on their daily life. It’s something we think about as marketers because we are generative in nature, so it feels competitive. But I do think that that is going to create a lot more content out there. And that will, just by nature of sheer competition, mean that we have to create better content, more trustworthy content, more accurate content in order to compete. So I think that’s a reality we’re up against.

Melanie Deziel: [00:26:04] And I do think that, especially with recent news in the last few months, the profile of things like deepfakes or AI-altered images, it becomes less clear what is real and what is not. And, for the average consumer, that can really only have the effect of increasing doubt even further and, therefore, has the effect of increasing the importance of evidence and multiple types of evidence because a single image alone may no longer be enough to convince someone. They’re not sure if that’s real. But, if we can come in with an expert testimonial, a quote from one of our students, the image showing this, we can bring in multiple forms of evidence and, hopefully, build a case to successfully defend that we’re someone worthy of their time, their money, and their attention.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:50] Yes, it seems like, if you’re combining good evidence with good relationships, you’re going to be fine. But that’s hard work to do both of those things.

Melanie Deziel: [00:26:56] It really is, yes.

First Steps for Building Greater Trust for Brands and ProductsJeff Cobb: [00:26:58] I suspect that any learning business professional, leader who’s listening to this is going to say, “Yes, great. I get it. We need to build trust. So let’s get to it.” What’s the first step? What do organizations need to do to assess where they are right now and then start moving forward?

Melanie Deziel: [00:27:16] There are lots of ways that you can get very technical about this. There are agencies you can hire who will do brand perception studies and all of these kinds of things. If that’s how you operate, if you have the budget and the time, by all means go for it. But, for a lot of us who are working with leaner resources, that’s not really within reach, and so we have to take a little bit more of a scrappy approach. And what I would say is your first step is probably to take a look at what you would consider to be your major assets and your major messaging. So, if you have a Web site where you do most of your sales, for example, or if most of your leads come from social media, look for the most impactful place, and then I would audit the types of claims that you are making there. For example, you might see, “Oh, when we’re on social media, we talk a lot about convenience, but we don’t actually quantify the time anywhere. Maybe we should talk about how many hours per week, per month, per year, so we can give that some more oomph, give it some more backup.” I think that’s really your first step. Identify those major communication points, those hubs of major impact, and then see what kind of claims you’re making so you can see where you might need to put a little more seasoning of evidence on there to up your game a little bit.

Approach to Lifelong LearningJeff Cobb: [00:28:24] We’re all about learning here at Leading Learning, obviously. That’s the name of the podcast. And, because of that, we always like to ask guests who come on the show about their own approach to lifelong learning. And I know you think of yourself as a lifelong learner. I know you are a lifelong learner. So what are some of your specific habits, practices, sources for continuing to grow professionally and personally, for that matter?

Melanie Deziel: [00:28:48] I am a huge audiobook nerd. That is my number-one source of learning probably because I’ve got a little one. I’m on the go, and so the amount of time I have in the car, on a plane, wherever, is much better, and I’m able to get a lot more reading done that way. So the way to my heart is usually through Audible or the Libby app. This is another one I love to tell people about. Your library likely has a relationship with the app called Libby, where you can rent audiobooks for free from your library, just like you would with a physical book. Those are my go-tos: Audible and Libby. And the other thing is I have a really firm policy that, if you are not getting new intake, you cannot create new output. And so, for me, I try really hard to force myself outside of typical genres. Even if I read every business book in the world, I’m still going to be missing so much broader context for humans and psychology and interpersonal relationships and history. I feel really strongly about going outside the algorithm when you can and trying to consume, whether it’s music, movies, TV, books, whatever that’s outside of where your comfort zone is because you get so much better outside context when you’re mixing in new ingredients. So those are some of my go-tos for my approach to learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:10] Melanie Deziel is a keynote speaker, co-author of Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust, co-founder of the Creator Kitchen mastermind, and a generally savvy thinker and content creator.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Measuring Marketing with Greg Stuart * Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer * The Strategy and Marketing Episode * The 4 Ps of Marketing Your Learning Business

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Greg StuartMarketing has arguably undergone more change in the last decade than any other field, which means learning businesses have to stay on top of their marketing game to make sure they reach the right learners and bring in the critical revenue that keeps them humming along.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 387, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Greg Stuart. Having spent over three decades in the field, Greg has contributed majorly to the transformation of marketing and media. He has served as CMO, CRO, or CEO at companies across the media landscape, and he currently is CEO of MMA Global, an international trade association for marketers focused on architecting the future of marketing. Greg also co-wrote the hugely influential book What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds.

Celisa and Greg talk about the shift from brand-based marketing to a focus on customer experience, the lack of clarity about what marketers do and the difficulty that creates in setting a strategy, the only three go-to-market strategies, multi-touch attribution, optimizing budget allocation, personalization, and the potential impact of generative AI on marketing.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesGreg Stuart: [00:00:00] I don’t know that there’s any other industry that has changed as dramatically as it appears marketing has in the last especially ten years.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:14] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:15] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] Marketing has arguably undergone more change in the last decade than any other field, which means learning businesses have to stay on top of their marketing game to make sure they reach the right learners and bring in the critical revenue that keeps them humming along. Greg Stuart is a marketing revolutionary and passionate about fixing marketing, where, for far too long, marketers have taken action based more on gut instinct than data. Greg currently serves as CEO of MMA Global, an international trade association for marketers focused on architecting the future of marketing. Having spent over three decades in marketing, Greg has contributed majorly to the transformation of marketing and media. He has served as CMO, CRO, or CEO at companies across the media landscape, and he turned around the Interactive Advertising Bureau when he was CEO there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:17] Greg also co-authored the hugely influential book What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds, published in 2013. In this episode, number 387, Celisa talks with Greg about the shift from brand-based marketing to a focus on customer experience, the lack of clarity about what marketers do and the difficulty that creates in setting a strategy, the only three go-to-market strategies, multi-touch attribution, optimizing budget allocation, personalization, and the potential impact of generative AI on marketing. Greg’s experience draws on his career working with CMOs of major brands, but his analysis and perspective can be useful for learning businesses of all sizes, even those without multi-million-dollar marketing budgets. Indeed, maybe learning businesses with smaller marketing budgets need to be even more thoughtful and measured about how they spend. Celisa and Greg spoke in November 2023.

Fundamental Changes in the Field of MarketingCelisa Steele: [00:02:28] You have a long and storied career in marketing. You’re the CEO of MMA Global now. You were CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. You co-wrote What Sticks, which is a great book in the marketing field. Given your depth and breadth of experience in marketing, what’s one of the most salient changes that you’ve seen during your career—or some of the most salient changes if you don’t want to limit it to just one?

Greg Stuart: [00:02:55] I appreciate that you said “storied” rather than “sordid” history with marketing. I appreciate that. We don’t always get that as marketers. Listen, here’s the thing—there was always this uncomfortability that I had in the role that I was playing, either as CMO or in some role in marketing, and I knew there was an understanding that I didn’t fully know what I was doing. And so the whole focus of this thing is to really set out and fix marketing, to have a better understanding of it. What we’re often faced with doing is either research or thought leadership, or it can be a series of other guides or other things, to help marketers better understand how to do what they’re doing much better. And the reason for that is because—back to your question—I don’t know that there’s any other industry that has changed as dramatically as it appears marketing has in the last especially ten years. And you could go back as far as the Internet, that kind of set the thing off, but then we brought mobile. All the channels are different. All the connections, consumers are different. The basic understanding of how marketing works is different. The technical nature of this business has become….

Greg Stuart: [00:04:08] Honestly, I’m not sure if any other industry has so dramatically changed. Energy, a little bit. Healthcare is certainly a dramatic change, but I don’t know any other beyond those. And so somebody’s got to lead those charges. That’s what we’ve really set out to do. You can look at it from, oh my God, there’s no limitation to the change. In fact, I’ll give you a really fun one. Most CMOs today got to the job in their ability to do brand marketing. To be able to do that soft skill of how to position a business in the minds of consumers—a critically important role, no question about it. The challenge is that I know from the research we’ve done that the leading marketing strategy today is customer experience, which requires, obviously, a strong understanding of data, a strong understanding of customer journeys, a series of multiple channels, completely new martech stacks in order to run those businesses. And there are very few marketers that are prepared to make that transition. That’s really where MMA (trade association nonprofit) steps in to try to help an industry transition itself. So I don’t know. I’d ask you what hasn’t changed, truthfully?

Evidence-Based MarketingCelisa Steele: [00:05:18] All right. And you began to get into it there in your response, but I know that you have, for a long time, advocated evidence-based, data-backed approaches to marketing, and you’ve been in favor of let’s call marketing less magic. Let’s look at the science behind it and what’s actually effective. I think, given the huge budgets that can get put against marketing, it makes a ton of sense to take this evidence-based approach. So, given the great sense that makes, what do you see as the hold-ups, to the extent that you do think there are still hold-ups, around adopting more of an evidence-based approach to marketing?

Greg Stuart: [00:05:58] Okay. Well, there’s a lot of layers to that question. First off, I think that boards and CEOs don’t firmly understand what marketers do. I think the marketers are somewhat to blame. We need to be more consistent and/or structured to help them help the leadership of the company help make better decisions. And so the challenge that you run into a little bit is that, because they’re not in co-creation of what that marketing strategy should be or where they should be oriented, I don’t think they incentivize properly. I’ll give you an example.

Greg Stuart: [00:06:33] I had a meeting about six years ago. We were kicking off some work we’ve now done around marketing org, and I had some of the world’s biggest CMOs at the time. It was the CMO of General Motors. T-Mobile. Chobani was in the room. Dunkin’ Brands was in the room. Allstate. Big-time CMOs. And we asked them a throwaway question meant to be a ten-minute warm-up question to get to another topic. It was an hour conversation. And we said, “What’s the role of marketing? What’s the role of CMO?” Celisa, we never got off that first question. And, after an hour, we realized that nobody in the room agreed the role of marketing. That’s a mess. How can you expect to get anybody outside of marketing to understand if we’re not clear and consistent, at least in some minimal sense of frameworks? (There could be differences.) And so that was the first indication to me that there was this big a problem as there is and that we’re just not clear.

Greg Stuart: [00:07:24] Now, I’m going to answer your question more foundationally, though, I think. If you ask me what are some of the challenges around it, I think there are definitely a lot of skill sets and upskilling issues that need to go on. As I said, we have to have a completely different skill set than we had before. It needs to be usually more data-driven, more customer-journey-driven, more customer-experience-driven, more like, “What are you doing in those individual experiences?” Google calls it the “Zero Moment of Truth.” What do you do at each moment of opportunity with a consumer? We just don’t have that. And so we’ve got all these skill sets. How are they going to transition? So we’re not really prepared.

Greg Stuart: [00:08:01] I think, though, that where the companies go wrong is that, because we’re not being clear about the role of marketing, they don’t incentivize marketers properly in the right way. I don’t think that the incentives are right. My guess is that bonuses and bonus structures are off because that’s what should drive the proper behavior alignment to the corporate goals. And I think marketers have been reticent to accept growth as the main focus of what they should do, which is what the answer should be. And then they should be measured, incentivized, and paid against that growth. And they’re not. And so, as a result of that, they end up with convoluted goals, and they don’t really change in the way that we think they need to as aggressively as they need to.

What Is the Role of Marketing?Celisa Steele: [00:08:37] So you gave that example of that meeting where no one in the room could agree what the role of marketing is. How do you explain the role of marketing? What’s your view on that?

Greg Stuart: [00:08:47] So, by the way, we have done a bunch of real work with a team of professors across the country to work specifically on that area. The first thing they needed to do is to define what are the different go-to-market strategies? There are three of them. There are only three of them, everybody. One is brand—the position in the mind of the consumer. Second one, as I mentioned, is obviously customer experience, which is the stronger of the ones against financial performance for the companies we see executing against that. How do you manage the entire journey? How do you make the acquisition of the product for the consumer and that whole journey smoother, easier, and simpler?

Greg Stuart: [00:09:29] How do we make consumers less frustrated with buying things from people and companies? Okay, I say that with the right tone there. And the third one is around direct-to-consumer. There are a lot of businesses that are just very transaction-oriented, and that can be successful. And you can have exactly the same product. Exactly. The best one is Harry’s razors and Gillette razors. They’re exactly the same product. Maybe they wouldn’t like me to say that, but they’re the same damn product. But their go-to-market strategy is completely different. One is a very transactionally-driven subscription model. The other one’s in-store retail, more brand-driven.

Greg Stuart: [00:09:59] Both are fine. You need to choose one and go down it. And now you can have combinations. You could be brand and customer experience. I don’t think you can be all three because, listen, strategy is about making choices—what to do and what not to do—and so, at some point, somebody’s got to make a decision. But you need to have alignment. The challenge too with this—and I’m going to get a little off topic here from the question, but just because I think you’re going to go there next—is that the issue is then did they hire the right marketer, the right CMO, the right team to do that, to execute that particular strategy? So the CEO and the board have to make the decision, have to co-create on what strategy they have, go-to-market, obviously. The CMO then has got to be the right person to actually execute that. And so the work we’ve done around marketing org now—not to get too off point here, I’ll come back to you—in this case, we created a product that will measure capability fit to strategy. And we happen to know for a fact that, when fit is aligned to strategy, sales go up. Marketing org design affects the actual revenue generation of the company. That’s a blow-your-mind. That’s not existed anywhere that I’ve ever heard of for any department within a company. But we’ve now figured that out.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:11:14] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

Using Data to Drive Effective MarketingCelisa Steele: [00:11:45] You mentioned it around, perhaps when we were talking about the incentivization structure being off, and so that marketers aren’t necessarily being measured against what matters. When I was thinking about this idea of really taking an evidence-based approach to marketing, that requires data. I’m wondering if the bigger issue is a lack of data (like organizations either aren’t collecting it), or is it a bigger issue around interpretation or use of that data (like they have it, but they just don’t know how to use it effectively)? Do you have any thoughts there on what the issue with data might be?

Greg Stuart: [00:12:19] Evidence is really marketing measurement. Do they have the right measurement? So the other challenge you have, when you don’t have financial incentives to make sure that you’re boosting the productivity of marketing, which is a lack of evidence-orientation to the world would be, or the lack of measurement, you also do have to understand the basics—understanding of both measurement and core marketing growth frameworks. We’ve done research and have validated that, first off, most marketers are not familiar with the core growth frameworks, of which there are three primarily in the world. We happen to have created a fourth because one of those three was wrong. So that’s part of the issue, is that we don’t understand the basics about how real marketing works. Marketers have a tendency to make shit up. They’re generally pretty articulate in their speaking, and so they tend to create a sense of believability. I don’t think we’re always right. So you’ve got to have the right premise.

Greg Stuart: [00:13:12] But then, once you’ve got the right framework, that you understand what you’re aiming for, then you’re right, and you need to create the right measurement. But measurement is complicated. It’s technical. It’s not in line with the old thinking of brand-oriented marketing, and so most don’t have good measurement. And listen, by the way, the answer is two things. It’s multi-touch attribution, and it’s incrementality. Those are the answers. I happen to be the co-founder, although I was kind of on the side—I was the rich patron that made multi-touch attribution happen. The guy who actually did that was a guy named Rex Briggs, who actually created that methodology. But, if you don’t have that in house today, if you are not using multi-touch attribution, then I almost guarantee your incentives are probably not aligned to the growth of the company. So the problem’s worse than the question you’re asking.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:56] Deeper, yes.

Greg Stuart: [00:13:57] Yes. It’s a deeper question. It’s not that they resist evidence-based…or I probably use the word “science-based” or “data-based,” that is driven by numbers. And, by the way, I want to be really clear, that’s not to take away from the magic. I have seen, in my career, the magic of getting message and creative position right. It’s crazy when it works—when you can get it. I’m a firm believer you can never invest enough to get the message and the creative right. Never invest enough. But, after that, you spend a lot of money trying to communicate with consumers, and how you do that, how you allocate that, and then how you measure that effectiveness and iterate upon that, I think, is understood by many but not nearly enough.

Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)Celisa Steele: [00:14:38] All right. So go a little bit deeper on the multi-touch attribution, just for folks who aren’t familiar with that or want to have a beginning understanding of what that means and looks like.

Greg Stuart: [00:14:47] Yes. I’m constantly horrified when people in marketing don’t understand what that is. The stats are today that 52 percent of marketers—large-scale, enterprise marketers, the people that we work with—have multi-touch attribution systems in-house, measurement tools to be able to do that kind of thing. Fifty-two percent was pretty low when that was created 20 years ago. That’s what led to the book. The book is really the story of Rex and I helping the industry to completely change marketing forever. The book was called What Sticks. So what multi-touch attribution is—the other one that a lot of people use is media mix modeling. That’s top-down. MTA is bottoms-up. What, in essence, MTA is doing—this is the best explanation of it—you’re basically aggregating an individual’s media habits, what ads they’re exposed to. To the best of your ability, you’re measuring what ads they’re exposed to, and you’re tying that either to their change in brand awareness, not recall but brand awareness, or actual sales data. And when you combine those at the individual level, then you’re able to aggregate that up to get a view of what channels and/or messages are really having the most impact on consumers.

Greg Stuart: [00:15:59] This is the most powerful thing that I’ve seen. What you’re looking for is that you’ve got the right mix of media channels, marketing channels to consumers because there’s an optimization across that based on different people’s habits of watching media. You can’t say generally. You have to measure. You wouldn’t be able to guess that kind of stuff. But you’re also looking for pots of gold in there, I like to say—or veins of gold. And what that means is that you’re looking for where there’s a market where you’re arbitraged in the market sometimes. Let me give a very specific example of that. So we did a study for Wendy’s a number of years ago, and the guy who was running that, Brandon Rhoten, was amazing. He had made a decision that targeting consumers who both like coupons—and Wendy’s, at the time, was doing an offer-oriented pitch to the marketplace. Buy one, get two free. Or buy two, get free, one free. I don’t even remember. It doesn’t matter. But it was very promotional. He was also targeting people who drove by Wendy’s on a regular basis.

Greg Stuart: [00:17:05] Now, at some level, that would be obvious. Of course you should do that. But you need to know how valuable that is. So here’s the thing. Each one of those two segments, to target those people, was worth five x anything else in the plan. It produced five times the sales of anything else in the plan. Now, what made that really powerful is that he was able to spend, or Wendy’s was able to spend five percent of the total budget against each one of those. So ten percent of that budget was worth five x what anything else was. That’s what drove the sales of that company. But, if you’re not able to identify that particular vein of gold—you could have guessed that those were valuable, and, sure, you should have put a couple of percentage points of the total budget against that. Any idiot would be able to figure it out. But to know that the optimized level was near five percent, very hard to do. And nobody probably would have made that kind of commitment at that level, and yet that was transformational to the business. You got to know where the real power in this thing is, and that requires science and, as you pointed out, evidence. You got to know it.

Getting Customer Motivation RightCelisa Steele: [00:18:05] You brought up What Sticks when you were talking about multi-touch attribution. One of the themes that comes through clearly in What Sticks is this foundational need to get the customer’s motivation right. Are there any generic tips that you can offer to listeners around what it actually looks like to get those customer motivations right? Tactics they can take or ways to validate that they aren’t just making an assumption about what learning their customers need to do, for example?

Greg Stuart: [00:18:40] Boy, that’s a complicated question. Listen, I don’t know that motivation is the only thing, but it was an important element that we didn’t see. I don’t know—there were so many things we saw that we got wrong, that marketers got wrong in doing that work. So where that work came from is that I was running, at the time, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which was focused on online advertising and trying to promote and develop online advertising as an industry. At that point, it was an eight-billion-dollar category. Today it’s, I don’t know, 100 billion, or whatever it is. Big. Two hundred billion, maybe. And so I was trying to find a way for marketers to understand what the value of the Internet was, and MMM didn’t do it. Other measurement techs didn’t do it, and that’s why Rex Briggs then showed me the technique he was developing at the time called multi-touch attribution and sort of got us down that path. We did, in total, about two dozen what ultimately were public studies with major marketers. We spent about five to seven million dollars doing those studies for marketers to understand what was the percentage of budget that should be allocated to Internet in the marketing mix? That was the idea before mobile. But what we found…it’s the same thing…I’m trying to reflect on this.

Greg Stuart: [00:19:52] It’s the same thing I’m saying now. It’s probably the reason I’m doing the MMA, is that we started to understand marketers, they were just making too much stuff up. It may have sounded good, but it wasn’t right. We were able to prove it through the research that it was factually wrong. And motivation was one of the many elements they get wrong. That was basic core strategy. I was earlier talking about all the allocation of channels—I was treating it as an investment orientation, portfolio kind of thing. But you’re right—you’ve got to make sure that strategy is right. And, if you don’t do that, we’d run into situations like you’d see it show up in the ad testing. And I remember we’d go to marketers and say, “Well, are you testing your ads?” And they go, “Well, no.” I remember one marketer—I won’t name names on this one. I may have named them in the book, but I forget. I said, “Well, why aren’t you testing your ads? Why aren’t you pre-testing the ads before you start spending tens of millions of dollars?” And they said, “Well, we don’t have any time.” We said, “Well, walk us through your process.”

Greg Stuart: [00:20:51] Well, here’s what they were doing. For Internet ads, they were getting nine people in the company to sign off on the ad, to approve the ad before it went public. And we said, “Do any of those people have any background in online advertising?” They said, “Well, no.” “Well, then, how would they evaluate the ad?” They don’t know what the hell they’re looking at. Second thing was, we said, “Have you shown them the actual strategy, the underlying strategy so they’re evaluating the ad against the actual strategy?” You got to make sure you’re aiming for—this is similar to motivation. But they were saying, “No.” “So why don’t you stop asking those nine people and just go pre-test the ads?” That’s going to tell you more about its effectiveness, how it’s going to work, and if that motivation is both appreciated and understood by consumers. And then, the second part, have you communicated it properly to them? Then you’ve got to get to the optimization thing. So, yes, I don’t know—it feels like every time I turn around, every time we kick over a rock, we just find more mess. The stuff isn’t totally understood. And then, let’s look at what’s about to happen. We’re about to enter the age of AI. So the foundation is not good, and we’re about to bring a whole new technology orientation to the world. I don’t know—it concerns me.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in MarketingCelisa Steele: [00:22:06] Let’s talk a little bit then about AI because I know that that’s a focus where you’re giving some time and attention. Let’s ask a big-picture question of what do you see as the role of AI in marketing? And what should we be thinking about as we’re thinking about marketing our products and services, given what AI is now doing to our world?

Greg Stuart: [00:22:31] I think most people that I speak to, broadly in business, believe that sales and marketing will be the two areas—or a singular area, they’re somewhat similar—they will be most affected by AI. I don’t know if that’s fact, but I feel like I’ve heard that enough that we’ll go with wisdom of the crowd for the moment. And I do think that marketing is a grossly inefficient business. We do way too much by hand. We don’t have good measurement. If we had good quality measurement, then machines, at some level, could run big portions of it. But, when you say only 52 percent do MTA, then clearly we don’t. And MTA is the only way you can do real-time, near-immediate measurement. MMM is more long-term. I talked to a big-time CMO, one of the CMOs on my board the other day. We were going through a conversation, and I asked her what she thinks marketers need. The context is I have a podcast now called Building Better CMOs. It’s really asking marketers what do you think we don’t get right, and what do you think we should do to get it right? Because that’s my job as the head of a trade association. I’m supposed to go fix stuff. And so I said, “What do you see?” She said, “I don’t think that marketers fully understand the complexity of operations today for marketing.”

Greg Stuart: [00:23:44] I go, “Explain.” She goes, “I have a campaign going that has 5,000 creative assets.” That’s not a magic job. That’s not a magic job. That’s an operations job. She’s right. So how do we know? Do we have the systems, the processes, the technology in order to do that? So that’s already how complex it is. My guess, with AI, we do finally have the opportunity to start serving more personalized messages to consumers, to really be relevant, to stop, frankly, annoying the shit out of consumers because that’s what the business has been, the business to the dawn. Print didn’t do this. TV totally did this. It was just bludgeoning consumers with ads, and they were untargeted, irrelevant. It was, in essence, teaching consumers to ignore ads. That’s why people don’t…. Advertisement is not a bad business. It can be a very helpful business. It’s meant to be helpful. It’s just information. But we’re not respectful of people’s time sometimes in the way that we operate. It’s getting so much better. CTV is going to change all that, and the digitalization of the business is making it better. And, certainly, Internet’s a little bit better. But hopefully AI allows us to both create more value for our companies especially but also better respect consumers.

Greg Stuart: [00:24:56] I think that’s really the big opportunity that gets me excited for us to lean into it. You asked me, though, a question. So where is the opportunity in AI? I don’t have a good framework on that yet. I don’t have what I think is validated or proven. My sense is, and where I’m leaning towards, there are two things. One is that it’s efficient. It’s creation of efficiency. It’s solving some of these operational complexities at some level. That would be good. But I think also, too, that there’s an opportunity to really improve the productivity, the value of marketing, the real intensity of it at a level we’ve never seen. And I’m not saying that like I’m making that up. We have been running a series of studies now—it’s called Consortium for AI Personalization—and what we’re doing is figuring out how to personalize ads in a limited way—not a full-on generative AI, but how we personalize ads in a limited way using simply contextual signal. In other words, I don’t have to know who somebody is. I don’t have to have a database on people. I could just use contextual. The performance gains on that…. And, by the way, I have nothing to sell here; I’m just a trade association. I don’t have a product. I couldn’t offer you anything. I wouldn’t run this for you. That’s not what I do. I’m just trying to find truth and facts.

Greg Stuart: [00:26:08] The performance gains of personalizing ads appear to be somewhere around two to three x. I might ask you, for your business—I know for mine, if you came to me as a CEO of this organization, which I am, and you said I can improve 10 percent of your business two to three x, I would clear my calendar for the rest of the week. I would stop production of everything else we were doing. We would focus just on that. But, Celisa, you know what’s really bad? Not every marketer I know is working against that. WTF. Really, that’s insane. It goes back to your point about evidence and measurement. And I think too, if I go back to the thrust of the podcast here, where’s our learning? Why do marketers think that we have to have all the answers? Why don’t we operate from a standpoint of “Okay, how do I better understand? How do I accept the fact that maybe I’m not great at what I do?” Which is a hard thing for anybody to digest. I get that. But what are you really doing to grow and be better and to learn against the future? That’s why I’m excited. I think we have that opportunity. It’ll be interesting whether or not the industry goes far enough to do it.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:12] Back to the earlier question about motivation and then thinking about what you just said around personalization and AI there, do you think that AI is going to play a role in helping us get that customer motivation right? Or is that still something foundational that we have to then bring to our use of AI?

Greg Stuart: [00:27:29] Listen, there’s always going to be positioning of a product in some common, consensus way. We can’t make the product completely different for everybody. I think that would just create confusion in the world. But I do think that people make different decisions for different reasons. And I don’t know all your exposure to marketing, but for years we based it on demographics. We would say we’re buying men or women 18 to 49 or something. There’s nothing the same about men or women 18 to 49. It’s just ridiculous. We did demographics. That always looked stupid to me, but it was the best we could do. By the way, I’ll give you an example. So the study—this one study we did for Kroger. I can name the name on that because they’ve been public about it. They got plus 259 percent over their best efforts, their best thinking, the best performing orientation they had. AI was able to improve plus 259 percent—that’s plus three to four x. Astonishing. Crazy. And it wasn’t personalizing motivation. It was really just personalizing the visuals on the thing, which somehow appealed to people differently. We don’t know enough at this point to know why.

Greg Stuart: [00:28:35] Maybe my researcher would know, but I’ve not heard. And so you’re right, when we start to tweak the motivation a little bit to get satisfying better somebody’s individual needs, I can only imagine it could just go up from here. Listen, I want to throw one more thing though here. You didn’t ask this, but I think it’s important to an earlier one, just to connect the dots here. Here’s what makes AI though, I think, a really big deal. Tell me one thing in a business, one thing that you can work against that dramatically improves the performance of business, as I’ve said, to as high as even almost four x? Three hundred percent would be four x. Tell me anything you can do to do that that then costs less. Doesn’t happen. Well, I don’t think so. I’d love for your listeners or somebody to feedback to me and give me other examples. That’d be great. But I’ve not seen anything that can boost productivity and value creation that aggressively and also lower the cost and become more efficient. That’s why I think AI is a big deal.

Personal Approach to Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:29:43] We do always like to ask guests who come on the Leading Learning Podcast about their own lifelong learning. So when you think about how you continue to grow professionally, personally too if you want, what are some of the approaches, sources, or ways that you think about your own lifelong learning?

Greg Stuart: [00:29:59] I heard somebody say not too long ago that, “Life is just about work and relationships. And, by the way, work is just about relationships.” I thought that was a very funny way to put it. And so I think that the learning…. Do I learn operationally about how the business works? Yes. Do I need to understand more about financials? Sure. Should I constantly be educating myself? Absolutely. I’m very lucky in the roles I have. I get to talk to some of the biggest business leaders in the world. I don’t just have the big companies in my industry. I have the biggest companies in the world on my board, at extremely senior levels. Facebook—or Meta, I should say—Google. Snap.

Greg Stuart: [00:30:39] Everybody sits there with us, along with the CMOs of AT&T, Major League Baseball, Visa, Verizon, and the list goes on and on and on. Major marketers that are working at GM. A bunch of them that are working with us. So that’s fortunate for me to get to learn from those people I think are amazing, those relationships, and so on. I think, though, if I was to give…. I might be twisting your question a little bit. Learning is about trying to be better at some level. I think the more important thing I’ve done is that I have had a coach for over 30 years. It’s teaching me how to have relationships and how to have conversations and to appropriately handle things. So I’ve had a personal coach for 30 years—most important person in my life.

Greg Stuart: [00:31:25] Well, now running the MMA, which has been a little over ten years for that period, I have had a psychologist on retainer at this company. He’s a PhD, Harvard, serious business. This is the real deal, this guy. And he is available to me and the other members of the team to help figure out…. I’m using him often to say, “Well, am I looking at this in the right way? Is there pathology that I have that is getting in the way of me hearing the situation, understanding the situation, or making the right decision around it?” It’s what you would ask a coach to do. “Do I twist a little this way to run faster? Do I jump higher by springing?” That’s what you ask a coach to do. I block the tackle. That’s what a coach is supposed to do to help you tweak the system to get a little bit more right. You still can lose the game, but it’s about getting a little bit better all the time. And I think, if you’re serious about your career, if you’re really out there, to have fun trying to be the best I can do in the short life that I have, you got to have people there that can really help you do that.

Greg Stuart: [00:32:33] Now, sometimes you could do it through mentors. It’s a different relationship, though, I think, a little bit. Mentors are good, and I applaud and appreciate, and I’ve had a series of people that have been really helpful to me in my career. But I think that long-standing expertise applied to becoming a little bit better every day. I think everybody would know, at some level, Tiger Woods’s story. I’m not an expert. I certainly don’t know Tiger. But he’s been through a series of injuries. He had to change his game. He had to shift his game. The game was different. And he played the game different at this age. The game is different than the game he could play before. It’s like all those little tweaks are all, to me, I think…the point I’m getting to is that I think that’s the important learning you need to have. I do think you got to pick up capabilities, and you got to be smart. You got to learn PowerPoint, Excel—you got to know all that stuff. Again, you want to be really good at those things. You want to be good at the tools of your job, and you want to understand operationally, and you want to get experience on how to make those decisions. But I think it’s that idea of having somebody that can help you make good decisions, better decisions, remove the pathology from your decisions, the stuff that’s dysfunctional, that gets in the way of making good decisions or having good relationships is so critically important to me.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:49] For over three decades, Greg Stuart has contributed majorly to the transformation of marketing and media. Greg Stuart is CEO of MMA Global, an international trade association for marketers, and author of What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds. Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and X.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer * The Strategy and Marketing Episode * The 4 Ps of Marketing Your Learning Business

The post Measuring Marketing with Greg Stuart appeared first on Leading Learning.

What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee yours Succeeds

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbWhat is capacity? The dictionary defines capacity as “the facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy.” But we dig deeper to look at what capacity means for learning businesses.

We explore three key facets of capacity (people, technology, and processes), look at capacity both as an assessment of current reality and a way to think about an ideal future state, and touch on how capacity plays out at three levels (individual, organization, and community).

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:00] To execute on a strategy and deliver meaningful results, a learning business has to have sufficient capacity—and optimized capacity has the ability to exponentially improve its reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:19] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] What is capacity? That’s what we want to explore in episode 386 of the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:34] And we have some views and ideas about capacity. We felt strongly enough about the importance of capacity to include it as one of the five domains of the Learning Business Maturity Model.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:45] Right. We saw—and still see—capacity, marketing, portfolio, strategy, and leadership as five domains that all learning businesses need to attend to and work to improve performance in.

Defining Capacity and Three Key ComponentsJeff Cobb: [00:00:59] But we’ve found that the word capacity has different associations and implications in different contexts, and there isn’t always clarity or agreement about what capacity refers to specifically and practically.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:12] The dictionary definition of capacity is “the facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy.” But we want to dig a little bit deeper today, get a little bit more specific than that dictionary definition, and look at what capacity means for learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:29] We can talk about three components of capacity if we want to break it down a little bit. And, in the maturity model we’ve already referenced, we focus on people and technology as components of capacity. And the core question that we ask around that domain is “Does the organization have sufficient capacity, in terms of human resources and technology, to pursue the vision and strategy effectively?”

Celisa Steele: [00:01:58] That’s right. Each of those five domains, we have one overarching question that we try to use to encapsulate that domain. As you just shared, Jeff, that core question for capacity focuses on people and technology—human resources and technology. Today we’re going to add a third area of focus: processes. And we’ll say a little bit more about this in a minute, but processes were not only implied but actually mentioned as you dig a little bit deeper into capacity in the maturity model. But, for today’s conversation, we want to elevate processes up to that same level as people and technology and really look at those three aspects of capacity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:36] Yes, and I think people often don’t think about processes so much. They’re just hidden in the workings of the organization and not raised to that conscious level that you’re talking about, and, in many cases, they’re just not documented well. And we speak from experience because we’re in the process of doing some capacity work ourselves, and processes are front and center. So people, technology, processes. Let’s start with the people part of it.

The People Component of CapacityCelisa Steele: [00:03:02] Right. So a key element here would be staff, of course. And then, when you think about staff, there’s a question of do you have the right staff in place? Do you have the right people on the team? And then, I guess, to borrow a Jim Collins phrase, are they in the right seat?

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:18] Yes, getting those right people on the bus is so important. And, in fact, he says that’s the foundation of everything—getting those right people on the bus—and that is directly speaking to the importance of capacity.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:30] He points out, first, you’ve got to get them on the bus, and then you have to figure out if they’re in the right seats.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:34] That’s right. It’s the getting them on that’s the most important part. And then you can figure it out from there. Sometimes that means hiring people. It doesn’t always mean hiring people, though.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:44] Sometimes you can make use of contract help. So it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a staff hire that you might make. It could be that you’re looking to just make use of an individual or perhaps a service organization to support what your learning business is doing. And, of course, whether it’s with an individual or an organization, those can be shorter-term or longer-term engagements, and sometimes it’s more people-focused. For example, you might have an SEO consultant—a search engine optimization consultant—and that’s a person that’s fulfilling a certain type of work, but it’s basically ongoing. As you put out new Web content, they’re going to be doing what they need to do to make sure that it’s optimized. Sometimes looking to outside help is much more project-focused, and, in fact, that’s the approach we take in the consulting work that we do at Tagoras. We work with client organizations around developing a shared vision for what’s the scope of work, what’s the project that we’re involved in together.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:44] And I think that ability to know how and when to use a contractor versus an employee or a short-term contractor versus a longer-term contractor really gets to the fundamentals of knowing how to manage capacity effectively, being able to make those decisions, what makes sense when as part of your overall capacity as an organization.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:11] Sometimes too you don’t necessarily have, maybe you don’t have—or perhaps you want to push back on this, Jeff—but maybe you don’t always have a choice of whether to hire or whether to work with someone who’s in more of an external role. I’m thinking about subject matter experts, which so many of our learning businesses rely on to help develop and deliver content. And so, in most of those cases, those are going to remain external resources. I guess you could argue that you may occasionally hire a really stellar SME, make them part of your staff, but in general that’s going to remain an external role, and so you’re going to have to balance what it looks like to work with someone who’s really providing a very essential type of task and doing essential work for your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:55] Yes, I think in many ways subject matter experts are the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to capacity and the people part of capacity for learning businesses because they are so essential. And I do think once a learning business reaches a certain size, having some subject matter expertise on staff, on call can be the right thing to do. We’ve worked with many organizations where they do have some subject matter expertise on staff. But, still, to handle the breadth of learning needs that most learning businesses are going to have to handle, you’ve got to be able to work with those volunteer and outsourced, contracted subject matter experts. And, of course, that whole terrain has changed so much as subject matter experts have become increasingly empowered to just do their own thing, basically. This was something that came up—we run a leadership mastermind group—the fact that those relationships with subject matter experts have changed. In many cases, subject matter experts are competing directly with the learning businesses that have traditionally used them. It’s a big issue. And this whole realm of capacity, I’m going to say probably mostly the people part, but I think all parts of it can get pretty complex and pretty nuanced pretty quickly.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:01] And so, again, thinking about people, I think we see often a perennial issue around just not enough people. I think a lot of learning businesses can feel understaffed, and so that then tends to lead to a view of there are two things to do—you can do less, or you could hire more.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:19] Right.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:19] By hiring more, whether that’s internal or external, it’s the idea of adding capacity in the sense of adding some person’s time, energy, and effort to what you’re doing. And often then there’s “Well, how do you justify that?” or making the case to do that, to the extent that you need to make the argument to someone higher up in your organization. And then that often means that you’re going to either need to show some success that you’ve had because of having the people on board, which would then perhaps translate into an additional full-time person, half-time person, whatever it is. Or it’s about making the case that, if we had access to more time from some people, we would be able to achieve more. So that’s on the hiring more than on the do less side.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:09] That’s always a struggle, I think, for the organizations that we deal with, because there usually is a compelling case for doing less, focusing the resources you have better, but sunsetting programs that have been around for a long time, that may be those proverbial sacred cows or whatever—however people tend to describe them—that can be really tough. There’s often this tension there between the people you have, the programming you’re trying to offer, and how do you make those match up? Making the budget argument’s hard, but making the sunsetting argument’s also hard. So that’s really a challenge of leadership in most learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:52] I think all of this speaks to being able to clearly identify, in your portfolio, what is performing well, what is delivering high value, and then what activities, by comparison, are not delivering as high a value. Because, of course, that’s going to allow you to set priorities and determine where the resources that you do have available should put their time and energy, and then, to your point about sunsetting, what you might potentially sunset or at least diminish the amount of time, energy, and effort you’re putting against them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:24] Yes. And I’ll say I won’t pull on this thread too hard because we should move on to other areas of capacity, but too often organizations don’t know the financial performance of their portfolio on a product-by-product basis. They can’t say that X product is profitable or not because they haven’t gone that deep in the finances on individual offerings. We find this again and again. So that makes it really hard to be able to make the right types of capacity decisions around people and otherwise.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:54] You said we shouldn’t pull too hard on that, but I do think it might be worth saying just a little bit more. So there’s, as you pointed out, this need to differentiate from product to product. I think there’s also this idea of sunk costs, and I think often, if you are developing something internally with staff time, you often don’t necessarily know or know how to account for how much staff time is going against that product, so that then you can really look at is it as profitable as we think it is when we actually look at how much time staff is spending.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:28] Yes, and that’s one of the key missing components. Organizations have no idea how much staff time goes against a particular product. They also often don’t do a great job of accounting for how technology applies against different products and against the business as a whole. So maybe we can move on to talking about technology as an aspect of capacity.

The Technology Component of CapacityCelisa Steele: [00:10:50] Yes, and I think here part of what’s key to having appropriate capacity is making sure that there are systems in place that will support you where you need support. Part of it’s about identifying systems that really can help you. And then, of course, there’s using the system. Before we hit record, Jeff, you and I were talking about a piece of software where there’s a lot of functionality. We’ve got it in place, and now it’s the figuring out how to use that system well and use it efficiently, and all of that very much relates to capacity and what you’re actually able to do internally with that piece of software or that system.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:26] Yes. There’s a crossover with people here because very often organizations will spend a lot of money putting, whether it’s a learning management system or some other system in place, and then not invest in either hiring somebody who has the skill set or training the people who are already at the organization in how to really get the most out of that system. So technology and people definitely meet up. Technologies are usually only as useful as the people who are using them actually have the knowledge to use them well.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:54] I think a prime example here is generative AI. That really shows, I think, the overlap between people and technology because it really begins to blur those lines much more. We have technology that’s doing what people might have done in the past, or that’s capable of doing it. And so, really, from a capacity standpoint, it may change the percentage of people versus technology or what you can rely on. And I think in an ideal world, back to that “People often feel under-resourced” or “Learning businesses often feel under-resourced in that people area,” well, if you can make effective use of technology, effective use of generative AI, then that may help you actually free up additional time that your staff or your contractors could spend on other things.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:47] Yes, and this will probably sound antiquated quickly, but we’ve just reached a point in the last couple of weeks or so where custom GPTs have become a thing. So you can make your own, basically, ChatGPTs that are defined for particular roles and purposes. I was just on a call with somebody who’s defined a support GPT and a copywriting GPT, and she’s got this whole set of GPTs she’s defining out and training to perform essential functions within her organization. And they’re just going to get better and better at doing those things over time. She’s essentially building a team of GPTs around her. And there are limitations to that. There still has to be that human intervention. But what it is now possible for an organization to do in terms of expanding its capacity by leveraging traditional technologies but now also these generative AI technologies—if you’re listening to this, and you haven’t started exploring those and experimenting with them yet, get to it.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:13:49] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

The Processes Component of CapacityCelisa Steele: [00:14:20] We touched on people. We’ve touched on technology. That brings us to the third area: processes. And, as you hinted at, Jeff, I think this is top of mind for us because we’ve been feeling the need for having processes in place pretty keenly and acutely ourselves. The idea here is that you need to have procedures and guidelines, and these need to be in place because they’re going to help people and technology use be as efficient and productive as possible. It’s going to help people know how to use that technology. It’s going to help people know what to do. It has a lot of implications for things like continuity and succession planning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:05] Yes. And, of course, every organization has processes in place, whether they recognize it or not. I think part of what we’ve been doing—and what so many organizations need to do—is to surface those, to make them explicit, to document them, to make them knowledge that can be communicated to new people coming in, that can be understood across the organization, that people can be trained on. They can be referenced.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:27] They can be used to create a custom GPT.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:29] They can be used to create a custom GPT. And the processes really are the glue that binds people and technology together too. You have to have good processes, and everybody needs to be aware of them and integrate them into how you’re using technology effectively.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:46] Yes, I agree that they help with how people use technology. I think they also just help, even when technology is out of the picture as well, just to help people in their job. We talked about hiring or outsourcing earlier. Having processes, having those procedures and guidelines in place is going to really make it much easier to onboard anybody that you would hire or anybody that you would be looking to outsource a particular task or set of tasks. So we’ve talked about three areas of capacity: people, technology, and processes. And now we want to take two views, or two lenses, on developing or building capacity, and those two views are your current capacity and then evolving capacity.

Building Capacity: Views of Current State and Desired Future StateJeff Cobb: [00:16:34] And I think lying in the background of that is a view of capacity that really comes out of the charitable sector, the sector of nonprofits that are really funded by foundations, grants, and those sorts of sources. We used to do a lot more work in that area than we do now, but the idea of capacity building is very big there. When organizations receive grants, there’s often this idea that you have this current level of capacity. “You’re getting this infusion of funding. We’d like to see a concerted effort for you to move from where you are currently to this future state of capacity.” It’s very explicit there in my experience, at least much more explicit than you find it in other sectors of the nonprofit world or in the for-profit world.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:22] Yes, I think that’s a good angle to take because it does really get to the core of capacity, which I think, in a healthy learning business, is about improving the capacity, growing the capacity, making it savvier. And so, in terms of the two views, if we think about the current view, you’re going to want to do an assessment based on who’s on the bus now, what seats they’re in, and that’s going to give you an idea for where there might be gaps. What is it that you’re trying to do that you don’t really currently have capacity around? It could be a key piece of technology that might be missing, an old piece of technology that needs to be replaced, or potentially a new position, but you’re going to base that on your current state. But then there’s that evolving lens, and that really is then that future-state view. Where is it you’re trying to go? Where is your strategy taking you as a learning business? And making sure that you’re thinking beyond what we just need to do now to deliver on what we’re currently doing well. What can we be doing that will build capacity, that will allow us to do more, to do better, or to do differently in the future?

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:34] Yes, I think you’re really looking for where is there leverage? Where, if we apply certain approaches, is it really going to make a difference for us? And that can be in multiple ways. We’ve talked about hiring, bringing people in, getting people on the bus. There’s obviously formal training that can be done to help people pick up new skills and knowledge. There’s a lot of informal that can be done—working out loud, just different ways to really make it part of the culture of the organization. Because, yes, you can have clear initiatives around training, around documenting processes, that sort of thing, but I think it’s also important for there to be a culture of capacity building. This really is a learning culture. We’ve talked about learning culture, broadly speaking, before; this is within an organization. That culture is there. They are always going to be doing things that are going to help us to evolve as individuals because at the root of organizational capacity is individual capacity, and just to make that a part of how people think about and approach their day-to-day work.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:35] I think part of that view of the future state, the evolving role of building capacity, or what it looks like to build capacity, again this is just a place where you need to continually reassess. Again, we’ll take the example of generative artificial intelligence. That has really changed a lot of what people are doing or were doing. So, suddenly, having someone who knew how to create great graphics is no longer quite as important if you can go out and get a piece of gen AI software that’s going to help you do that, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:11] Or that person becomes much more productive at creating graphics at a higher volume, higher scale, whatever it is, because they’ve now got this tool to help them with doing it. In the programming world, there’s always this talk about “Can I become a 10-times programmer now that I’ve got AI to help me?” And the answer to that is maybe. But you’ve got to have the underlying talent in the first place to leverage. But, if you’ve got somebody who’s good at particular things in your organization (hopefully you do), then adding AI to that, you may see a significant jump in your capacity.

Three Levels of Capacity-Building: Individual, Organization, and CommunityCelisa Steele: [00:20:40] So the last area we wanted to touch on are just three levels of capacity building. And those three levels are at the individual level, at the organizational level, and then at the level of the community, the field, or the profession. And so, for a learning business, the individual really is that staff person or that key volunteer—maybe a subject matter expert, maybe a board member. So that’s—you just said, Jeff—that idea of at the core of organizational capacity is individual capacity. If you want to make your learning business better, if you want to increase its capacity, by definition, that means you’re going to be increasing the capacity of your people at some level.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:24] Yes, and that’s going to be investment in professional development, investment in training, but also, as we were just talking about, that culture that makes it clear that’s what people in your organization do—they learn, they grow, they develop, they are self-motivated and self-directing in doing that. And then, of course, the organizational capacity, that really is that totality of the people we’ve been talking about—the technology, the processes, how those all really meld together—and then making sure you’re paying attention to and managing what happens when one of those changes or something is added, or maybe that can happen across multiple of them at one time. How agile and adaptive are you with respect to capacity?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:09] And then the third level is that community level. And so, for nonprofits, back to your example of charitable organizations, Jeff, this is the idea that a funder helps build, say, the capacity of a food bank, and then that is going to mean that more hungry people are fed. For learning businesses, this often comes down to trying to improve the field, the profession, or industry and/or those served by the field, profession, or industry. So it could be the medical field, or you could be thinking too about doctors’ patients, that end user there. But this idea is that, if you make good use of capacity, if you have individuals that are continually improving their own capacity, if the organization is continually optimizing their capacity, then you have this chance to broaden those circles of impact out beyond into that community.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:14] To execute on a strategy and deliver meaningful results, a learning business has to have sufficient capacity—and optimized capacity has the ability to exponentially improve its reach, revenue, and impact. A learning business needs enough of the right people, it needs documented and efficient processes, and it needs technology that supports and enhances the work.

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Related Resources* Who and What: The Capacity Challenge * 7 Ways to Build Capacity for Your Learning Business * Maturity, Learning, and Desired States

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While arguably lifelong learning has always been a vital part of human existence, it’s hard not to notice the new level of emphasis that has been placed on it in recent years.

In 2017, The Economist declared lifelong learning an “economic imperative,” and it has hardly been the only publication in mainstream and business presses to insist on the importance of learning in a world where the scale, scope, and speed of change seem much higher than ever before.

As The Economist’s interest in the topic suggests, much of the concern over lifelong learning ties back to the employment market and to business productivity and growth. Terms like “upskilling” and “reskilling” have become trendy ways to describe what workers must do—or have done to them—if they expect to remain relevant and remain employed in the current economy.

But, while much of the focus has been on formal education and training tied to employment, the demand and supply for lifelong learning are much broader. From YouTube videos to social media communities to the age-old institution of local book groups, lifelong learning permeates nearly all aspects of our lives whether we are conscious of it or not—and technology has multiplied the options exponentially.

Information may want to be free, as some have suggested, and knowledge may be invaluable, but it became clear long ago that there is money to be made from all this learning activity. People will pay, sometimes handsomely, for access to content and experiences that promise to improve their condition. As a result, there is a thriving and growing global market for lifelong learning.

In this article, we’ll look at key aspects of this market and consider how it is likely to evolve in coming years.

Defining Lifelong LearningAs with so many things in life, what “counts” as lifelong learning is often skewed by the perspective of the person talking about it or the group seeking to serve lifelong learners. So it’s important to understand our perspective, which informs all that is written in this piece..

Our view at Leading Learning is that lifelong learning, by definition, occurs throughout life. It is not limited to adulthood or late adulthood. That said, in our own work we have chosen to focus specifically on adult lifelong learning, and the focus of the article is on the market for adult lifelong learning.

We also believe it is important to recognize that lifelong learning is not limited to education and training or to formal activities. “Learning” is much broader than “education” or “training,” and it occurs, as UNESCO puts it, in “life-wide contexts (family, school, the community, the workplace, and so on) and through a variety of modalities (formal, non-formal and informal).” It also applies not just to skills or knowledge but also to behaviors and attitudes—the latter two being particularly important in how we make sense of the world and participate in it as responsible citizens.

Finally, while many definitions of lifelong learning stress consciousness and intentionality on the part of the learner (see this definition from Eurostat, for example), we believe it’s important to recognize that learning occurs across a spectrum of consciousness and intentionality. People can and do learn without necessarily being aware of the fact they are learning or having any conscious intention to learn. Arguably, most learning happens that way.

As we’ll see, these distinctions matter when considering the potential opportunities in the market for lifelong learning. The market is considerably larger and—in our view, richer—when it is seen to include both formal and informal as well as intentional and non-intentional learning.

In the end, we don’t really distinguish lifelong learning from learning itself. “Lifelong” simply emphasizes that learning is ever-present in the life of every human being. So, to succinctly define “lifelong learning,” we rely on the definition of learning we’ve offered on Mission to Learn:

Learning is the lifelong process, both conscious and unconscious, of transforming information and experience into knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes.

How Big Is the Adult Lifelong Learning Market?It’s very hard to say how large the total market for lifelong learning is, mostly because of the limited definitions of “lifelong learning” and “adult learning” that most market analysts use. We do, however, have significant clues.

In a pre-pandemic article, Forbes reported that the adult learning services market in the United States, both online and offline, was about USD 10 billion as of 2016. Forbes also estimated the market size—the number of people who would be new consumers of adult education—at around 32 million adults.

Aside from being U.S.-centric, the Forbes article focused specifically on “the market for helping adults learn basic skills or develop workforce skills” and draws on data from companies that serve that market. It was also published before COVID-19 pushed the world online, resulting in a boom in e-learning, and before ChatGPT changed the playing field for digital content creation, delivery, and consumption.

Roll forward to 2023, and some sources project the size of the U.S. continuing education market as USD 93.25 billion by 2028, with generative AI being a major driver of growth. Other sources have valued the global continuing education market at USD 33.55 billion in 2022 and project it to grow to around USD 58 billion by 2030.

Again, definitions are a big issue. The analysts and reporters behind the estimates cited here are loose with their language—adult learning, adult education, continuing education—and with the underlying meaning of the terms. Yet clearly something big is going on—and growing.

Perhaps by necessity, analysts tend to focus on products and services that are relatively well defined and measurable. The reports we link to rely on numbers from companies and institutions that are clearly in the education and training space. But there is a much larger portion of the adult learning market that does not typically get accounted for.

The global meetings market has been estimated at USD 1.2 trillion. Arguably, nearly every meeting contained in this estimate is a source of learning, whether formal or informal, for the participants. Trade and professional associations, for example, routinely provide extensive continuing and professional development opportunities as part of their annual meetings—and that’s just the formal aspect of the learning that goes on.

The global content marketing industry was estimated at USD 63 billion in 2022. While it would likely be impossible to determine the exact percentage, a significant portion of this activity is educational—again, both formal and informal—in nature. While, by its nature, content marketing may not produce revenue directly, it is a huge indirect driver of revenue for the companies and individuals that produce it.

And none of the figures cited so far take into account the burgeoning industry of edupreneurs—people who are part of the broader creator economy and generate significant revenue through blogging, live streaming, creating online courses, membership sites, and other offerings aimed at monetizing their expertise and helping their followers and customers learn.

As an example, Teachable, one of the major online course platforms, claims more than 100,000 creators who have earned more than USD 500 million to date through courses and coaching. Teachable is just one of many similar companies. Goldman Sachs projects the broader creator economy will be valued at USD 480 billion by 2027.

The list could go on.

The point is that opportunities for learning and growth are everywhere, and the market for lifelong learning is much larger than is reflected in currently available analysts’ reports. For those seeking to serve the market, understanding this discrepancy may be the key to seeing opportunities that others don’t yet see.

Need Help Reaching Your Market?At Tagoras, the parent company of Leading Learning, we are experts in the global market for continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning. For more than two decades, we have helped a wide range of organizations increase the reach, revenue, and impact of their educational offerings.

Contact us today for a complimentary initial consultation.

Major Providers of Lifelong LearningThere are many ways in which lifelong learning can be delivered and supported, and, as a result, there is a wide range of organizations that might be categorized as lifelong learning providers. Among organizations intentionally and primarily focused on lifelong learning as a market, however, there are four major categories of providers: academic institutions, trade and professional associations, commercial learning providers, and edupreneurial expertise-based businesses.

Academic InstitutionsContinuing education and “extension” education programs have been a part of college and university offerings for more than 150 years. The roots of Harvard University’s continuing and extension education, for example, can be traced to the Lowell Institute, founded in 1836. Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) dates back to 1873.

In more recent times, as debates have flared about the costs and value of traditional degree programs and the focus on lifelong learning has increased, academic continuing education units have gained more prominence. A report from Encoura points to that growth:

[N]on-degree program interest has grown from 34% in 2019 to 47% in 2022, a 38% increase over that time. This compares to a 3% increase for undergraduate programs and a 38% decrease among graduate programs. Amid debates about debt and return-on-investment, graduate prospects seem to be hedging toward faster and cheaper alternatives.

Increasingly, leaders of professional, continuing, and online education (PCO)—the phrase often used to identify contemporary continuing education programs—are seeing opportunities in addressing workforce development needs and providing alternative forms of credentialing to help adults navigate the modern career landscape. Indeed, pressure to reevaluate their core value proposition and business models has, in my estimation, put these providers well out ahead of their counterparts in the trade and professional association world in pursuing the issuance and management of standards-based digital credentials.

An advantage these organizations usually have is access to broader institutional infrastructure along with access to institutional faculty with subject matter expertise and teaching experience. Additionally, they may be able to capitalize on the brand—whether local, regional, national, or international—of the institution with which they are associated and automatically be seen as a trusted, authoritative source of learning.

In many instances, particularly at community colleges and lower-tier universities, continuing education offerings may be taught by actual practitioners in the subject matter covered. Of course, in other instances, academic lifelong learning programs may be subject to the sort of “ivory tower,” “out of touch with the real-world” criticisms commonly leveled at degree-focused programs. Additionally, decision-making, particularly when it comes to allowing credit to be granted for an offering, can be very slow in academia, which is a key reason why many PCO programs are turning more of their attention to non-credit programming.

Trade and Professional AssociationsWhile academic continuing education arguably enjoys broader public awareness, trade and professional associations are likely the largest single source of organized lifelong learning for adults.

Because they can be organized in many ways, there is no truly reliable data on the number of these organizations. Even the American Society of Associations Executives (ASAE), the “association of associations,” provides estimates that range from roughly 67,000 to nearly 91,000. (By comparison, the National Center for Education Statistics reports 3,542 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the U.S. as of the 2020-21 academic year.)

What is clear is that associations reach a lot of people, whether they are direct individual members or employees at the corporate members of trade associations. What is also clear is that most of these organizations provide education to their members formally, informally, or both, and most professional/individual membership associations specifically cite education as part of their mission and/or their strategic plan. They typically pursue this part of their mission through programming offered through their education departments and at myriad events that are part of the trillion-dollar meetings industry highlighted above.

While academic institutions have faced something of a crisis related to the cost and value of their degrees, associations have faced a crisis related to the value of membership. The general concern is that younger generations do not value traditional membership, and associations may be facing a significant decline in membership along with a corresponding decline in dues revenue.

Whether that concern becomes a reality may depend largely on the degree to which associations fully capitalize on their position as leaders of lifelong learning. Because associations tend to be member-driven, they are arguably in a much better position than academic organizations to identify and certify essential knowledge in the fields and industries they serve, to spot emerging trends, and to lead the way in addressing new learning needs. They also often have access to the best practitioners in the fields and industries they serve and can tap these people as subject matter experts and instructors.

One of the biggest downsides to association-driven lifelong learning is that these organizations have a strong tendency to be “all things to all people.” The drive to serve all parts of a member base can lead to taking on a higher volume of educational offerings than an organization can reasonably maintain while also ensuring high quality. Additionally, the teaching capabilities of the volunteer subject matter experts on which most associations rely can vary dramatically, and many association education staff end up in their positions by chance, with relatively little formal background in adult education and training.

Commercial Learning ProvidersThere have always been a range of companies serving the adult lifelong learning market with correspondence courses, seminars, distance learning, and e-learning, but the past decade or so represents a tipping point for “Big Learning.”

Udemy, an online course publishing platform and marketplace, was founded in 2010, and, according to the company’s Web site, has since grown to host more than 210,000 courses authored by more than 75,000 instructors. Coursera and edX, the two largest and most recognizable massive open online course (MOOC) providers, were both founded in 2012. Lynda.com, which was founded in 1995, was acquired by LinkedIn—and then rebranded as LinkedIn Learning—for a whopping USD 1.5 billion in 2015. That same year, The Great Courses, founded in 1990 as The Teaching Company, launched its online subscription service, Wondrium.

These are just a few of the bigger names in a large constellation of companies that see significant opportunity in providing learning experiences to adult lifelong learners. In some ways, the growth of these companies in the market has been a welcome disruptor. They have created competition where little to none existed before, often forcing academic and association providers to pay more attention to the relevancy and quality of their offerings as well as to related areas like customer service.

The drive to be competitive—combined, in many cases, with pressure from investors—often spurs commercial providers to focus more on innovation, particularly technological innovation, than academic and association providers. Arguably, digital badges have managed to gain traction mainly because the large MOOC providers and LinkedIn have found them valuable. And much of what is happening with artificial intelligence in education is being driven by companies like Duolingo and Khan Academy.

But what giveth also taketh away. The increase in supply and corresponding competition have led to the commoditization of education as a product in many instances. The resulting downward price pressure—often to the point of free—has made creating and sustaining viable business models difficult for many of the commercial disruptors as well as for the traditional providers they have disrupted. Stories of layoffs and cost-cutting are becoming common.

Moreover, what is most profitable from a business standpoint is not necessarily what is most effective from a learning perspective. It’s relatively easy to churn out a high volume of talking-head-and-PowerPoint-based video content, but the learning value of this content is often questionable. Defenders of MOOCs will say that the high dropout rates—greater than 90 percent according to various estimates —are a result of learners simply getting what they need for a course, then leaving. A better bet may be that most aren’t particularly engaged or motivated by the content.

Edupreneurial Expertise-Based BusinessesThe last group is what we term expertise-based businesses—consultants, coaches, speakers, authors, and other experts who generally operate solo or as very small businesses. For this group, courses, membership sites, events (online and off), and other types of learning experiences have become a primary path for moving beyond the traditional “time for money” approach of charging hourly or project fees. Evolving from expert to edupreneur offers the possibility of creating a more predictable, sustainable, and potentially sellable business.

Advances in technology have been particularly important for this group. The emergence of relatively low-cost software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools and platforms for creating and selling digital learning experiences has made it possible for a single individual with little to no budget to produce, sell, distribute, and support offerings that just a couple of decades ago would have required a team of people and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The result is that publishing a course has become what publishing a book became in the aftermath of self-publishing platforms. You’d be hard pressed to find an established coach or consultant who hasn’t published a course or who doesn’t have plans to soon. Many provide courses and/or community within the context of membership or subscription sites, and educational Webinars are the coin of the realm for lead generation.

As with the commercial providers, the quantity of offerings flowing from this group has contributed to overall commodification and downward price pressure in the market for adult learning. And, as might be expected, quality is all over the map—even more so than with the previous three groups. Low-cost, easy-to-use tools don’t translate into high-quality learning experiences if the people using them have no real background in adult learning or instructional design, and most of the people in this group do not. They are experienced subject matter experts and often excellent marketers, but, aside from the naturally gifted, most are mediocre teachers and facilitators of learning.

Other Providers and PlayersThe four groups already covered are the ones most focused on producing adult learning experiences that generate revenue directly. As such, they are the main drivers for adult learning as a market. But that doesn’t mean they are only ones impacting the market.

While they do not tend to be revenue centers, and their focus is primarily on advancing the goals of the companies they serve, corporate L&D departments play a significant role in adult lifelong learning. The research in learning science and similar areas that informs the activities of these departments as well as their actual practices very often influence what academic, association, commercial, and edupreneurial providers of learning experiences do. Moreover, from contracting for seminars to licensing e-learning content to sending their employees to conferences, corporations are important customers for the output of the four main provider groups.

Beyond formal learning and development, corporations are also a major source of events for their customers and partners. While these are often oriented more toward public relations and marketing, they are also a source of both formal and informal learning. For example, an event like Dreamforce, hosted by the customer relationship management (CRM) software giant Salesforce, reaches tens if not hundreds of thousands of people annually with a long list of formal educational sessions and informal peer learning opportunities. Smaller versions of this sort of event occur daily throughout the world.

Content marketers—including those who operate on behalf of the lifelong learning providers already discussed—also play an important role. While direct revenue generation is generally not a goal of content marketing, it may be used to funnel people toward paid learning experiences. It can also impact the market by steering people away from paid learning experiences. In many instances, prospective learners may find educational content that is created for the purpose of generating traffic, affiliate clicks, or lead acquisition to be sufficient for whatever learning goal they’re pursuing. Just ask anyone working for the four major revenue-focused providers about the challenge that the plethora of free educational content represents.

Finally, governmental bodies play a role, one that varies significantly from country to country and region to region. In general, investment by governments in adult lifelong learning is relatively minimal in comparison to the amounts that flow into K-12 and higher education. In the United States, for example, Pro Publica reported this in December 2022:

The federal government provided about $675 million to states for adult education last year, a figure that has been stagnant for more than two decades, when adjusted for inflation. And while states are also required to contribute a minimum amount, ProPublica found large gaps in what they spend. Lower funding leads to smaller programs with less reach: Less than 3% of eligible adults receive services.

By comparison, funding from all sources for K-12 education in 2021 was around $795 billion, with $85 billion coming from the federal government. That same year, the U.S. spent about $875 billion on its military.

As noted in a Leading Learning Podcast episode on the topic of defining “lifelong learning,” the situation in Europe and other parts of the world seems to be better, if not necessarily from a funding standpoint, then at least from the standpoint of fuller appreciation for the role adult learning and education play in developing individuals into responsible, capable citizens and thereby bolstering the long-term viability of social institutions and society more broadly.

Given the increasing recognition of lifelong learning as (to quote The Economist again) an “economic imperative,” it seems likely that governments will become more involved in lifelong learning and the market for it over time, whether through increased funding, oversight and regulation, or other paths.

The Future of the Adult Learning MarketOne clear lesson to be drawn from even a high-level analysis of the market for adult learning is that it is currently quite siloed and fragmented. Partly because of the issue with definitions, there is no cohesive understanding of “adult lifelong learning” in the way that there is for K-12 and higher education. For efforts to serve adult learners to achieve the impact they could and should, we need a cohesive understanding.

In our work, we’ve moved toward describing the more formal aspects of the adult learning landscape—those served by the four major types of providers—as the third sector of education. While more limited than the full lifelong learning landscape, it has the advantage of being more readily definable and more measurable.

Regardless of whether the phrase “the third sector of education” sticks, if we are serious about cultivating lifelong learning as a public and social good, there needs to be much more dialogue and collaboration across the four major provider groups as well as with corporate and governmental bodies with a stake in learning.

To a certain extent, such dialogue and collaboration already exist. The major MOOC providers, for example, have largely built their brands off the brands of the universities that have provided much of the course content; university PCO departments quite often develop programming meant to serve specific corporate and/or workforce development needs on a local or regional basis; and a growing number of associations have worked to get their certifications embedded into university programs.

Nonetheless, efforts like these remain isolated. There is no larger, connecting vision or shared understanding among the providers that they are participating in a common effort and opportunity. What might spark a change in this situation is unclear, but artificial intelligence seems a strong candidate.

The disruption that AI is likely to create in how learning happens, the financial resources needed to deploy it effectively, and the challenges it will create for learners attempting to navigate the new learning landscape may, at a minimum, lead to greater government involvement, but it also has the potential to prompt more dialogue among the providers as they seek ways to capitalize on emerging opportunities. One catalyst for this dialogue could be greater collaboration among the organizations to which many of the important players tend to belong. As I’ve suggested before, it doesn’t seem like a pipedream at this point to imagine a strong working alliance among some of the major institutions that serve and/or have a major stake in the success of adult learners. Meaningful collaboration among, for example, the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), the Association for Talent Development (ATD), the Conference Board, and the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE), could produce a strong vision for the direction adult learning needs to take and a coordinated plan for supporting the vision.

Whether such an alliance ever happens or not, the market for adult learning will continue to grow substantially for the foreseeable future. The nature of our current world demands lifelong learning, and adults and their employers are clearly willing to pay for it.

The market has grown increasingly sophisticated over the past decades as technology and approaches to learning have evolved, and the emergence of AI practically guarantees that it will become even more sophisticated. It seems inevitable that more personalized and social, informal learning experiences will gain ground as they become easier to deliver, track, and (given that this is, after all, a market) monetize. These types of learning experiences tend to be more attractive to learners and, by and large, are much more effective than traditional lecture-based approaches.

As more informal and personalized approaches to lifelong learning take hold, it will become much clearer that the definitions currently applied to the market are far too limited. The revenue potential is likely many, many multiples of what current analyst reports tend to suggest. At the same time, the revenue potential is arguably the least important aspect of this market.

The value of lifelong learning in enabling individual human beings to thrive and in enabling humanity, collectively, to overcome the daunting challenges we currently face is inestimable. In that sense, in every sense, lifelong learning truly is imperative.

Contact us today for a complimentary initial consultation.

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Catherine BellYou’ve heard it said that culture eats strategy for lunch, and getting culture right is arguably even more important for learning businesses than for other types of organizations because the creation of a culture that truly embraces learning is so integrally tied to both what a learning business does internally and what it offers externally. This means learning business leaders need to give time and energy to fostering an awakened culture.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 385, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Catherine Bell. Catherine is the founder and author of The Awakened Company, and she’s passionate about being of service to humanity and the planet. Catherine believes that, if we’re going to solve the problems that we face, we have to organize differently, and healthy culture will allow us to do that.

Catherine and Jeff talk about organizational culture, thriving relationships, viewing everyone as a leader, hiring and retention, the impact of events like the rise of generative AI and COVID on culture, the four I’s of transformational leadership, and more.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCatherine Bell: [00:00:00] Healthy corporate culture is not built in a day. It’s all those micro actions that we do every day that creates a healthy corporate culture.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:13] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:15] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:23] You’ve heard it said that culture eats strategy for lunch, and getting culture right is arguably even more important for learning businesses than for other types of organizations because the creation of a culture that truly embraces learning is so integrally tied to both what a learning business does internally and what it offers externally. This means learning business leaders need to give time and energy to fostering an awakened culture.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:51] This episode, number 385, features a conversation with Catherine Bell. Catherine is the founder and author of The Awakened Company, and she’s passionate about being of service to humanity and the planet. Catherine believes that, if we’re going to solve the problems that we face, we have to organize differently, and healthy culture will allow us to do that. Catherine and Jeff talk about organizational culture, thriving relationships, viewing everyone as a leader, hiring and retention, the impact of events like the rise of generative AI and COVID on culture, the four I’s of transformational leadership, and more. Jeff and Catherine spoke in October 2023.

Defining Organizational CultureJeff Cobb: [00:01:44] We’re here to talk mainly about how to build thriving and healthy organizational cultures in challenging times, and I think most people would agree that we are in challenging times right now. But, before we get to that part of it, I’d love to talk about the concept of culture a little bit because that often seems challenging in and of itself. You go out and look at the business literature and that sort of thing, and there are so many articles and books that have been published about culture: how to have a great culture, how to fix your culture. There’s training and speaking. There’s just a whole industry around it, it seems like. So we’d love to hear how you define culture. And then what is it that makes culture seemingly so challenging?

Catherine Bell: [00:02:29] Great questions. Culture is really the secret ingredient. It’s actually the power of our relationships: who we are and how we work together. And what the business research says is, when we focus two-thirds on corporate culture and one-third on financial success, that’s where alchemy happens. Yet most leaders are solely focused on the financial part of it. So I’ll meet with a company, and they’ll say, “You know, Cath, can you take me from $0 to $1 billion in five years like you did that other company?” I’m like, “That’s the wrong focus. That’s the wrong focus.” The emphasis needs to be on what are the problems that we are solving in our organizations and how to do that in a humane way.

Catherine Bell: [00:03:21] The awakened organization, or awakening organization, or creating a thriving organization, if you could just picture a drop of water, and the first drop is awakening ourselves. Most people are disengaged at work. Most people are unhappy at work. How do we activate that droplet of water in ourselves? I believe everybody’s a leader. So how do we bring our own personal leadership potential to the table? Then the next ring is our relationships, and that is how do we actually work together? And we know that, for the most part, how somebody works, how they perform, how they are at work is directly correlated to their relationship to the person they report to. So how are we cultivating healthy relationships in our organizations? And I looked at a study of a thousand leaders, and this, I think, is a really big key to unlocking corporate culture. There’s not enough time spent on one-on-one relationships from a heartful, mindful perspective. The next ring—again, the droplet of water—is organizations. And most organizations don’t survive past nine years, so we need to clearly be doing things differently. What I’ve seen and emerging business research is, if we focus on energizing, sustaining, and regenerating—almost following the healthy life cycle of a forest—that’s where we can create really, really, really healthy cultures.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:00] I think a lot of people would probably say that, right now, for a number of reasons, that it seems difficult to do because so much has changed about the nature of work, the nature of society. What are some of the aspects of our current times that you find most challenging when it comes to culture, to having that thriving culture, to having the types of relationships that you were just talking about?

Catherine Bell: [00:05:27] So, from on-the-street experience, from who I’m working with right now, there’s a lot of challenges around hiring, a lot of challenges around retention, keeping really important people, and the cost. If we have a $100,000 employee, the cost, if they turn over within a year, is about $1 million to the organization. So retention is very, very, very, very important. And how we work together, I think, also needs to be reexamined. The invitation for leaders is to consider who do we have to be to get to where we want to go? I don’t think enough consideration has been given to that. And to view everybody as a leader is also a philosophically different perspective because often people will see somebody as a follower. And, actually, the moment we think of somebody as a follower, their behavior denigrates. This is, again, business research. Their behavior denigrates. They won’t take risks. They won’t try. They won’t experiment. And I’m really big into Carol Dweck’s research—having a growth mindset versus a closed mindset in all of this, for our organizations to be like organisms that are learning and growing and using also social context to create healthy ways of being. Unless we capture people’s hearts, hands, and minds with meaningful, interesting, challenging work, it will fall apart. Organizations will continue to crumble.

Catherine Bell: [00:06:59] So the invitation is, for everybody listening to this, do you have cultural metrics, and do you weigh those cultural metrics as more important than the financial metrics, so that the discretionary energy of everybody is applied to solving a problem, is applied to being of service to our world and to humanity, not simply for the bottom line? I do think, really believe we have to think about how much is enough, and I don’t think enough consideration has been given to that. I think having leaders who are making hundreds and hundreds of times more than the average employee, that’s a challenge too. Now, I do believe in risk return, but it’s what makes sense. And again how much is enough? And really for leaders to go within at this time and to think about how do we want to show up? How do we want to be of service to humanity? And this is more than the why. I think the other thing that’s very important to talk about, a lot of CEOs say, “Oh, what’s your vision?” The majority of them still cannot answer it. The majority still cannot answer it. However, what’s more important than that? If we peel back the levels of the why, it’s the who.

Catherine Bell: [00:08:19] If we know that we’re to focus on the why and we’re not doing it, then to drill down on that. It’s who do we have to be to recognize and create a vision together? I have a bit of a disaster story of my own, Jeff. I’m a serial entrepreneur. So I’ve founded a Profit 10, Profit 200 company, and one of my biggest mistakes in that company was I said to our team, “Oh, here’s our vision. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and I kept on talking to them about it in our boardroom, and I was really excited. And we brought in a consultant from Denmark because there was nobody in North America doing what we were doing, so we wanted a different perspective. And so you can imagine this. We’re all at the boardroom, and he asks, “What’s your vision?” And I’m like, “Oh!” I felt so proud, like I just felt myself bursting. And I was like, “Oh, the team’s got this. They totally have this.” And nobody raised their hands. And you know why? The reason why is because I didn’t get them involved in the process of creating the vision. One of Margaret Wheatley’s principles is people support what they create, and I didn’t engage them in that process.

Catherine Bell: [00:09:29] I was command and control, like, “Here’s everything. Here’s what we’re going to do,” and pummeled it in. And no. So what did we do for that strategy session? We spent time together as a team defining our vision, and then nobody ever forgot it. And the other thing, as a leader is once that vision was rippled out, it was really important that I repeat it so that people remembered it. And then I knew it was working when everybody started to repeat it. We found very creative ways to reflect our vision, our values, and it became almost immersed in everybody’s blood. They knew our why. They knew our values. And the key thing, though, for me was how am I going to show up? I learned because I did it so poorly the first time. So underneath the why is the who. So for everybody to think about, “Today, what’s the tiniest micro thing I can do around organizational intention, around how we live, around how we work together, around how we play together?” And it’s those little micro actions that make all the difference in the world.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:10:43] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:17] In the aftermath of COVID in particular, we’ve moved to remote work being so common, so people not being face-to-face as much, and that seems like a permanent aspect of the work landscape. Obviously, people are coming back into the office, but we’re going to continue to have this remote work culture. We now have AI coming along as the latest big disruptor in the world of work, and I think a lot of people rightly feel threatened by what AI might do to their jobs, to their careers. How do you address some of those issues, help people make peace with what might be disrupting work, be able to work effectively, and have those relationships that you’re talking about when they’re remote, they’re not face to face as often? Just some of those concrete challenges that people seem to be facing right now. How do you advise them to take those into account when they’re thinking about culture and trying to ensure that they have the culture that they want in their organization?

Catherine Bell: [00:12:24] Your question is very current. I just met with a CEO, and their biggest challenge was retaining staff because they don’t have a hybrid workplace. And there are other CEOs who I’ve worked with, and they actually kept their office open all through COVID. I’ve seen so many different perspectives on it. The key thing is to listen to the team and what the team wants. And the other thing I’d say is a best practice—I do think there is something so powerful about us coming together, having days where we’re designated to be together. For example, at Awakened Company, we have days where we come together and days that you can work as you want. So I think to really listen to what our teams are asking for and wanting and also to pay attention to productivity. Because, for some organizations, productivity is actually higher when it’s remote. For other organizations, it’s lower. What that also points to is corporate culture is not one-size-fits-all. It needs to be curated. That’s why I don’t believe in corporate culture in a box. I think corporate culture is something that we need to be very deliberate about and is very custom to the organization. For example, some organizations hire based on vision and values, which is incredibly poignant. And then they have their job performance based on vision and values. However, they’re rare. Remember I said at the beginning most people don’t even know their why.

Catherine Bell: [00:14:08] So to start to integrate all of this into a coherent system or organism, it becomes very interesting and very fun to create. What kind of forest does every leader want to create and in a very deliberate way, and to listen to what everybody is wanting, I think, is incredibly powerful. For example, if you have high turnover and, on your exit interviews, it’s because the style of work or how they’re working together, then you might want to look at changing how you actually work together. And, when we ask people for their input and get them involved in the solutions for how we can work better together, the engagement goes up. And engagement is super, super important because you know the more engaged everybody is, the higher performing the organism. Organism—I’m calling it an organism. Organization. Well, it really does. When it’s healthy, organizations are like an organism. In other words, we need to give people a sense of control over their lives, a sense of meaning, a sense of belonging, and cultivate a system, a culture that works around that. Now, this sounds very simple when we’re talking about it on this podcast. And it’s not. It’s very mercurial. So I invite everybody to just be patient. Healthy corporate culture is not built in a day. It’s all those micro actions that we do every day that creates a healthy corporate culture or organization culture.

Viewing Everyone As a LeaderJeff Cobb: [00:15:45] You’ve referenced leaders a number of times and made the point that really everybody is a leader, at least some level. And it seems to me that’s probably essential to this in some way because I think of a leader, well, probably fundamentally, as somebody who takes responsibility for their actions and feels responsibility for the others who they have the privilege to be a leader for. Can you talk a little bit about the role of leadership in this and also that concept of everybody has to be a leader?

Catherine Bell: [00:16:18] For sure. I think good leadership applies the same whether it’s in person or remote. We host all of these Webinars, and all the people on our Webinars I consider leaders. They are part of the co-emergent process of our learning system. And that’s not like the old style of teaching was: “I’m going to embark my wisdom on you.” And, no, that’s no longer the case. The invitation—great teachers get people to think for themselves. I’d love to share the transformational leadership model with your audience because leadership can be learned, and anybody can apply these tricks. First of all, there’s laissez-faire leadership, which is, “I don’t really care.” There’s that style of leadership. Then there’s the contingent reward, which is, “I’m going to give you a carrot for asking great questions, Jeff. Here’s a carrot.” Pavlovian. By the way, this is based on the research of Bass and Avolio. This is the most-researched leadership model in the world. Then there are the four I’s, which is transformational leadership. Number one is “inspirational motivation.” Are we providing an inspirational vision for the people we work with? Next is “idealized influence,” and that is are our values clear, and do we live by those values? Next is “individualized consideration.”

Catherine Bell: [00:17:53] Am I considering the people who are around me as individuals? Then the fourth is “intellectual stimulation,” that I’m here to really get people thinking for themselves, which is why the whole goal of the Webinars is to get people to think for themselves. The four I’s all begin with I. Yet transformational leadership has nothing to do with I. It has everything to do with bringing something out in the other person. So just for everybody to know those four I’s, and you can live with them every day and think about how are you working with this teammate as an individual? How are you inspiring whoever it may be? And it applies to everybody, anywhere. And anybody can learn to be a leader. And we often overemphasize that whole inspirational piece. However, some of the most powerful teachers in my life have actually been the quietest, and they’ve brought something out in me that I couldn’t have done myself. And that’s that whole intellectual stimulation—I’m going to ask you really good questions to pull the ideas out of you that you have.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:05] It’s funny—even as you were talking, getting to the end of your comments there, I was thinking about the concept of quiet inspiration because I think people may get stuck on this idea that the leader is a charismatic figure. But, in so many instances, it’s by your actions—what you’re modeling, your empathy, you’re listening to other people—that provide that inspiration that may not even be obvious but is impacting people all the time. And it goes back to relationships, as you were saying earlier. I think those four I’s that are part of transformational leadership are very good benchmarks to have in mind, or tools to have in mind, as we’re engaged in all of the relationships in our life and work.

Self-Awareness and Mindfulness in Organizational CultureJeff Cobb: [00:19:55] Culture, being part of culture, facilitating culture, all of that seems like it has a lot to do with a level of self-awareness. You’d have to have self-awareness to employ those transformational leadership points that you just indicated. Can you talk about concepts like self-awareness, mindfulness in general, and that journey of personal development that I think is what being a part of an awakened company and being part of a great culture most likely is?

Catherine Bell: [00:20:26] The business research says the most self-aware leaders are actually the higher-performing. So how do we cultivate self-awareness? There’s a tool we use called the Enneagram, which is a personality typology that outlines nine different modes of being and doing, which we have found incredibly powerful. A powerful key, a powerful lever for executives and teams that we work with to understand themselves. We also do maps with entire teams of who’s on this map and how are they. What I love about the Enneagram is that it also says that everybody has nine types within them. It’s just which is the dominant type that you perhaps hold.

Catherine Bell: [00:21:10] When we understand what our gifts are, what our work-ons are as a result of something like the Enneagram, we can balance out who we are so that we are more self-aware. We are more mindful. And, bringing in mindfulness, we haven’t talked about this. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about it on an actual podcast before. When we’re mindful, everything around us becomes living and breathing as well. So it’s also informing us when we drop into the present moment, when we just relax into the present moment. This moment has everything within it. And so, knowing that, how can we be and act from that place? It’s counterintuitive because our society has trained us to be on the relentless treadmill of productivity, productivity. And what the research shows is, when we’re more mindful, we’re more creative and more productive, and our stress is reduced.

Catherine Bell: [00:22:13] With teams, we often begin our sessions with mindfulness. We have everybody take a few deep breaths, relax their shoulders, feet on the ground, and sensations in the body before we move into the agenda. And, at first, it seems like this is weird. However, I feel great, and it sets a different tone. So there’s now a board of directors who are beginning in stillness and mindfulness so that their agendas can be more complete, more full, more creative, more productive. However, it’s counterintuitive when you think you should be diving into the agenda and getting stuff done. No, take the pause. We’re more productive, and also it’s more meaningful and more fun. At one of the other companies I founded over a decade ago, we were doing mindfulness breaks right at the beginning. As leaders, it’s also the invitation to experiment. I’d invite everybody here, with their course content or whatever it may be that they’re hoping to bring to the world, experiment with it. See what works; see what doesn’t work from that place of mindfulness and also a lack of attachment to the outcome so that you can be open to receiving feedback on whatever product or service it is that you are offering.

Awakening Organizational CultureJeff Cobb: [00:23:40] Lying behind our conversation is this idea of the awakened company, and your own company is called the Awakened Company. You’ve written a book by that name. Could you just say a little bit about what an awakened company is, or an awakened organization, however you prefer to hear it? For the listeners who are out there listening to the podcast, can you say a bit about what that is and how it connects to culture, how an awakened company and a good culture are interwoven?

Catherine Bell: [00:24:13] If you could picture this, I was in a dimly lit cafe in New York City, and I was doing an executive search and about to go on a course, a development course, and the name Awakened Company just literally dropped into my being. And I’m like, “Oh, I’m to write a book called The Awakened Company.” I turned to my colleague. I said, “Carolyn, I’m to write this book.” She’s like, “Yes, you are.” Originally, the book was on how to hire because that’s what I did: executive search. And then my partners were like, “This is terrible. This is not a very good book, nor is it very interesting. It’s more of a workbook than a book.” So I’m like, “What is it that is being asked of me in this book?” At BluEra, we were playing with corporate culture, with unlimited vacation, mindfulness, bring-your-dog-to-work days, really creating a different kind of petri dish. And I’m like, “Oh, it’s to be on corporate culture.”

Catherine Bell: [00:25:18] And then I wanted Eckhart Tolle—I don’t know if you’re familiar with Eckhart Tolle—I wanted Eckhart Tolle’s publisher to publish it. Well, she said no to me a whole bunch of times and then said yes, that she thought that this book represented the consciousness needed for organizations at this time. This was in 2015 that the book was published, and I was writing it seven years before that, the whole writing started. So why am I telling this story? I’m telling the story because an awakening organization looks to solve a problem. I saw the challenge of our time around creating healthy corporate cultures. And when I say “corporate,” I believe it’s really “organization” because I don’t believe in the whole social, not-for-profit, for-profit. I think every organization has to solve a problem and to do so without hurting humanity or the planet to be of service. So that’s what an awakening organization is—one that is solving a needed problem, not creating a problem. Solving a problem and helping humanity and the planet by doing so.

Personal and Professional Lifelong LearningJeff Cobb: [00:26:29] I’d like to ask you something that we ask every guest who comes on to the Leading Learning Podcast, and that’s about your own approach to lifelong learning. Because we’ve been talking about self-awareness, about developing personally, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you are an avid, lifelong learner, and it would be great to hear about some of your specific habits, practices, sources for continuing to grow, both professionally and personally.

Catherine Bell: [00:26:59] Life is like a petri dish for me. I can’t help but learn. And I hope to be open enough to learn something new every day. I love taking business courses. If you look at my background, it’s kind of weird. I have an MBA, a sociology degree, certified in the Enneagram, and am a yoga instructor. It’s kind of a weird thing. However, I think life has pulled on me as a result of being open to learning. I love business classes. You won’t find me without a book every day, and the variety of books that I read are from Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now to The Wisdom of the Enneagram to Collins’s book. It’s just a broad, broad, broad spectrum. I have a deep meditation practice, and I’ve actually just said yes to being a strategic advisor to a Buddhist organization in Colorado. And that’s also a form of learning. I’d invite everybody to get involved in your community and to volunteer because that’s also a way to learn. Teaching at Queen’s University, I can’t help…I was learning so much when I was there by the people I was surrounded by, by other professors, by students, everybody.

Catherine Bell: [00:28:24] Everyone. I can learn from everybody. I think that’s my learning thing—what do I need to learn today to be a better human being? I have two kids. When they were growing up, I was reading all about parenting, and what I realized is that our first leaders are our parents. So how do we be great parents? Because that’s really the ultimate leadership role. And that’s another thing to parse out—what’s our role? What’s our relatedness? And never to forget our relatedness. Our relatedness is really our common humanity. And the role is, for example, you’re interviewing me right now for this podcast. That’s our role. But our relatedness is our interest in humanity, our shared humanity. And I think that’s too often forgotten.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:13] Catherine Bell is the founder and author of The Awakened Company, and she works with organizations to create healthy, flourishing cultures. You can connect with her and the Awakened Company on LinkedIn.

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Related Resources* Tool Talk: Learning Culture and Learning Ecosystem Snapshots * Elevating Engagement with Amanda Kaiser * Connecting Organizational Culture and Learning with Maddie Grant

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Jack FlahertyOn average, we make 35,000 decisions a day. The sheer quantity means a process for making effective, successful decisions is a foundational aspect of leadership. But decision-making isn’t often taught in school or on the job.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 384, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Jack Flaherty, author of The Decision Switch: 7 Principles of Successful Decision-Making, about his decision-making framework, decision-making as a process (not an event), the importance of self-reflection in getting better at decision-making, the role of empathy in decision-making, and the benefits of incorporating an effective decision-making process into an organization’s culture.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJack Flaherty: [00:00:00] Once you learn to make effective decisions consistently, you gain a confidence. Your shoulders pull back. Your ability to look forward and not look back and wonder if you made the right decisions frees your brain. So you’re a better leader.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:22] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:32] On average, we make 35,000 decisions a day. That’s a lot of decisions, which means having a process for making effective, successful decisions is a foundational aspect of leadership. But decision-making isn’t usually taught in school or on the job. Jack Flaherty is working to fill that gap. Jack is an advocate for leadership development, particularly in the area of decision-making. He’s a consultant, a speaker, and the author of The Decision Switch: 7 Principles of Successful Decision-Making. In this episode, number 384, Celisa talks with Jack about his decision-making framework; decision-making as a process, not an event; the importance of self-reflection in getting better at decision-making; the role of empathy in decision-making; and the benefits of incorporating an effective decision-making process into an organization’s culture. Celisa and Jack spoke in October 2023.

Decision-Making As a Process, Not an EventCelisa Steele: [00:01:40] I know that you say that decision-making is a process and not an event, and I would note, for listeners, that may sound familiar to them because we often talk on this podcast about learning being not an event but a process. But would you just unpack that assertion for us and explain why it’s important to view decision-making as a process and not an event?

Jack Flaherty: [00:02:03] Decision-making is a process because there are critical events that happen before, during, and after a decision occurs that often influence whether or not we achieve a successful outcome. Before the decision is made, it’s activities, whether it be gaining additional information that we need, collaborating with others to make sure that we’re not making an isolated decision, and also looking at those who might be impacted. And then, once we’ve made the decision, there’s the follow-through. So often I’ve seen great decisions that were done with meaningful reason fail because it never gained the momentum it needed or had that champion to overcome the obstacles that virtually every decision faces. And the last aspect of that is the self-reflection. How do we learn from our mistakes, from these activities, and apply them to future decisions so we can continue to improve and make better decisions for both our companies but also for ourselves?

The Quantity of Decisions We Make Shows the Need for a ProcessCelisa Steele: [00:03:02] I learned, in reading The Decision Switch, that apparently we make something like 35,000 decisions a day. And so that’s a lot of decisions. What are the implications of that sheer volume of decision-making that we do on a daily basis?

Jack Flaherty: [00:03:19] There are many references. One that I love to use is decision fatigue, and that is we consume so much information on a daily basis and have to make decisions that we become exhausted, and you no longer put forth the effort. The critical aspect of those 35,000 decisions is to really identify which ones matter, what are the most critical decisions, and make sure that we apply the right amount of effort and due diligence around them to get the outcomes that we seek. And so, throughout the process, the first of my principles is to triage first, to evaluate those decisions that we become cognizant of and become aware of and first identify whether it’s our decision to make. Because often we see individuals either don’t participate in decisions they should or those that jump into a decision and have no reason for being in that particular process. And so when we look at the 35,000 decisions, it’s really breaking down and prioritizing those as to what needs to happen now, what maybe needs to happen in the future, and those that we can let in a sense the world itself resolve those decisions or actions that need to happen.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:34] So making decisions, that’s something we all have to do; we all have to do a lot of. And so it does seem—given just that sheer volume, given the quantity of decisions—that having a decision-making process would be very helpful. But I also got from reading The Decision Switch that it’s not just that a process is helpful in getting through the quantity of decisions; it also speaks to the quality of decisions. Would you talk a little bit about how the process helps make sure that the decisions made are good decisions or better decisions than they would be if you hadn’t used that process?

Jack Flaherty: [00:05:11] Sure. I’ll first put a lens on this, that we are now amidst a world of technology. You and I, right now, are speaking remotely because we’re on a video call and having this conversation. And, looking at the past, we may have had colleagues that we could have bounced ideas off at the office. Now we’re sitting much more isolated. And so we need to very distinctly look at what each of these phases are so we can make a well-informed decision. It’s looking at things like do we have all the necessary information to make a decision? Or are we doing a more siloed type of decision, which is more of a hip-check decision, where it’s based on an idea, a gut feeling, rather than actually exploring what other ideas are out there and, almost more importantly, what the perceptions are of other individuals, particularly those that you’re going to have to rely upon, and seeing where they are and how they fit into this? Because, as we talked about before, it’s a process. They’re going to be the ones to have to carry this through. And by making a more well-informed decision, it turns into a much more quality decision. This is where I use the word consistency. If we can more consistently make good and well-informed decisions, we’re going to be more successful, whether again for ourselves, for our companies, for whatever we’re looking to do, and that is such a critical aspect of this, the success portion that correlates directly back to making good, quality decisions.

Decision-Making Isn’t Often TaughtCelisa Steele: [00:06:43] I feel like too it could be good to pause here for a moment because one of the points that you make, which I think is very important, is the fact that decision-making is such an integral part of our daily lives, and yet most people aren’t taught how to make good decisions. And so I think that’s part of how you came to focus on these seven principles of decision-making that you write about in the book. But talk about why do you think that’s the case? Why is this really important facet of both professional and personal life not given time in school or more time in culture in general?

Jack Flaherty: [00:07:22] I put so much deep thought into this, and this is part of my thesis statement because, if you think about it, in your childhood, we’re really not taught how to make decisions. We’re punished or reprimanded for making poor ones. Even within our schooling systems, there’s no real focus on decision-making. We might have a philosophy class or a history class, but there’s no focus on why that individual made that particular decision; it’s often focused on the outcome of a decision. And it’s only when you get into your working profession, where there are two aspects that are the foundation for how we really develop our skill set. One is mentors, and the second is on-the-job experience. The challenge, though, again is, I go back to that technology reference I made before, is our ability to access mentors and get those really transparent relationships where you can be completely vulnerable with another individual. And saying, “I just don’t know” is something that people are so terrified right now of. I also believe that there’s a bias in society that anybody who exudes an overabundance of confidence must know what they’re talking about. And so you don’t question their ability, their decisions that they’ve made. You just assume that they know how to make good decisions, and so you’ll follow them.

Jack Flaherty: [00:08:44] And the breakdown of that is we then sit back, and we don’t ask good, objective questions, and not in a, I would say, deconstructive manner but in a productive, constructive manner and the idea of how do we make this idea better? And I think about this one CEO that I worked for. Brilliant gentleman. Charismatic. I think that allowed him to walk into board meetings, and he would present an idea but present it almost in the fashion of “This is an unfinished idea, and I need the help of this room to finish this idea.” I think if we can take that approach of not assuming that we’re always right, but that we’ve got a great idea, and we want others to contribute towards that, it sets up cultures for organizations, or it sets up a way of thinking for ourselves that we’re always seeking the best outcome. We don’t want to be in a situation where we just want to be right. And I do think that—my last piece on this is—in today’s individualistic society, people tend to want to be right, and I think that undermines our ability to make consistent, quality decisions because it’s ego versus what the optimal decision is for a particular circumstance.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:09] I’m hearing in there, I think, a tendency for us to expect leaders to have the answer, which means, if we present them with a choice, they can make a decision. And, to your point, then we accept that decision without a lot of questioning, when really the decision could potentially benefit from that “Let’s all participate. Let’s all think about this. Let’s think about what could go wrong or alternatives to the route that the leader has decided on.”

Jack Flaherty: [00:10:35] Absolutely. And, if I could just add one more thing, if you look at the composition of today’s workforce, particularly Gen Z, they want organizations where they feel like they can contribute. That’s where you’re going to get the employee retention. That’s where you’re going to get every ounce of energy from your employees, when they feel like they’re contributing. And then the second part of that is, because of the speed of technology and innovation, you just can’t have one or two sets of eyes looking at the horizon as to what changes are afoot. The entire organization itself needs to be very mindful of what are obstacles that are coming up? Where are the opportunities? And that way you have hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes that are constantly looking at the horizons or inside the organization and saying, “How can we do this better?” And by rewarding that behavior and really setting the culture from the top down that this is an expectation that you come to meetings with—I don’t want to say an opinion—but a well-informed background to have a conversation really comes to a much richer conclusion and one that everyone buys into, and therefore you get the whole organization behind you instead of being a lone cowboy just trying to push your personal agenda.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:58] I’m thinking of the Ikea effect—if we build it a little bit, then we’re going to be more invested in that decision and seeing it to its conclusion.

Jack Flaherty: [00:12:07] Absolutely.

Partner with TagorasJeff Cobb: [00:12:12] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.

Self-Reflection Is Key to Effective Decision-MakingCelisa Steele: [00:12:42] You focus on seven principles of decision-making: triage first, follow your North Star, collaborate with others, recognize cognitive bias, establish a champion, manage fallout, practice self-reflection. Each of those principles, there’s a lot in them, and very rich. I was hoping we could spend a little bit of time on that last principle because self-reflection is also so important in learning. So talk a little bit about what role self-reflection plays in decision-making.

Jack Flaherty: [00:13:14] Sure. Historically, you and I, probably have had mentors, where they would sit over our shoulder and give us guidance and tell us how to do something better. Well, we’re in a self-learning world nowadays, and we don’t have that as much of an opportunity, so we need to take a demonstrative step. You can formulate it however it works best for your work style. But, if you have a critical decision, writing down what are the aspects of that particular decision, how you came to a conclusion, and then revisiting that after you see the results to see if there was any way you could have altered your approach to get a more optimal outcome. The second aspect of that is that we all have either crutch words that we use, or we have crutch excuses about why we could or could not do something. And again, by writing that down and start taking notes about when those instances occur, we’re more apt to close those gaps and become a more effective leader.

Jack Flaherty: [00:14:26] Going through each of the principles, we can start looking at and saying, “Oh, I probably should have collaborated with this individual,” or “I had no idea because I joined a company six months ago that, 24, 36 months ago, something happened.” So there’s an inherent bias about going in a particular direction, and “I should have asked more questions.” And that really drives the self-reflection piece, to identify where there’s an obstacle or a hiccup and see if we can iron that out, so the next time we’re faced with the same decision or something similar, we ask the right question. We learn from ourselves. Because they say about 85 percent of us are not very self-aware, meaning only 15 percent of us are truly self-aware. And so we need to question ourselves at times. Even if we are confident, even if we think we have all the background information, it’s still good to ask open-ended questions of ourselves as well as others to make sure that we’re not falling into the same traps that we might have before.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:34] I was struck by the concept of a decision journal, which you mentioned in the book, and I think it’s essentially what you just explained, at least in part—that idea of taking note when you make a decision, thinking about what information did you have, who did you involve. But I liked that idea of making sure to document those aspects of decision-making while it’s still fresh in your mind, while you have that decision that you’ve just made. And then there’s that piece of returning to it later, when you have some of the results, and you’re really seeing how that decision played out. But I think that could be incredibly powerful as a tool for better decision-making in the future and an incredible tool for learning as well.

Jack Flaherty: [00:16:16] I can’t begin to say. I’m a lifelong learner, most of the time by hard knocks. And so I would love to say that I do this every time. But I do know that, when I’m faced with a life-altering change or something that I know is significant, I will take notes, both in my to-do list but also what I’ve learned or found along the way. That way we can come back because, again, I don’t have the world’s best memory. It helps me rethink what I was feeling, what I was thinking during that particular time, how do we alter the course going forward, again, so we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

Collaboration and Empathy in Decision-MakingCelisa Steele: [00:16:58] I think one aspect of decision-making that we’ve touched on somewhat—because we’ve certainly talked about who else could be involved—some choices really are mine to make, I would say. This is a very simple one, but it might be just what I want to have for lunch. But there are going to be others that really need to involve others, like what strategic direction my organization is going to take. And it seems like leaders who solicit input on an important decision are probably going to inevitably end up with some input that doesn’t match the decision that’s ultimately made. So how do you think about helping those groups, those parties who aren’t satisfied by the ultimate decision? How do you think about asking for input and knowing that there might be some dissatisfied people or how to control for that in the decision-making process?

Jack Flaherty: [00:17:58] Sure. There are two principles that I’ll hit on. One is collaboration, and I suggest not only soliciting feedback from those that agree with you or those that you have to work with, but those who might vehemently oppose a recommendation that you’re making and sitting down with them. Often I find those conversations themselves dispel a lot of the—I won’t say animosity—but the argument or energy around that because, again, folks want to feel heard. And the second part of that is empathy. It’s a theme that I have that goes throughout the entire book, that we really need to understand the impact of our decisions. And so, whether you’re negatively impacted because you might be asked, as part of your work, to move or change your role or learn a new position, but also it comes to executive leaders who have contributed an idea that you need to go back to them and have a conversation and talking about why you took a particular path.

Jack Flaherty: [00:19:03] They may not 100-percent agree with it, but, by taking the time out of both your and their day to really express what challenge you were faced with, what information you were provided, your appreciation for their feedback, why you made a particular decision, and that you want them as part of your team because you want to have that objective opinion or perspective to ensure we get to a successful outcome. You take a humble approach in saying, “I may not know everything, but, based on what the facts were, this was the most optimal direction for us to take. But I also want my right-hand person to always be identifying what other roadblocks are out there so they can help me or help the organization navigate what’s often a very complex course.”

Celisa Steele: [00:19:51] Those kinds of conversations are assuredly important, but admittedly they will take time. And so, as we’re talking about the first principle around “triage first,” that it probably depends on the level of decision how much time you’re going to be able to invest, or how much time it’s going to make sense to invest in these upfront, collaborative conversations, and then these follow-on conversations around “Let me circle back with you, explain why I made this decision, even though it’s not what you recommended.”

Jack Flaherty: [00:20:25] There’s a wide spectrum for the speed, and that’s one of the foundations again for the platform, is to be able to make decisions with speed. But the platform supports short-term decision-making, even in an air traffic controller, all the way to your audience, who might be building a software platform, and they’re looking to see what technologies to use, how to market it, and what their audience is. The latter are a little bit longer in the evaluation phase. So you put time to have some of those discussions because usually it’s a richer discussion. But, if we go back even to the air traffic control, the FAA actually implemented a governance program for air traffic controllers so they could communicate because they’re not looking at just technology or what they can see out of the sky, but now they can listen to others as well as they go through the decision-making process.

Jack Flaherty: [00:21:21] And so, yes, some of these are split-second decisions, which you may have to revisit after an event has occurred and say judgmentally, “This is why I chose A and not B.” But there’s a time to come back because trust and a rich culture are so important for the longevity and success of an organization. The decision itself might be done very quick, but I highly recommend coming back and having some level of rapport conversation with those individuals, functions, or departments and sharing again what you were faced with, what the criticality of that was, what the value of that was, and why we took a particular approach. But never push down or press away their opinions. I would say continue to foster that. I want somebody that’s always taking that objective look for the best interest of the organization. And so we can again consistently get the results that we want. And, if you always have yes people around you, we all know where that goes. It’s usually not a good situation.

Becoming More Intentional About Decision-MakingCelisa Steele: [00:22:41] I really like this idea of thinking about decision-making and having an effective decision-making process as being part of organizational culture. I think that’s a really interesting perspective on it. So let’s think about our listeners, and, if they’re leading their organization or leading part of their organization, and they’re hearing this and thinking, “Okay, yes, decision-making is a really important aspect of our culture or should be,” what would you recommend as some initial steps or a first step if they’re really trying to get more intentional and more deliberate about decision-making in their organization?

Jack Flaherty: [00:23:20] So, from a leader’s perspective—and I have a lot of thoughts on this one—but for the sake of this one, we’ll get targeted. From a leader’s perspective, it’s demonstrating by example. It’s coming to meetings, fostering questions, and setting the expectation that individuals again or groups will come with a perspective, and it may align; it may not align. But setting the expectation that you’re coming to a meeting or a decision well-informed is the first step. The second is to not silence, whether somebody who’s just hired yesterday or new to the organization, because a lot of times those are the individuals who—because they have a fresh perspective—bring in brilliant ideas that could be hugely beneficial to the organization. Whether you catalog those ideas and revisit them as part of some sort of inventory list, you have that agile, analytical brain working constantly, saying, “How can I do my job better? How can our company operate better?”

Jack Flaherty: [00:24:30] It’s by instilling your initial cultural values and expectations by the leadership. And then, as we take this further, it’s talking about building cultures of collaboration. Because again, if we start setting the expectation that it’s okay to have sometimes almost a level of an argumentative discourse about a decision, that can be okay as long as you are arguing the facts, and you’re not advocating just your position based on ego. That is a delicate balance that you have to walk because I’ve seen it far too often that two executives go toe-to-toe, and one just wants to win. And that’s where it really undermines your ability to achieve a mission, a goal, an objective because it might be self-interested, because it might mean “I get a higher bonus this year because my department did X better,” but it was at the sacrifice of numerous others.

Making Decisions About Our Own Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:25:35] So, Jack, we always like to ask guests that come on the Leading Learning Podcast about their own approach to lifelong learning. But, given our focus on decision-making today, I wanted to tweak that question a little bit for you and ask you how do you go about making decisions about your own lifelong learning?

Jack Flaherty: [00:25:55] This has been a lifelong journey. I didn’t fall upon writing a book about decisions because there was a gap in the marketplace. It was a skill set that I lacked, and I had numerous mentors that blessed me with their time and helped me along my way. And so my decision process is I’ve always focused on what my North Star is, and this aligns with my personal, my career, my everything. And for me it’s family first. And so, if it doesn’t make sense for my family, then it doesn’t make sense for me. And then, when we get into the actual business aspect of it, I look at, from an ethical perspective, to be able to look at the person in the mirror—did I really give the right amount of attention to this and bring in the others that should have collaborated on a particular decision?

Jack Flaherty: [00:26:54] I’m a huge person of empathy, and I’ve spent my entire life mentoring and building basically kids out of undergraduate. And so I love working with particularly young people but also senior executives and really opening their eyes. Because, once you learn to make effective decisions consistently, you gain a confidence. Your shoulders pull back. Your ability to look forward and not look back and wonder if you made the right decisions frees your brain. So you’re a better leader. You make better decisions. People want to follow you because they believe in who you are and what you stand for. And so, for me, it’s a lot of who you are as a human being that really, for me, is a driver. So I’m very ethical-bound—a lot of empathy. But again it’s also tied to success. I want personal fulfillment myself. And I’m sure your audience does as well, not just for themselves but for their clients. And so, for me, I always come back to my North Star or my goal. What am I looking to achieve? And that can vary across time, but it’s so important to be very crystal clear on where you want to go because that will help you make the right decisions so you can get there.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:20] And so, you, in the book make the point of writing it being part of your own learning journey and that you’ve had these lessons from the school of hard knocks around decision-making and what works and what doesn’t, and that then the book is essentially part of giving back and sharing what you’ve found to be helpful in making decisions.

Jack Flaherty: [00:28:46] I want to enrich the world and leave it better than I came into it. And unfortunately, early on in my career, some executives and other individuals were negatively impacted, whether their job or their position, because of the risk management reports that I wrote. And so I flipped my entire approach for how I did client service, how I worked with my clients, and I try to put myself in their shoes, saying, “What pieces are missing? Why are they not getting towards their goal?” And, as a result, how I wrote, how I engaged was always focused on their goals and why their current status was inadequate for them to achieve that goal. And, as a personal belief, who I am, what I do in my personal and professional life all follows that “How do I help you?” Because I do believe the more good you put out there, the more good you get back. And so it’s a personal philosophy about how we make decisions. And, yes, all of this has been learned through the school of hard knocks because, like I said at the beginning, we’re not really taught how to make decisions. And, as I vividly remember my mom, when I was young, she said, “Trust your gut feeling,” and it felt like a great idea. But when you think about it, if you’re not actually born with a good compass, that might not actually be the right decision.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:11] I just recalled that last week I was on the tennis courts with someone, and she said her mother used to always say, “Make good decisions!” And she realized that her mother would say that over and over, and she would never tell her how to make good decisions. So, maybe these seven principles would help her.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:37] Jack Flaherty is a consultant, a speaker, and the author of The Decision Switch: 7 Principles of Successful Decision-Making. Learn more about this work on the Decision Switch Web site.

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Related Resources* Talking Learning, Leadership, and Results with AMA’s Manny Avramidis * Leadership, Happiness, and Positive Psychology with L. Michelle Smith * Leadership, Innovation, and Collective Impact with Seth Kahan * ‘Inclusive Leadership with Melissa Majors

The post Successful Decision-Making with Jack Flaherty appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbLearning styles are a pernicious myth, but learner preferences are a reality that learning businesses disregard at their own risk. Learning businesses need to balance using effective learning strategies and approaches with giving learners what they want.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesJeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Learning styles are a pernicious myth, but learner preferences are a reality, and learning businesses disregard learner preferences at their own risk.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:13] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:15] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] The scientific basis for learning styles is slim to none, and yet the idea of learning styles persists. So in this episode, number 383, we want to explore why the myth of learning styles remains popular and what learning businesses can and should do with this fiction.

Designing to Learning Styles Is Still Recommended by Some Despite Lack of EfficacyCelisa Steele: [00:00:42] Learning styles have come up in a couple of recent interviews—I’m thinking of my conversation with Jane Bozarth and yours with Will Thalheimer, Jeff—and so this concept of learning styles is top of mind for us again.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:54] And there have been other interviews further back when we’ve talked about learning styles and how they’re not aligned with effective learning. I’m thinking about my conversations with Megan Sumeracki and Clark Quinn, for example. But then, back to more recent things that have made learning styles top of mind for us, I recently came across a post, an article that talked about them, and this was on a site called Teach.com that’s actually hosted by edX, which is one of the biggest, massive open online course providers, and that’s owned by 2U, which is one of the biggest commercial learning companies in general right now out there in the university, more academic-type world. And this was an article specifically about learning styles, basically in support of learning styles and teachers tuning in to learning styles to be better teachers.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:47] And, in fact, I’ll quote from it because I quoted from it in this LinkedIn post that I did about the article. It says, “By understanding what kind of learner you and/or your students are, you can now gain a better perspective on how to implement these learning styles into your lesson plans and study techniques.” So this article is basically supporting the idea that learning styles exist and telling teachers that they need to teach to learning styles, which is really what’s been disproven. Teaching to learning styles does not make any difference, is not effective, but ends up consuming a lot of resources. I ended up getting so far close to 7,500 views of that post on LinkedIn, which anybody familiar with LinkedIn knows that’s quite a few views. Lots of comments, lots of reposts. So it’s obviously a hot-button issue, and so we felt like we needed to give some airtime to it.

What Is a “Learning Style”?Celisa Steele: [00:02:43] That’s right. So we want to dig into learning styles and their perniciousness. And, as we often do, we’re going to define our key term just to make sure that we’re all on the same page. We feel like, upfront, we should define what we mean by “learning styles.” The idea of learning styles refers to different ways that individuals learn and acquire new information or skills. And so the idea is that people have distinct and preferred ways of processing information. Common learning styles include visual learners, and these are folks who learn through visual aids. Think photos, illustrations, charts, graphs, and diagrams. These folks benefit from seeing information presented visually—or at least that’s the idea.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:29] Yes, I hear so many people say that they are visual learners. I think that’s the one that tends to get the most airtime. But then there are auditory learners that learn best through listening. That might be our listeners out there for the podcast, and these are people that tend to remember information presented verbally—or at least this is how they think that they learn. Think about lectures, discussions, or, of course, podcasts.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:56] Kinesthetic learners, this is another learning style that gets brought up often, and the idea here is that these kinesthetic learners learn through physical experiences and hands-on activities, and they prefer to engage with the material in an interactive way. So think about experiments and projects that require the learners to do something. One very specific example could be practicing CPR on a mannequin, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:22] So those three are the classical learning styles. But you’ll sometimes hear about reading/writing learners who learn via written text, and this is how you get the VARK model (V-A-R-K) that a lot of people might be familiar with. You’ll hear about social learners who learn best in groups and collaborative situations or solitary learners who learn best by working independently, often in a quiet setting.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:50] So that’s what we have in mind when we’re thinking about learning styles—this idea of visual learners, auditory learners, kinesthetic learners, different kinds of learners, and that they have one way that’s really the most effective way for them to learn across the board, in all situations.

I think that one reason we continue to hear about learning styles is that, like any good myth, they try to explain something. And I think that learning styles offer a potential answer to why sometimes we learn better than at other times, or why sometimes certain people seem to learn more than others from a specific experience or offering.

Celisa Steele

So, if I learn really well from a lecture, and you don’t, then saying, “Hey, I’m an auditory learner,” that offers a plausible explanation for that difference in learning outcomes there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:40] Right. And, if I don’t learn well, then I can blame the delivery method. It’s not my fault that I can’t play piano or that I can’t recall the dates of major events of World War II. No, it’s the fault of how that instruction was designed and delivered.

Learning Styles As a Hypothesis That Persists Despite Evidence to the ContraryCelisa Steele: [00:05:56] And then I think another reason that learning styles persist is probably just the difficulty of keeping people up to speed on what’s theory and hypothesis, what’s initial testing and results, and then evolving theories and their evidence. So I think, again, people probably came up with learning styles to explain some of those differences that we were just talking about there. And, yes, those might be plausible hypotheses, but then you actually test them, and you see how learners actually learn, and you see that there really is no support to these different learning styles leading to better learning outcomes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:35] Yes. And they just haven’t held up to that testing. Over time, we found out that what does seem intuitive and plausible in the end isn’t really what works. And you can think of analogies out there. Think of what happened with COVID when, way back in the beginning, we were told pretty emphatically at first not to wear a mask. Nobody should be wearing masks. That’s not the thing to do with this. And then, of course, I don’t know, it was a month later, two months later—I can’t remember when it was—a complete about-face because we were getting evidence that, yes, wearing a mask does have some positive impact, so it is something that we should be doing. But, of course, a lot of people heard that original message and were never able to get on board with the change in message after that.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:20] Right. So this happens all the time in science. There’s a theory, and then that theory is either supported by testing results, or it is overturned by testing results. I think we have to keep in mind that, if we are truly going to subscribe to following learning science in our learning businesses—which we think we should—then you have to remember that it is a science and that you have to keep up with the latest discoveries, the latest findings, and what is actually evidence-based.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:50]

And the reality is the evidence just isn’t there to support learning styles. A lot of work has been done on this. There’s a lot of research that’s been reported out on this.

Jeff Cobb

Instead, what we see in the real world is that individuals use a variety of strategies to learn, no matter what they may think their learning style is. And the best strategies depend on context, subject matter, and the learner’s goals, among other important factors.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:17] Right. I mentioned CPR and a mannequin. That’s a place where that kinesthetic learning really makes a ton of sense. If you need to be able to understand how to do compressions, then using that literal, hands-on approach to learning, it fits that subject matter. It fits that context. And so, if the goal of the learner there is to learn how to do CPR, then you’re going to want to take that kinesthetic approach, at least for part of the instruction.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:44] And now you may be listening and saying, “Wait a minute here. Wait a minute. I know that I like to be able to watch a video to learn.” Or, of course, in this case, “I like to listen to a podcast to learn.” Or “I have to have my hands on stuff to learn.” And it’s true that if you ask people how they like to learn, many, probably even most, will express some preference. And there is evidence of preference.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:16] Sure, I’ve always hated group projects. So, if I were asked, I’d say, “Yes, I’m a solitary learner. Please do not make me work with anyone else.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:23] Absolutely, people have their preferences, and we’ll come back to that because it is important. But the fact that people have preferences does not mean that those preferences actually align with how they do in fact best learn or support this idea that there are specific learning styles that we need to be teaching to.

Partner with TagorasCelisa Steele: [00:09:47] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Learning Styles = Myth, Learner Preferences = RealityCelisa Steele: [00:10:22] I think we can summarize where we are at this point with learning styles, that falls under the heading of myth; learner preferences, that falls under the heading of reality. So we do believe that learning styles, in terms of actually promoting more effective learning, no, we’re going to put that in the myth category. But this idea that learners do have preferences, we absolutely buy into that. We do believe that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:48] We do, and there are some implications of that. But to talk about learning styles first, learning businesses need to reject the idea of learning styles in teaching to learning styles because they really need to focus on what we know is most effective.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:05] Right. And so, for example, there’s been a lot of research around dual-coding theory, and this is the idea that audio plus visuals is really one of the most effective ways to convey information and help learners. Richard Mayer and Ruth Colvin Clark talk about this in e-Learning and the Science of Instruction. That’s a book we’ve recommended before and we believe is very good because of its evidence-based approach. Again, as you hear in the title, the focus is in particular on e-learning, but it has relevant application in physical classroom settings as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:42] And, of course, this is true regardless of whether somebody says, “I am a kinesthetic learner or a read/write learner.” That dual encoding with the audio/visual approach, giving those different pathways into cognition, is going to be effective regardless, and you want to go with what does the science say about what is effective? That’s one very good reason for dismissing this idea of learning styles and going with things like dual-coding theory instead. The other is that learning businesses need to be good stewards of their resources. And we know a lot of our audience members are feeling resource-challenged in their learning businesses. There never seems to be enough budget, never enough people to do what you need to do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:27] And, if you’re trying to create learning experiences that teach according to learning styles—so you’ve got a visual approach, you’ve got an audio approach, you’ve got a read/write approach, you’ve got a kinesthetic approach, you’ve got a social approach—and you’re trying to factor all of that into your learning design, well, it is good to use multimedia. We just talked about audio and visual, but to try to do all of those things and engineering all of your learning experiences, that’s very resource-intensive. That’s why I brought up the article at the beginning that I posted about on LinkedIn because there’s an article telling teachers—and, in this case, mostly in K-12 and higher education situations—that they need to be teaching to all of these different learning styles. And that, again, is a resource-challenged environment. And this site is telling teachers they need to use a theory that has no basis in fact to do a lot more work, basically.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:15] Right. So don’t follow learning styles when creating what you offer as a learning business. It’s not effective. It’s a poor use of your resources, and it really just adds to the noise that so many learners are hearing. If they land on your catalog page, and they see that you are offering something that helps them in a subject that they need help in, but then they have to further make this choice around what format to take it in, it’s adding overwhelm without value. There’s no value there.

What Learning Businesses Should Do with the Reality of Learner PreferencesJeff Cobb: [00:13:47] Right. So that’s the learning styles side of the equation. But, back to preferences, we feel it is very important to embrace preferences, or the knowledge that learners view themselves as having preferences, because that is going to be an important aspect of marketing and appealing to adults when they have a lot of options for going elsewhere. So, if they feel like you’re speaking to their preferences and how they like to learn, that can make you much more attractive as a learning provider. That’s not going so far as to say that we’re developing to different learning styles, but that we recognize at different times you might prefer things in different formats.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:30] And so this means that, when appropriate, offer different options. Think about things like, “Here, do this project on your own” versus working with another member of the cohort. That could be fine for a project related to time management, that choice of “You can either do this on your own, or you can do it with a group.” But it might not be an appropriate option if what you’re focused on is giving and receiving useful feedback, where working with another learner is integral to that goal of learning, where you’re trying to see what it’s like to give and receive effective feedback. Again, you could let learners read an article, or you could let learners listen to it. But, again, if a key point of that piece is something visual, then it’s going to be more effective to have them read the text with the embedded visual versus trying to explain the visual in audio form, which is going to create higher cognitive load. Just as an example, you know that describing what a person looks like is done much more efficiently with a photo than with a paragraph of text, for example. So, again, it gets back to subject matter, context, and learning goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:39] Right. You don’t want to pander to preferences. You need to forefront what’s actually effective in the particular context with the particular goals, as you’re saying, Celisa. But, where it’s possible to provide some meaningful choice, then provide it because that supports autonomy, which we know is also good for motivation in the context of learning. Bottom line is there’s some nuance here, and it’s easy to see, again, why this idea of learning styles and then developing all of these different ways to teach and learn is attractive, but you’ve got to pare it back to, “Okay, let’s start with what’s actually effective here,” and then where it makes sense to provide some meaningful choices that make people feel like their preferences are genuinely being respected as adult learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:24] Right. So nuance is at the heart of this, and it’s a balancing act that you have to look at the financial realities, the resource realities, just knowing that you are dealing with limits in the resource area, and then thinking about what your audience needs and wants. And so where can you provide options that are going to have a return on investment, that it’s going to be worth providing those options? Or options sometimes don’t necessarily add a whole lot of extra effort. Again, as long as they don’t undercut your learning goals, that can be a very good thing to support the adult learners’ motivation by giving them that choice.

Look to Maximize Where Effective Learning Techniques Overlap with Learner PreferencesJeff Cobb: [00:17:04] One way we’ve thought about this is a Venn diagram, which, even if you’re listening, as an auditory person, we think you can probably visualize this, where you’ve got one circle that is those learning preferences—what your learners perceive as their preferences—and another, which is the effective learning techniques. And, to the extent you can, you want those to overlap. So definitely giving priority to the effective learning techniques, but then also giving the measure that you should to how people say they like to learn, their preferences for learning. If you can combine those into the learning experience in that balanced way, then you’re getting the best of all worlds.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:45] Learning styles are a pernicious myth, but learner preferences are a reality, and learning businesses disregard learner preferences at their own risk. Learning businesses need to balance effective learning strategies and approaches with giving their customers, AKA their learners, what they want.

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Related Resources* Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer * Evidence-Based Learning with Jane Bozarth * Effective Learning with Learning Scientist Megan Sumeracki * Debunking Learning Myths with Clark Quinn * Designing Content Scientifically with Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra Roldan

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e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning

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The Leading Learning Podcast is just one part of what we do at Leading Learning. In this episode, we reintroduce Leading Learning and the range of resources, education, and insights Learning Learning provides to learning business professionals. To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via …

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Dr. Ellen LangerOn the Leading Learning Podcast, sometimes we get to talk with someone whose thinking and research have deeply influenced our work and lives. Such is the case with Ellen J. Langer, AKA the mother of mindfulness. Dr. Langer was the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she is still professor of psychology. The recipient of three Distinguished Scientists awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Liberty Science Genius Award, Dr. Langer wrote the international bestseller Mindfulness, as well as The Power of Mindful Learning, Counterclockwise, On Becoming an Artist, and, most recently, The Mindful Body.

In this episode, co-host Celisa Steele talks with return guest Dr. Langer about what mindfulness is (hint—it’s not meditation), the ubiquity of uncertainty, mind-body unity, and attention to variability. They also discuss mindful contagion, how we never really make decisions, and how our perception (of time, of ability) changes what we’re capable of.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

Defining MindfulnessCelisa Steele: [00:01:56] You are known as the mother of mindfulness, and mindfulness is clearly this thread that runs throughout your work, including your latest book, which we’re going to talk about more in a minute. But just to help listeners more fully engage in this conversation, tell us what you mean by mindfulness.

Ellen Langer: [00:02:16] That’s a very good question, Celisa, because I’m not talking about meditation. Meditation is fine. Meditation isn’t mindfulness; it’s a practice you engage in that results in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness is more immediate, and it’s not a practice. It’s so simple that it almost defies belief. Noticing new things. When you notice new things, the neurons are firing, and 40 years of research says that it’s literally and figuratively enlivening. But we don’t notice new things because we think we know. And so what happens is, if you simply notice things about things you know, you come to see, “Gee, I didn’t know it as well as I thought I did,” and then your attention naturally goes to it. I often, when I’m giving lectures, start by asking people—so I’ll ask you this, Celisa—how much is one plus one?

Celisa Steele: [00:03:05] I’ll fall into the trap and say two.

Ellen Langer: [00:03:08] Yes, everybody does. That’s what we were taught. And, usually, at that point, you tune out—who is this woman, and why should I listen to her? But it turns out that one and one is not always two. If you’re adding one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. Adding one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one equals one. One cloud plus one cloud equals one cloud, and so on. And, in fact, in the real world, one plus one probably doesn’t equal two as or more often than it does. What you need to do is sit up and pay attention. Is this an instance where one plus one equals two, or perhaps it equals one? Actually, people often don’t know that when they’re adding, they tend to use a base-10 number system, but if you were using a base-2 number system, one plus one would be written as 10. So the answer to almost any question is “It depends.”

The way to be mindful is to start off recognizing the ubiquity of uncertainty. Everything is uncertain. Everything is constantly changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. As soon as you think you know, you’re going to be caught off guard, probably, and find out, in some instances, you don’t know.

Dr. Ellen Langer

Ellen Langer: [00:04:25] And this happened to me many years ago. I was at a horse event. Now, you didn’t tell your listeners that I’m Harvard-Yale all the way through. That’s important for this story. So this man asked me will I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog. Well, nobody knows better than I—they could know as well, but not better—horses are herbivorous; they don’t eat meat. The man came back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong. It’s very humbling. But it’s also very exciting because that means all of the things we think we can’t do or that can’t be done by others also become uncertain. We can’t know that we can’t. And, for me, that’s what propelled lots of the work that I describe in The Mindful Body.

The Mindful BodyCelisa Steele: [00:05:15] Well, let’s do talk about that new book [The Mindful Body] a little bit now, and tell us what prompted you to write this book. Why the book, and why now?

Ellen Langer: [00:05:24] Well, there probably couldn’t be a better time, but I think, no matter when I did it, I would say there couldn’t be a better time. It’s one of those things that, if somebody is going to help us be happier and healthier, there is no better time than the present. We’ve done a lot of research that, since my last book—and this is the way that I make people most aware of the work. I want to get it out there because, to my mind, the findings are very important for everybody’s health and well-being. And so this book, it’s interesting. This book started as a memoir, and then I decided, “No, I don’t know. I don’t want to write a memoir,” and then it became what it is, so there are lots of personal stories in there. So that was fun for me to write. But I think that, when you look at the research that is in the book, it’s self-explanatory as to why now and that the cost of medical care, if we put into practice some of the things that this research suggests, we might not need the medical care that we currently need.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:33] I did notice in the acknowledgments where you said that it did start as a memoir, and I found that fascinating. You mentioned that it went into an idea memoir, and I just loved that concept, of this idea memoir.

Ellen Langer: [00:06:46] Yes. But you see, the thing is that my ideas are anything but linear. So writing an idea memoir became too difficult. And then I just write, and people can call it whatever they want.

Leadership and Mindfulness Celisa Steele: [00:06:58] Well, I think that we all personally have an interest in improved health, whether that’s for ourselves or for people we love. And there are, of course, also societal benefits to improved healthcare. But, given that this is the Leading Learning Podcast, I want to focus a little bit less directly on the healthcare side of things and a little bit more on some of the implications for leading and/or learning that is definitely there in the work that you do. And I had that leading and learning lens on as I was reading The Mindful Body. When I got to one sentence in chapter 10, I felt like, “Wow, this is perfect! You are answering this question.” And that sentence that I have in mind is that “Perhaps the primary job of the leader, just as with teachers, is to encourage the mindfulness of those being led or taught.” Maybe you can make the argument, in brief, for why leaders and teachers really should focus on encouraging mindfulness in themselves and then those they are leading or teaching.

Ellen Langer: [00:08:02] Well, let me answer in a backwards way. Typically, we’re using yesterday’s solutions to solve today’s problems, and that’s not a good thing.

The more mindful the leader is, the more they realize they don’t know. And when you know you don’t know, you sit up and pay attention to other people, who, in any particular instance, may know. Everybody knows something.

Dr. Ellen Langer

We did a study a while ago where we had orchestras perform either mindfully or mindlessly—simply instructed, “Remember when you played this piece of music, and you loved the way you played it? Just replicate it.” Versus “Play it new in very subtle ways that only you would know.” We taped it, then we played it for people, and we asked, “Which performance did you prefer?” The musicians themselves and the audiences overwhelmingly preferred the mindfully played piece. Well, it wasn’t until I wrote this paper up for publication that I realized how it spoke to leadership. Here we have a situation where we have a group performance where everybody is essentially doing their own thing, but you end up with superior, coordinated experience/performance.

Ellen Langer: [00:09:16] You know that, if everybody is mindful, then everybody is drawing their cues from the same ongoing situation. Once the leader recognizes that they don’t know—and too many think they do know, and then, again, they’re using yesterday’s solutions to solve today’s problems, and they’re never going to win the race, whichever race they’re in—you tend to have a different respect for people. Lots of my work is about how we become non-judgmental. Everybody says you shouldn’t be judgmental, but then nobody knows how you turn it around. Many people say, “Okay, so you’re inconsistent, Clarissa. I’ll just let you be inconsistent,” but that never works. If you recognize that behavior makes sense from the perspective of the person who’s doing the behavior, and you ask, “Well, what sense does it make?” Well, your being inconsistent, I realize, is because you’re flexible. You don’t like me because I’m gullible. You want me to change until you recognize that’s because I’m trusting.

Ellen Langer: [00:10:22] And it turns out that every single negative description we have for somebody has an equally positive but oppositely valenced alternative. So that leads us to feel differently about people. And, when we’re leading people, rather than thinking, “This person is top of the line, and this other person is somebody who I can’t trust,” and so on, when we apply these simple rules, we see, “Gee, there are certainly moments where even that person we question….” If you were a teacher, and you started a class, and you asked how much is one and one, and you had little Janie raise her hands, and she says it’s one, the way we are now, where we think we know, you’d put her down. The class would look at her disparagingly, and that would destroy her life—sad story.

Ellen Langer: [00:11:11] But, anyway, in this scheme, what you would do with little Janie or big Peter (adults) is assume that there’s some sense in what they’re saying, figure out the sense in what they’re saying, and then everybody learns. When you encourage the people you’re leading to be more mindful, you’re doing several things, but probably most important—or one of the important things—is that, when you’re mindful, you see opportunities to which others are blind, and you’re able to avoid the problem before it arises, so everything is going to go more smoothly. You are creating an environment where everybody feels good about themselves.

It turns out that, when people are mindful, the products that they produce actually bear the imprint of that mindfulness.

Dr. Ellen Langer

Being mindful is so easy that what happens is now your relationships improve. People see you as authentic, genuine, that you’re seen as charismatic. Your relationships, the products are better—and it’s good for your health, and it’s the essence of feeling good. There’s no downside, which is nice.

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Mindful ContagionCelisa Steele: [00:13:05] Maybe you can talk a little bit about mindful contagion because I found that really fascinating in The Mindful Body, when you wrote about that. So tell us a little bit about that and what you found out.

Ellen Langer: [00:13:16] Okay. Well, let me tell you, first, that when I was writing the book, I had a chapter that I thought was the woo-woo chapter. I never report findings that we don’t have, but some of them are so strange that I question, “Hmm…” because I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath. There’s so much solid information in the book that, if this seems too out there, let it just stay out there. But you know that when you’re with people who are mindful, you’re going to feel more at ease because they’re less judgmental. So, in that way, mindfulness is contagious. But it goes beyond that, and this is bizarre. We gave people index cards to read—now, I did this 40 years ago—and the index card would just say something on it like, “Mary had a a little lamb.” Nobody sees the double “a.” I said, “Okay, tell me how many words you just saw? I’ll pay you for accuracy.” It doesn’t matter; they don’t see it. Okay. Now, if people are mindful, it turns out they do see it. All right. So now we have somebody sitting in a lab, and we have somebody working with us, a confederate, and the confederate is going to be mindful or mindless. They’re not looking at the person. They’re just sitting next to them, and, wildly so it seems, when that confederate is mindful, the participant sees the double word.

Ellen Langer: [00:14:47] But we also have a lot of data that I think I also reported here. We have a wine tasting experiment, and the experimenter is mindful or mindless. These are heavy drinkers, who are our research participants. And the question is how much do they drink? And, when they’re with the mindless experimenter, they drink more. We have people interacting with kids who are autistic, and they’re either mindful or mindless. When they are mindful, the children are indistinguishable from kids who are not autistic. There are many mechanisms for this, but you can’t lose by being mindful, and people will like you more, whether you have to speak to them or just be in their presence. I don’t know. The last of these woo-woo studies, we had people in a room meditating, and then we had them leave. Then the participant would come in, and the participant is given all sorts of cognitive tests. Versus the participant enters a room that had not just been occupied by people who were meditating. There’s something in the air, it seems, that, when you’re in that room where people have just been mindful (in this instance, through meditation), your scores are better. I don’t know what to make of it, but it’s exciting.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:12] It is exciting, and I think, for me, one of the implications I was seeing is we’ve always talked about the value of peer learning, for example, and I think sometimes that gets boiled down to, oh, well, you can learn from their experiences, or they can share examples of what’s failed or what’s worked for them. I think that’s part of it, but I think there’s something in your work here that also suggests just the fact of being surrounded by others who are actively interested in and mindful about whatever the topic is, there’s a huge benefit in that to learning.

Ellen Langer: [00:16:44] Oh, yes. I think the most important part to learning is for people not to feel evaluated. People enjoy challenges when they’re playing games. They don’t enjoy the challenges when they’re in work settings, for example. They’re scared. What are they scared of? That heads are going to roll. That somebody is going to think they’re stupid. And so on.

How a Universal Attribution of Uncertainty Benefits LearningCelisa Steele: [00:17:06] That actually is a topic I wanted to talk about because I think your concept of this universal attribution of uncertainty has a very particular benefit in the learning situation because adult learners can be afraid to appear dumb or to not know the answer. And so, if we recognize that no one knows everything for sure, then that can reduce that shame and open us up to learn.

Ellen Langer: [00:17:37] Well, it’s not just that everybody doesn’t know everything for sure. Nobody should know anything for sure. Remember, one and one sometimes equal one. But oftentimes we’re afraid to seek help or afraid to show up because we don’t know, and people in that situation are making what I call a personal attribution for not knowing: “I don’t know. You may know. I better get out of here or pretend.” The alternative to that is a universal attribution, which is the correct one, I believe, in this instance: “I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody can know because everything is always changing.” Again, everything looks different from different perspectives. And so it makes you very strong when you’re in the face of somebody who acts as if they know. And it’s very easy to poke at them—and, yes, it’s not so nice to show them that, in fact, they don’t know. You can either know something mindfully or think you know it and behave mindlessly. When you know it completely—if you’re playing golf, people think that what they’d like to do is get a hole-in-one every time, be fully expert.

Ellen Langer: [00:18:49] But once you get a hole-in-one every time, there’s no game there. There’s no there there, and you’re mindless. Not knowing is actually an advantage. You could do a crossword puzzle, and then you could do it again right after. Well, that’s not fun because you know the answers, or you still don’t know the answers. Either way, it’s not fun.

What is the essence of this mindfulness is that experience of engagement, and that experience of engagement is going from not knowing to knowing for the moment, not for all time, again, because everything is always changing. And one of the ways we should be teaching people to understand this is to teach conditionally.

Dr. Ellen Langer

So you don’t say one and one is two. The way to teach that more appropriately would be one and one may be two, one and one can be two, one and one is often two, and so on. Because, as soon as you think you know, then you’re no longer there for the way things change.

The Illusion of ControlCelisa Steele: [00:20:07] You also make the assertion in the book that we really don’t make decisions. Can you talk a little bit about that, the fact that we don’t make decisions and this illusion of control?

Ellen Langer: [00:20:19] This may be a little complicated, but let me try to state it. First of all, if we start by realizing that outcomes are neither good nor bad, it depends on how we understand them. An example I’ve used too often, but you and I go out for lunch. The food is good, wonderful. The food is bad, wonderful—I’ll eat less. So, for me, it’s always a winning situation. People suffer from stress. Events don’t cause stress; it’s the view you take of the event that causes stress. You open it up and take a more mindful view, the stress disappears. When people are making decisions, they think that what they’re supposed to do is a cost-benefit analysis, hat are the costs, what are the benefits. If there are more costs than benefits, you don’t choose this option, and so on. But, if every cost is a benefit, and every benefit is a cost, and it’s all up to you to interpret that, then, when you add them up, they’re not going to tell you what to do. So you say, “Should we go back to that restaurant?” I’m going to say, “Whatever you want to do.” Because I know that, if the food is still no good, I’m going to enjoy your company and not be distracted by eating. Or I’ll eat it.

Ellen Langer: [00:21:35] So that’s the first part. People think they should be doing these cost-benefits. They shouldn’t. Now, all decisions are between or among things that are the same or things that are different. When they’re the same, it doesn’t matter what you decide, and, when they’re different, as soon as you understand the difference, the decision follows mechanically. For example, if I say to you, “Do you want A or B?” How could you know what to want? What is it? So you gather some information, and you see, ah, A is $50, and B is $1,000. What’s the decision? You mechanically just say B. I think that, when we add all of this together with other pieces—and I think it’s more persuasive because I can take more time with it, to read it—that I end up with the view that, rather than spend our time worrying about making the right decision, instead we should make the decision right.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:36] I think that’s very profound and very practical. I think there’s so much time and energy spent in organizations around trying to think through the “right decision.”

Ellen Langer: [00:22:46] It’s also about decisions are holding the world constant, and things are changing. That’s why I say, again, that everything you’re deciding was based on yesterday, which is only going to be partially related to tomorrow.

Attention to VariabilityCelisa Steele: [00:23:01] You spend a fair amount of time in The Mindful Body talking about attention to variability and that kind of mindfulness. Would you explain to listeners what attention to variability is?

Ellen Langer: [00:23:14] For sure. We deal primarily with it with respect to chronic illness in the way that we can heal ourselves, but it’s true for everything. And it sounds fancy: “Oh, my gosh, attention to variability.” It’s just another way of saying mindful, being mindful, noticing change. Let’s say your spouse is always “Oh, he drives me crazy—he’s always…” whatever. Well, nobody is always anything. If you alerted yourself even once every half hour that you’re with the person, are they being that way now? You’d see sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t. We do this with respect to big diseases—multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, chronic pain, and so on—and we call people periodically, “How are you feeling now? Is it better or worse than before? And why?”

Ellen Langer: [00:24:08] And three things happen. The first is, when you have some chronic illness or even stress—let’s do it with stress. People who are stressed think they’re stressed all the time. No one is anything all the time. So we call you periodically. We’re going to say, “How are you right now? Is it better or worse than before? And why?” And you see, “Gee, I’m not always stressed to the same degree. In fact, now I’m a little less stressed, a little more stressed.” Or, “Before, I thought I was maximally stressed. No, I wasn’t. This is the worst.” Whatever. Then you see you have some control over it. But what’s causing it? You do this periodically throughout the day, throughout the week, and you find out you know you’re stressed when you’re talking to Ellen Langer. Well, if that’s the case, then the cure is simple—don’t talk to me, or talk to me differently.

Ellen Langer: [00:25:00] We’ve been using this for the big ones. Now, what happens with lots of chronic illnesses, the word chronic leads people to believe—and the medical world fosters this belief, I think—that there’s nothing you can do about it. And there’s always something you can do about it. When we didn’t have a cure for COVID—just imagine that you’re a couch potato, and all you’re doing is watching television and eating, overeating, which all of us have done on occasion—but that’s your MO. That’s what you’re doing for months on end. Compare that person with an Olympic athlete. Now, I don’t have data about this, but, just a thought experiment: If both of them got COVID, who do you think would suffer more? No matter what’s wrong with us, there are always ways we can build up our strength; the other parts of our body then are going to be helpful. And then, using this attention to symptom variability, you end up curing some of these so-called incurable diseases, and you end up getting along with the person who you thought was always whatever—add your own adjective.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:23] You share some studies around things like eyesight, which we tend to think of as fixed. And this idea of varying some things and the attention to variability, it seems to—again, if I’m putting the learning lens on this—suggest some ways in which we might be able to outperform our own expectations if we’re willing to open up and remove some of our expectations.

Ellen Langer: [00:26:47] Yes. Once we realize that our behavior varies, then it’s very easy in some sense. What’s making it vary? When am I better? When am I worse? We take cures—seeming cures, I think—too quickly. People fail an eye chart (whatever that means) and then immediately get glasses and then teach their eyes not to be able to see, rather than recognize sometimes we see better than others. If you were doing this attention to symptom variability, in this case, it would be vision variability, and you notice that around three o’clock in the afternoon, you don’t see as well. Well, then you have choices. You can put your glasses on. You could have an energy bar (that would be my choice)—just a chocolate bar, but you call it an energy bar because that’s the way I’m using it. Or you could take a nap. Everything varies, and any time we’re holding it still, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. That’s why, if you were to have just one mindset, which is the only one you should have, it should be that everything is uncertain, so you get to exploit the power in that uncertainty.

Ellen Langer: [00:27:56] And something that I don’t think we brought up yet—it’s probably important and listeners probably want to know—how do I get from discussions about the illusion of predictability and decision-making and risk-taking, stress to chronic illness? What motivates that, and what’s a large part of this book, is an understanding of mind-body unity.

When you put the mind and body back together, then you recognize wherever you put the mind, you’re affecting the body; wherever you put the body, you’re affecting the mind.

Dr. Ellen Langer

That means every thought you have, in some sense, is affecting your longevity, if nothing else. Sometimes the effects are small; sometimes they’re large.

Ellen Langer: [00:28:40] But the first test of the mind-body unity was a study I did a long, long time ago, the counterclockwise study. And, just briefly, we took old men to a retreat that we retrofitted to 20 years earlier and had them live there as if they were their younger selves. They spoke about the past in the present tense. For them, it was 20 years earlier, and these were old men—I’m getting older, so I don’t mind, but they were even older than I—that, without any medical intervention, in a period of time of one week, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked noticeably younger, not 20 years younger (truth be told) but still noticeably younger. So now lots of the new research is involved with, again, testing the mind-body unity idea. And what all of these experiments show is that the amount of control we have over our health is extraordinary, and most of us are totally oblivious to it.

Ellen Langer: [00:29:43] Let me give you an example of just one of these studies. We inflict a wound. Now, the review board is not going to let me really wound people, and I don’t want to hurt people either, so it’s a small wound, but the procedure would be exactly the same. You have this small wound, and you’re in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time, unbeknownst to you. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. And, for a third of the people, it’s real time. The question we’re asking is does that wound heal based on the time you think it is by looking at that rigged clock or based on real time? And it turns out our perceptions control our healing. We have people in a sleep lab who wake up, they see a clock that tells them they got more sleep than they got, less sleep than they got, or the amount of sleep, and, again, biological and cognitive functions follow perceived amount of sleep. So much more is possible than most of us realize.

Implications of Mindfulness on LearningCelisa Steele: [00:30:49] You’re focusing on that possibility in the mind-body unity piece of it, but, again, they’re clear learning implications. If you think you can learn something faster, then you can.

Ellen Langer: [00:31:05] Exactly. In fact, if you were playing the role of Einstein—so, right now, you assume you’re Einstein, you mess your hair up and whatever, and then you approach whatever the problem is. If you assume you’re Einstein, my guess is that you’ll be able to solve the problem better than just as yourself.

Ellen Langer: [00:31:29] I know that when I’m in the shower that—I don’t have any evidence of this except the possibility that it’s true. I’m singing, and I’m Barbra Streisand. I can’t carry a tune, but I’m now Barbra Streisand or Maria Callas, whoever I’m being, I hit more notes. And nobody is within earshot, or else I wouldn’t be singing, so who knows? But, yes, there’s no question that we can do more. In fact, we did a study ages ago, and I don’t remember the details of it, but what we did was we have people do something, and then we just asked them to do four more, and everybody was able to do it. We can all do more. In the book, we have lots of studies on fatigue, and what we find is that the context, in some sense, determines how tired we get. You might have somebody at home who’s word-processing, fingers are killing him. He’s really bored out of his mind. He’s exhausted. He goes home exhausted and now sits down and plays the piano.

Ellen Langer: [00:32:30] It’s the same thing, right? Except it’s not—the context. We have lots of studies, but the simplest one is, if I asked you to do 100 jumping jacks and tell me when you’re tired, most people say they’re tired around 67, somewhere between 65 and 70, two-thirds of the way. If I ask you to do 200 jumping jacks, now people aren’t tired until about 170—140 rather, two-thirds of the way. We set ourselves up—and this may be getting too involved in the weeds here—but part of the reason might be that the structure we use for an activity allows us to get out of the activity and then go on to something else. You see, mindfulness is energy beginning, and I’m having such a good time talking to you, Celisa, that why should I do anything else? And so I don’t get tired. In fact, if you watch me lecture—most people start off high, and then they get down—but not most people, many people. For me, it just goes up and up, and so you can’t shut me up once I get started. So now there’s a life to be lived. How do we arrange life and go on with the rest of my life since, whatever I’m doing, I’m enjoying so much?

Ellen Langer: [00:33:47] We build in an amount of time something should take, and then we can easily exceed it. You can never prove that you can’t. Science can only show you that, if you try something and it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell you that it can’t work. And, if we add that to what I said before about the game of golf, where every time you’re swinging the club, you’re getting it right, a hole-in-one), then we don’t want to be that expert. We want to keep learning. And so you try something, it doesn’t work. You try something else, that doesn’t work. You try something else because, once you’ve mastered it, it’s over. If you think that you won’t always be successful, even in a competitive situation, play tic-tac-toe against a four-year-old. You’ll always win, but, yes, there’s no game there. So, implicitly, we know that we like the adventure. We like a little bit of the struggle, the not knowing and overcoming whatever odds, and it’s the process of mastering that we seek, not being the master. Unless your learners are, as we all should be, see ourselves as always learning rather than “Oh, now I know it.”

Level 1-2-3 Thinking and MindsetCelisa Steele: [00:35:08] I want to ask you to talk a little bit about level 1-2-3 thinking and how we can use that to change mindset.

Ellen Langer: [00:35:15] It turns out that, when you see somebody do something, too often we think we know why they did what they did, and we’re often disparaging them. But, if you sat back, and you were a little more mindful, and you thought of other explanations for that very same behavior, you’d learn a lot more. Let me give just a simple example. Let’s say we see a woman drop her cane. Level 1 would be somebody who, “So what? Who gives a damn?” Doesn’t do anything. Level 2 rushes in to help her. Level 3 person, just like the level 1, also doesn’t help, but that’s because they’re aware that, if she can figure out how to pick up the cane herself, she’ll be that much better off. So level 1 and 3 are doing the same thing—they’re not helping—but they’re not the same person. And it’s always the case that—not always, but it’s often the case. You have people who never read a particular magazine, people who read it, and then people don’t read it anymore. Again, 1 and 3, they always look alike, but they’re very different. The problem is the people stuck at this level 2. They’re the ones they think they know. They see the person who’s actually more advanced than they are, and they mistakenly see them as that level 1 rather than level 3. If you came up with an explanation for why somebody did something, that, even if that hadn’t been the reason, you could learn from it, and you’d treat that person differently, there’s, again, nothing to lose by that.

Personal Lifelong Learning PracticesCelisa Steele: [00:36:57] We always like to ask guests who come on the Leading Learning Podcast a little bit about their own lifelong learning habits. So talk to us about whether you have particular sources, habits, or practices that help you continue to learn and grow.

Ellen Langer: [00:37:12] I don’t have habits because most habits are mindless. I’m 76, so I have, since, I don’t know, five years old, always looked for the other side. You say X; I say yes, but here’s how it could be not X, and so on. So I don’t have to practice this; it just comes naturally. But you live a certain number of years, and things are going to happen, and, for me, they’re rare, but, when something like that happens, I simply ask myself, “Is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?” Rarely, if ever, is it a tragedy, and so that immediately brings you back to a state of calm. I like to tell people how to fall up rather than fall down. Let’s say a simple thing. Let’s say I bang my car. That’s too bad. It’s going to cost a little money. I’m out of a car. So I get the car fixed, and then I always have them fix something else. At the end of this, my car is even better than it was before the accident. I try to do that with everything, and, most of the time, it works.

Celisa Steele: [00:38:28] Is there anything else that we haven’t yet talked about that you would love to have a chance to share?

Ellen Langer: [00:38:34] People might be interested in how I came to the mind-body unity idea in the first place. There are two fun stories. I was married when I was young—also divorced when I was young—but I went to Paris on my honeymoon, and so I was very, very trying to be all grown-up. We’re in this restaurant, and I order a mixed grill. Now, here’s the proof that I am fully sophisticated. On this plate was pancreas. I had never eaten it. The thought of it was making me sick. I asked my new husband which of these items was a pancreas. He pointed to something. Okay, I ate everything. I’m a big eater. I ate everything on the plate with gusto. Now came the moment of decision—was I going to be able to eat the pancreas? So I started eating this, and I’m getting sick, really, literally sick. He starts laughing. I say, “Why are you laughing?” He said, “That’s chicken. You ate the pancreas ages ago.” So we make ourselves sick. The other story is not as fun, but my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas, which is the end game. And then, magically, it was gone. How do you account for that? I think that, for me, the mind-body unity idea does account for it and can explain spontaneous remissions.

Celisa Steele: [00:39:58] Both have pancreas, both of your stories there.

Ellen Langer: [00:40:02] Oh, yes. Interesting. I never realized that.

Wrap-up: [00:40:11] Dr. Ellen J. Langer is professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the books The Mindful Body, Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, and more. Learn more about her books and work at ellenlanger.com.

As we hope you heard in the interview, Dr. Langer is smart, insightful, and funny, and we do encourage you to read her work and think about the implications and applications for your learning business.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts at leadinglearning.com/apple or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Related Resources* Redux: Mindfulness and Learning with Ellen Langer * Maximizing Learning with Mindset * Redux: The Surprising Truth About Human Behaviors and Learning with Dan Pink

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Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff CobbWhat does the term “lifelong learning”mean for you? It’s an important question for learning business professionals to ask because taking the time to reflect can lead to a better understanding of the influential role your learning business plays in your stakeholders’ lifelong learning journey.

In this episode, we explore the history of lifelong learning and major viewpoints on what it is, the reasons behind a renewed interest in lifelong learning, and why taking time for to know the backstory of lifelong learning represents an opportunity for learning business leaders.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

Celisa Steele: [00:00:30] At Leading Learning, we’re all about supporting the learning businesses and learning business professionals that create and support adult lifelong learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:39] But “lifelong learning” can be an ambiguous term.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:43] Well, in fact, “lifelong learning” may be even more than ambiguous. We might even call it polysemous. Ambiguous, deriving from the Latin ambi-, meaning both, which suggests two, but there are more than two takes on what lifelong learning is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:01] I’m not convinced we’re going to sell folks on the idea of using the term polysemous. Maybe. I don’t know. Ambidextrous might go over better. But I know that’s your leaning, to go into language like that.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:13] Well, we’re talking about the meaning of words, so it seemed legitimate to me to make this point. And language and etymology are also things that I enjoy studying as part of my own lifelong learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:27] To each her own, I suppose. But it is interesting that even in that comment about what you enjoy studying and calling that lifelong learning, we start to get into some of those differing opinions about what lifelong learning is or should be and why it is, in fact, polysemous, as you say.

The History of Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:01:45] That’s right. So let’s talk about some of those differing opinions and their origins. We’ll do a little bit of history. We’re going to focus primarily on the history of lifelong learning in Europe and the U.S,. and we’re going to focus primarily on the 20th and 21st centuries. So be forewarned that that’s where we’re focusing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:06] I think it could be interesting, at some point, to go beyond Europe and the U.S. I have to say my own knowledge there is very sketchy. We need to fill in that knowledge at some point and make it part of the podcast. But, as you say, Europe and the U.S. right now. I’d also love to go back, pre-20th century, to see, in all those ages of enlightenment and the Greeks and everything else, how was this thought of, this whole idea of lifelong learning? What was it called then? But, back to where we are today.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:34] That’s right. For today, we’re going to impose these artificial limits. I have in mind three major lifelong learning paradigms that are still around and still guiding thinking, and these were developed by three European groups: the Council of Europe, UNESCO, and the OECD. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. That was founded in 1945. It has an aim to promote world peace and security through international cooperation in education, the arts, sciences, and culture. And then OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. That’s another intergovernmental organization. It has 38 member countries. That was founded a little bit later, in 1961, and the goal there was to stimulate economic progress and world trade. Then the Council of Europe is another international organization that also came about in the wake of World War II. It was founded in 1949. It has 46 member states, and it’s really focused on trying to uphold human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in Europe. We have these three organizations, and all three of them were pushing for some form of lifelong learning. This was in the 1960s and 1970s, when they really made this push.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:59] I’ll say, as you noted, these are primarily associated with Europe, these organizations. Though, obviously, the United States is also involved in the United Nations to at least some degree. I don’t actually know the ins and outs of how involved the United States is in UNESCO, but I’m going to make the assumption that, hopefully, we’ve had at least some involvement there. But I do note that most of what I see coming out of UNESCO, the OECD, or the Council of Europe seems to be paid attention to more by European countries at this point than by the United States.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:32] If we look at what those three groups were writing about, proposing, and arguing for in the 1960s and 1970s, we have a few different terms that were being used. The Council of Europe was really focused on this idea of “permanent education.” That’s what they wanted to call it. Again, “permanent” instead of “lifelong” learning. You get this idea of you need to keep educating yourself. The OECD was focused on a term called “recurrent education.” Their idea there was that we tend to chunk education into full-time learning and then full-time work, and they thought it would be better to mix it up. So maybe you have full-time study, then you might go to work full-time, and then you have a sabbatical leave to go back to studying for a little bit there. And then, at UNESCO, there was a really important report that came out in 1972 called Learning to Be. It’s also called the Faure report. And that’s because Edgar Faure was the chairperson of UNESCO’s International Commission on the Development of Education. At the time when that report came out, he was a key figure in developing that report. It used the term “lifelong education.” We get “lifelong.” We don’t quite get to “learning.” It’s still this focus on “education,” but the idea there was that lifelong education could really be transformative and emancipatory.

Jeff Cobb: [06:02] That’s a tough word.

Celisa Steele [06:03] It is a tough word. It’s right up there with polysemous in terms of pronunciation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:06] It’s probably a polysemous word.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:09] One commentator, around the time that the Learning to Be report came out, called the UNESCO concept a Copernican revolution in education. That caught my eye when I read that tidbit.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:23] It is eye-catching. I’m not sure it’s quite turned out that way, but this report has had a lot of influence, I know. At least three comments there. One is I love that there was a prime minister involved in all of this. Somebody at that level of government—you would love to see that across all nations.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:40] Faure was not prime minister at the time, but he had been. So, very clearly, he’s this politician really focused on education and then thinking through the policy and what needed to be in place to actually change education and make it better.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:57] I won’t name names, but I can think of certain ex-presidents in the United States who would be involved in something like this, and others who probably would not be as involved in something like this. But having that level of involvement is nice. I liked the terminology “recurrent education,” “permanent education,” and even the title of the report, Learning to Be. Even though these haven’t necessarily become commonplace in how we talk about it, they do echo a lot of, or they don’t echo—what we’re doing now echoes them in that we’re starting to really think of learning as this continuous activity. These days, we talk about things like the other 50 years. You hear terms like the “60-year curriculum.” All of these are more aimed at adult learners or higher education through the rest of life. We’ll talk about what we really mean by the full span of lifelong learning here. But some of the language that was being used at that point, I think, has been very influential over time—the involvement of high-level people in it. I think we will get to this division between education and learning and how we treat those terms at some point in this conversation.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:06] I think what we see in the history is that we have various groups promoting or emphasizing some aspects more than others. I’m thinking it’s probably not just an either/or. It’s not A versus B. It’s probably more of a spectrum. You’ll have idealistic on one end of a spectrum and pragmatic on the other. So we have this idea of let’s create better societies. Let’s create better international cooperation. And learning is one way to do it. Then you have much more pragmatic concerns around how we can deal with workplace skills gap issues, to use modern-day, contemporary talk that’s going on. So that’s one spectrum.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:51] We often see—I think this, particularly, tends to be the case in the European context; I feel like it’s more the case in the European context—the characterization of a lot of lifelong learning or lifelong education having a remedial focus. Whereas, I think in the U.S., particularly where continuing education and professional development have such an emphasis, it’s really more about advancing careers. That remedial versus advancing careers dichotomy that we often see.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:20] Then there’s, of course, the formal versus informal spectrum. There, we have education and what it brings to mind around, perhaps, collegiate degrees, certifications, and that type of thing, to the more informal, what might you learn through a mentorship, through doing something on the job, or just through a conversation with someone.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:44] It’s encouraging, I think, that we’ve seen much more attention to the concept of informal learning over the past two to three decades. I think of the work of people like Jay Cross in writing about informal learning and many of his colleagues. But that is starting to become something that’s getting a lot more attention. I still think it doesn’t tend to get talked about or contextualized as lifelong learning per se. It’s a different take on, say, workplace learning in most instances when informal learning is being talked about, but, at least, it is being talked about, and, in some cases, action is being taken around it.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:19] Another spectrum that we might point to is a spectrum that has societal benefits on one end and more personal benefits, or personal, gains on the other. Again, I think this harkens back to this idea of how can we advance democracy, or how we can create good citizens (that being on the societal end) and then, on the more personal gains, that can be career advancement, as we talked about. But, again, why? Who is the learning for? Who does the learning benefit? There are for the individual learner benefits, and then there’s for society at large benefits. You have different groups focusing on different ends of that spectrum.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:02] Again, these are my perceptions. I can’t say these are grounded in actual data, but I hear or see terms like the “learning society” used much more in a European context than I tend to see it used in a U.S. context, with the idea that learning is a driver of social progress and that we need to be thinking about how learning is integrated and woven into society to improve society. But you think back to the efforts that do come from the U.S,. something like Dewey on Democracy and Education and the fundamental role education plays in society, that is obviously embedded in so many ways now in how we think about and pursue education in the United States. I think that also has infiltrated Europe as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:55] What I think is related to this is something I’ve heard you say before. Learning starts as a social good. We send all of our kids off to school, and we believe that that’s a social good. As the learner ages, it becomes almost more of this economic commodity. What is it that you’re going to do with what you learn? I think we’re seeing this in the current attack on liberal arts and this idea of “Oh, well, that philosophy degree isn’t going to help you on the job,” which may or may not be true. I think there’s a pretty strong argument that maybe it does help you on the job, but there’s much more of an emphasis on what can we do that is actually going to give you workplace skills?

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:39] And I just referenced Dewey. Even when he was talking about democracy and education, he really was focused on early life. The child, K-12 into higher education, as we would make those divisions. Now it needs to extend beyond that.

In some ways, that’s a tension in our work because we’re very focused on this idea of the learning business, and there is the business side of that, which most of the organizations we’re dealing with do have to sell what they’re creating. That doesn’t necessarily mean that what they sell needs to be treated as a commodity. It should not be treated as a commodity. I think there is still this aspect of what you’re doing and continuing education and professional development being a social good and taking that learning side of the equation in learning business as seriously, if not more seriously, than the business side of it.

Jeff Cobb

But once learning/education becomes a business, as it typically is in the adult world. For children and up through higher education, there’s so much government funding across the U.S. and Europe around that. But, once you get into the adult world, very often, either the individual or the employer is having to pay for that. There is this commerce aspect to it that I think we need to be conscious of and be careful with.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:56] Most of the organizations that we work with do have that revenue imperative, but they also tend to have a mission focus as well. Whether or not they’re organized as a nonprofit or not, they tend to buy into the fact that what they’re doing, by educating and helping individuals learn, actually will improve those individuals. Then, in turn, those individuals will help improve society.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:19] Ideally, that mission aspect should be there, regardless of whether you’re organized as a nonprofit or not. I think if you’re in the training and education business and serving that sector, to have, as part of how you operate, how you define your operations, that mission to be providing an essentially social good to the field, the sector, the industry that you are serving and to society more broadly as an extension of that.

Leading Learning Newsletter[00:14:50] As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

The newsletter is inbox intelligence for learning businesses and helps you understand the latest technology, marketing, and learning trends and grow your learning business. Best of all, it’s a free resource. As a subscriber, you’ll get Leading Links, our monthly curated collection of resources to help you grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business; the podcast digest, a monthly summary of podcast episodes released during the previous month; plus periodic announcements highlighting Leading Learning Webinars and other educational opportunities designed to benefit learning business professionals.

Lifelong and LearningCelisa Steele [00:15:52] There’s a lot of disagreement—or, at least, discussion—around what lifelong learning is and where it should focus. All those different spectrums we were talking about and where along them you fall. But what we can say, if we just look at the term itself, is that we can say lifelong learning is lifelong, and it involves learning. So let’s just unpack those two terms a little bit.

LifelongJeff Cobb: [00:16:16] Yes, that lifelong aspect, we heard hints of that in permanent learning, in recurrent learning, in Learning to Be, and in some of the reports and the organizations we were talking about earlier.

It’s a recognition that this is cradle to grave. You start this process of lifelong at the beginning of life, and you continue it to the end of life.

Jeff Cobb

That’s why, when we talk about lifelong learning, we tend to be specific and say we focus on adults because that is a major and probably the most recognized area of lifelong learning. But, really, you’re forming habits from the minute you emerge into the world. Those learning habits need to carry you through a lifetime. Establishing lifelong learning as a practice and a habit early in life is extremely important.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:08] So it starts early on. It continues through your education. It even continues into retirement. We’ve spoken with Chris McLeod of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke University. So you have those OLLIs across the country. You have other organizations that really came about to serve retirees and help them continue to learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:33] We were talking about how to think about definitions of the term earlier. I think, for a lot of people, when they say “lifelong learning,” that’s what they’re talking about. It’s this late-life learning where your time is freed up because you’re now retired. You can pursue some interests that maybe you couldn’t pursue before. I think it’s notable that, at that point, a lot of people often turn back to the liberal arts, which, we were talking about earlier, don’t tend to get the respect that they did once upon a time. It would be nice if people were engaging with the liberal arts in one way or another throughout their careers. But that’s only one aspect of the life journey, and, by extension, it’s only one aspect of lifelong learning.

Lifelong Learning: An Umbrella TermCelisa Steele: [00:18:17] So lifelong, cradle to grave. Our focus at Leading Learning and most of the organizations we work with is on adult lifelong learning. The other part of the term is “learning,” of course. For us, learning and lifelong learning—that’s an umbrella term. That contains, underneath it, continuing education and professional development. Sometimes we list all three out in a series. We know we say we focus on adult lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development, and that’s because some people tend to think of them as different things. So, for us, lifelong learning—umbrella term; the other two, CE and PD, fall underneath it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:57] I think it’s important to recognize that it is an umbrella term, and, also, I consider education to be a subset of learning. It’s a more structured, more formalized approach to learning. It’s typically what you’re going to do in a continuing education or professional development setting, something that is more formalized and structured. But human beings are learning creatures. We’re engineered to learn, even if we make no effort at it whatsoever. By the time we’re crawling around on the floor, we’re learning, we’re taking in sensations, and we’re processing information. It’s changing our behaviors and our knowledge, obviously. Learning is just a constant process of change. A lot of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about lifelong learning is becoming more conscious and becoming more intentional about this native capacity that you have as a human being. Whether you’re doing that informally or whether you’re doing it formally in a continuing education and professional development-type setting, the more that you can refine those skills and become better and better as a learner, that, in itself, is a lifelong process as well. You’re learning to learn throughout life.

Malcolm Knowles: The Father of AndragogyCelisa Steele: [00:20:23] It would be hard to talk about lifelong learning without, at least, mentioning Malcolm Knowles.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:29] That’s right. We’re practically a Malcolm Knowles fan club, I think.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:32] I’m thinking, in particular, of The Adult Learner, which he published in 1973. As we’re recording, that was 50 years ago. I learned something recently. I had not realized the subtitle to The Adult Learner—that there’s a subtitle. Did you know that, Jeff?

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:50] I did not know that until I was reading your notes for this podcast, actually.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:53] The subtitle is A Neglected Species. The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species. I found that fascinating. That subtitle has since been dropped.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:04] I guess I did know that was a subtitle originally, though I always forget it. But I didn’t know that it was no longer used with the book. I guess I just haven’t been paying enough attention to my recent editions of The Adult Learner. But probably that subtitle has been dropped—or I’m hopeful that maybe that subtitle has been dropped—because adult learning is just much more widely recognized and appreciated than it was at the time that Knowles wrote that book. Prior to Knowles, you had people like Dewey and Piaget who were very much focused on what happens in childhood learning, pedagogy, at that point but not so much focus on what’s happening with adult learners. Of course, Knowles coined this whole new term andragogy to talk about adult learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:55] See, etymology. We’re back to etymology.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:57] There we go. It’s all polysemous.

A Renewed Focus on Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:21:59] We have a lot of drivers for the new focus (or renewed focus) on lifelong learning that’s come about

We are changing jobs and even changing careers more frequently. We’re living longer. As part of living longer, we’re also working longer. We’re seeing technology evolve and change at an increasingly fast pace. All of those are, of course, driving the need and desire for lifelong learning.

Celisa Steele

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:32] That’s having an impact. We were saying earlier, this idea of becoming more conscious and intentional about being a learner and about being a lifelong learner, and it appears that that is in fact happening, or it seems to be. There was a great report several years ago by the Pew Research Center that we actually did a podcast around. In that report, they found that 73 percent of adults consider themselves to be lifelong learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:00] It’s interesting that they also divvied up what type of lifelong learner are you. Seventy-four percent of adults that they surveyed were what Pew calls “personal learners,” meaning that they had participated in at least one activity in the past year that would advance their knowledge about something that personally interests them—my etymology and my interest in languages. That was one category. Personal learners: 74 percent of adults were personal learners. And then 63 percent of those who were working (or 36 percent of all adults) were what Pew termed “professional learners,” meaning they had taken a course or gotten training in the last year to help them improve job skills or expertise connected to whatever they do for a living, to earn money.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:52] And that’s the group—that 36 percent of adults—that really constitutes the broader market for probably most of our listeners here who are in that continuing education, professional development, and adult lifelong learning market. Though I think there’s also probably a significant number of listeners who may be in that personal learning space, helping to support that personal learning space. I would say even those who are focused on the professional space might take note of that desire for personal learning and think about are there ways that you could supplement and complement whatever you offer right now in terms of your catalog of experiences that offer some of those personal aspects since we know the demand is out there for it? I’ll also note that there was a 2017 Economist special report, and we’ve done a blog post on this, which basically declared that “Lifelong learning is now an imperative.”

Celisa Steele: [00:24:47] It was “becoming.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:47] It was “becoming an imperative.”

Celisa Steele: [00:24:48] I think that was their title.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:49] That’s right. It was “becoming an imperative.” Because our comment at the time was, “Really?” We felt like it had become an imperative well before that and that there was plenty of evidence for it. But it was good to see a venerable, old institution like The Economist magazine declare, and particularly since they tend to be an international publication, too, spanning not just Europe and the U.S. but the globe, for them to say, “This is becoming an imperative.” That puts lifelong learning on the map in a way that it, really, probably hadn’t been up until that point.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:23] Now, of course, The Economist report and the Pew report are pre-pandemic—they are a few years old. And so I think, even more recently, we’ve seen that lifelong learning, the need for it, and the options for it have grown. We had the pandemic that pushed so many organizations online, which created more online learning opportunities. There was work from home, and people had the need to build skills in areas that they didn’t have before. By working from home, maybe they had a little bit more freedom and flexibility to take advantage of some of the online learning that was out there. We had the Great Resignation, which, of course, sent people leaving one job and then looking for the next, probably, as part of that, also thinking through, “Okay, what skills or knowledge do I need to help me find a good, new job down the road?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:20] I think it’s interesting that, in many ways, the growth in awareness of and demand for lifelong learning has been consecutive with the growth of online learning and the ability to access more and more types of learning experiences than ever before. As we’ve already said, we’re always learning all the time. That’s always been the case. That has not really changed about human beings. But, suddenly, there’s this massive new set of options that are out there for people. They’re both a product of and a driver for some of the change that we’re talking about—the pace of change and the evolution of what’s happening in the workspace. As you said, because of the pandemic, boy, that just blew open the doors. If there was any doubt before that point that online learning was firmly established and that lifelong learning—particularly in terms of adaptability, flexibility, a more formal, conscious, intentional type of learning—has to take place and has to be an integrated part of people’s lives, the pandemic just drove those two points home in a way that it’s hard to imagine anything else really doing at that scale.

Why Lifelong Learning Matters for Learning BusinessesCelisa Steele: [00:27:44] So, Jeff, we’ve taken a little detour through history. We’ve talked about some of these different areas of focus that different groups and individuals have brought to this concept of lifelong learning. But all of this begs the bigger question of why do we care? Why does this matter?

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:00] Does there have to be a reason? It’s fun to take detours and talk about lifelong learning. Why not? But you’re right. Why does this matter? I think we probably have a relatively pragmatic audience listening to the podcast. Certainly, a key reason for our listeners is simply that understanding your position and just that landscape and your position in that landscape as a provider of adult lifelong learning is the key to actually being the effective learning business that we’re assuming you aim to be.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:37] I also think that there could be some fruitful discussion and reflection to come out of thinking back to these different tugs on what the term should be, where the emphasis should be on lifelong learning, and, really, as a learning business or as you yourself, as an individual lifelong learner, thinking through, “Okay, what do I think? Where do I feel like we should focus? Where do we land on these various spectrums?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:03] We’ve discussed before that there’s probably a significant percentage of our audience that doesn’t really embrace the term “lifelong learning” or recognize themselves as being in lifelong learning. For some reason, there’s this strange bifurcation between lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development. I’ve met plenty of people who will say they’re in continuing education and professional development and do not think of themselves as being in lifelong learning. I think it’s worthwhile to question that, to back up and say, “Why is that? Is there perhaps a benefit to our organization, a benefit to our learners if we are actually thinking of ourselves as engaged in supporting and facilitating lifelong learning, with continuing education and professional development being an approach to that, obviously?” But it may open up other possibilities in other ways that you can impact the world that you’re trying to serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:01] I think no matter where you land, individually or as a learning business, in terms of what you think that focus for lifelong learning should be or where your focus is, I think no matter where you land, it’s pretty clear to look out there and go, “Okay, the lifelong learning landscape is fragmented.” We have much more consolidated systems that serve those young learners. But, by the time you leave college in the U.S., how you go about learning is largely left up to you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:33] We often talk about this third sector of education. Even that—that’s narrower than lifelong learning more broadly—but even to talk about this more formalized continuing education, professional development, adult education-type sector, people don’t tend to put a label on that and think about that in the same way that they do K-12 education or higher education. I think there’s just a real opportunity to do that. And, as part of doing that, to start to get rid of some of that fragmentation and get more of a sense of integration across these different sectors of education and more recognition that there is this umbrella of learning that arches over all of them. We talked about learning as an umbrella term at the beginning of the podcast. We’re back to it again. I think that’s just a very important shift in perspective that we need going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:35] There’s the benefit of recognizing the umbrella. I think there’s also a benefit in helping learners make sense of the fragmentation. I think we all know that we have limited time and energy. And so, as a learner, if I’m having to spend all of my time even figuring out which options, what it is I need to learn, or where to go to learn that, that can eat into the time that I actually have to focus on learning any new information, skill, or knowledge. If you can be that guide, if you can help make sense of the fragmentation, make a clear path through this fragmented market, that’s going to help your learning business stand out. It’s going to make you much more valuable to the learner. And, as we’ve been saying too, therefore much more valuable in terms of the role that you’re able to play in society more broadly.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:23] That, really, to me, feels like the biggest opportunity for anybody who’s listening to this podcast, who is involved in the learning business, is to be that guide, to be that ally through whatever portion of that lifelong learning journey that you’re helping your particular stakeholders with. If they’re looking to you as that, as that guide, as that ally, facilitator, curator, whatever terms you want to use for it, but, as you said, you’re helping them make sense. You’re helping to get rid of that fragmentation that characterizes what life experience is and what professional experience is for so many people these days. If you’re doing that as a learning business, you’re going to have tremendous success.

Lifelong learning drives learning businesses. Taking the time to consider what lifelong learning is and what it can be is an illuminating exercise in better understanding why your learning business does what it does and the broad human goals that it supports.

Jeff Cobb

Wrap-up: [00:33:32]

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Episodes on Related Topics* Lifelong Learning and Technology with John Horrigan * 7 Metalearning Moves to Empower Lifelong Learning * The Mainstreaming of Lifelong Learning * Leading a Lifelong Learning Institute with Chris McLeod of OLLI at Duke * Lifelong Learning Through COVID with Chris McLeod * Revisiting Adult Learning Theory

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Diana HowlesThe full, complete experience of the learner—from before they decide to sign up for a course or event, until after it’s over—should be a primary concern for all learning businesses.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb is joined by return guest Diana Howles, CEO and co-owner of Howles Associates, which specializes in virtual training, virtual presentation coaching, and learning experience design.

They delve into the topic of learning experience design—what it is, why it matters, and how to implement it. They also discuss evidence-based practice, the four dimensions of learning, learner personas, journey mapping, social proof, and the importance of feedforward, not just feedback.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

Defining Learning Experience DesignJeff Cobb: [01:39] I think it’s probably useful up front to define “learning experience design.” It’s been a somewhat buzzy term out there for a while, and I know it can have somewhat different meanings depending on who’s saying it. So what do you mean when you talk about learning experience design?

Diana Howles: [01:55] Well, you know what’s really funny, Jeff? I have yet to see a definition of learning experience design that does not use the word experience in the definition. It’s so hard to define it without saying that word. But, yes, let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about instructional design first. Traditional instructional design, here at Howles Associates, we view as almost like the 1.0 of instructional design. We view learning experience design, or LXD, as like the instructional design 2.0. In other words, it’s an expanded, more modern version that gives us more modern terminology, tools, platforms with which to build these creative, engaging, meaningful, and, hopefully, impactful learning interactions.

Instructional Design 2.0Jeff Cobb: [02:51] That’s an interesting distinction. When I think of instructional design traditionally, I’m thinking of things like the ADDIE model: analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate. What’s different about learning experience design? Is ADDIE gone? How do you go about this instructional design 2.0?

Diana Howles: [03:11] That’s a great question. A lot of learning experience design does incorporate things like iterative design and more collaboration with users, stakeholders, and learners on the front end. So it is more akin to something like Michael Allen’s SAM, which is the Successive Approximation Model. Rapid prototyping, iterative, and bringing in feedback and input from the beginning. We see more of that. Certainly ADDIE still has a place, but we’re seeing more of the progression to that agile movement forward.

When I think about learning experience design, it’s this holistic approach. It is more of a mindset than a process, and, really, it’s learner-centered and task-centered for a learning solution. It ideally integrates the cognitive, emotional, social, and the behavioral dimensions of learning.

Diana Howles

Jeff Cobb: [04:10] I definitely want to come back to that because that seems very important to this. I know it’s something that you write and talk about relative to learning experience design. But, before we get there, why has LXD become such a focus? Why is it a buzz term? What needed to be corrected, I guess, basically? What needed to evolve?

Diana Howles: [04:31] That’s a great question, Jeff. I’m sure our listeners, too, are thinking of lots of things. What comes to my mind is that we really had this introduction to this idea of user experience design back with Apple in the 1990s. Then we saw that grow. And then we saw, in the healthcare industry, we started talking about patient experience. And then we see now customer experience (CX), the voice of the customer, and it’s just grown and grown. Now learner experience really encompasses what is that experience? We really, ideally, want to help improve the experience the learner has while they’re learning.

Design Thinking and Learning Experience DesignJeff Cobb: [05:09] I think with our listeners, the learner typically is the customer. So, when you’re doing learning experience, you’re also doing customer experience and, obviously, user experience as well. Experience is everywhere, it seems like these days. I know there’s this whole field of design thinking out there that connects in to user experience design and then all of the other types of design. How does design thinking factor into learning experience design?

Next Level Virtual Training: Advance Your Facilitation by Diane HowlesDiana Howles: [05:38] I love that question. I wrote a book called Next Level Virtual Training: Advance Your Facilitation, and I’ve devoted a whole chapter (chapter two) to learning experience design as it relates to virtual training. But, in that chapter, I also talk about how, at least here at Howles Associates, we see the influence on learning experience design from at least three main streams. One of those being the one you just mentioned, Jeff, which is design thinking. Another one being user experience design. And a third one that we’re calling evidence-based practice, which is really more of this broad term, which encompasses cognitive neuroscience, the learning sciences, psychology, and evidence-based research—all of that together. But, if we look back at user experience design, we have the great benefit of looking at user testing and, again, wanting to improve the user’s experience with the technology. In design thinking, we really bring in these influences, if you will, about empathy, learner empathy, user empathy, and also including learners in our context on the front end, bringing them in and inviting them into the design process, where they can speak into designs when they’re still rough and not yet crafted or finalized but just get those ideas. Again, that speaks back to what we talked about before, Jeff, with that iterative design—rapid, rapid, rapid successive attempts to keep improving very quickly. But getting that feedback early on, which, here at Howles Associates, we like to call “feedforward,” because sometimes feedback comes too late. So we’re asking for feedforward very early on and, ideally, throughout.

Jeff Cobb: [07:28] We hear again and again across so many different aspects of the learning business just how important it is to get that, as you said, feedforward early in the process, to really be engaged with your prospective users, with your actual users, and find out how they’re thinking about things, what they would want to do in a particular situation, what kind of outcomes they’re looking for, and to factor that in. Because we all know the whole “if you build it, they will come” problem that so many organizations have faced over time, and they just don’t come. That’s often because they have not really been consulted on what it is they wanted in the first place.

Diana Howles: [08:04] That’s exactly right.

Jeff Cobb: [08:05] I like that evidence-based aspect of it, as you were saying, too. When you think about what most of the evidence about learning says, it’s that learning is active. Learning takes effort to know. Learning involves the learner engaging and doing things. That may mean cognitively doing things like reflecting, but it’s not a passive experience. I think of learning experience design as oriented more towards the active, towards really getting, as you said, learner-centric—the learner is engaged in the process.

Diana Howles: [08:36] Absolutely agree.

If we really were to summarize it in a nutshell, I would say that, in learning experience design, we are leaning into the experience the learner is having while they’re learning, not the content they are consuming.

Diana Howles

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The Four Dimensions of LearningJeff Cobb: [10:12] Let’s come back to the four dimensions of learning: the cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral. Can you say a bit more about each one of those dimensions and then why it’s important to incorporate them?

Cognitive LearningDiana Howles: [10:28] Sure. Let’s start with the cognitive one. The cognitive learning dimension has probably received the most attention. I think nobody would really argue that. We know it’s important to use the cognitive function. When you talk about cognitive dimensions of learning—and, by the way, I’m basing this model of those four dimensions from Simone Conceição and Les Howles’s book Designing the Online Learning Experience. They developed that framework of those four dimensions, which, then, I also reference in my book. But this cognitive dimension, we can do so much more with that. As you mentioned, Jeff, there’s the passive versus the active experience. An active experience, for example, cognitively, might include more reflection and pausing for reflection. It might include asking more questions of the learners as they are learning or as they are learning segments of different types of activities or content. So that’s the cognitive piece. The emotional one is the one that we have almost really not given enough attention to, and, as you’ll notice, over the past several years, people have rediscovered, “Oh my goodness, we forgot about how important emotion is.” You’ll hear Michael Allen talking about that. You’ll hear Dr. Richard Mayer talking about that. You’ll hear Clark Quinn talking about that.

Emotional LearningDiana Howles: [11:51] The emotional dimension is so important because we’ve learned from neuroscience that we cannot separate decision-making and emotion. Educational neuroscientist Janet Zadina says you cannot separate learning from emotions. They’re so tightly integrated. So why is that important? Well, think about motivation—adult learners’ motivation. We want them to be very excited about what they’re going to be learning. We want them to see why it’s important to them. We want them to understand how it will benefit them. All of those motivational elements.

Social LearningAnd then the third one would be the social dimension. We are social beings. Very important when we’re in the virtual setting, too, for those purposeful connection times, to have cameras on for both online and on-site. We can see and hear people. We can have rich discussions with each other. We are social beings.

Behavioral LearningThen the behavioral is really the doing. I don’t know what our listeners think of this, but it seems like so much of our learning solutions that we produce are more about what we know. Or it’s all about something versus doing. When we talk about application, it’s important to have that doing aspect. Bringing the behavioral dimension into a learning solution means we are practicing, we are doing teach-backs, we’re doing role plays, and we’re practicing giving constructive feedback. Whatever it is we’re learning about, we’re practicing that. And then, ideally, we would take that right back to our work environment, our organizations.

Those are the four dimensions, which really is, again, a holistic approach. They tightly interweave, and sometimes there’s overlap too. But creating experiences intentionally that include these dimensions, then, is what our goal is.

Traditional Design Versus LXDJeff Cobb: [13:51] You’ve already started to point to this a bit in what you’re saying about the dimensions, how this actually plays out, and the things you do to tap into these different dimensions, but I was wondering if we could do an exhibit A/exhibit B thing here, where exhibit A is your prototypical old-style learning intervention. They’re often called “interventions” in the old-style way of doing things. I know you do a lot with live virtual-type training. Let’s say it’s that, and it’s your standard you’ve-got-your-subject-matter-expert-presenter-on-a-Webinar. It’s the presenter and his or her PowerPoint deck. Everybody’s been to thousands of these in their careers. What does that look like if you apply LXD principles and make sure you’re addressing those four dimensions, moving from that exhibit A, traditional, to an exhibit B that is much more ideal?

Diana Howles: [14:48] I love it. Let’s do it. All right, everybody, so exhibit A, we would have just that traditional Webinar. This is one-to-many. It’s very didactic. We’re really thinking about it being content-centric. So this facilitator is probably doing a lecturette with very little interaction, maybe a few polls if it’s done through the virtual training venue, but mainly lecture. And so you look at the learners, and they’re very passive. It’s more sit-and-get. Let’s say that was about virtual training. You basically have an expert telling others what helps to be a skilled virtual facilitator, but a passive audience. Exhibit B, let’s transition to that. There, instead of content-centric, it’s learner-centric but also task-centric because it’s still about reaching our goals and outcomes. Let’s say, in this scenario, the learning experience really is everything from A to Z. It could be a welcome video that learners receive well before class day that gets them excited about “This is what you’re going to be able to do” and builds motivation in them to do that. And then, on class day, when we talk about the objectives, you have those designed learning objectives that drive your design, but then you convert them into questions that are more motivating for your learners. So you keep the traditional objectives for you in your design, but then we translate them into something that’s more motivational statements for them.

Diana Howles: [16:25] And then, as we go through the learning, we do teach-backs. They’re practicing how to facilitate and get feedback. That’s part of the doing. They also have the ability to, let’s say, in the social realm, have discussion groups on different topics that we talk about. They have the chat forum as well. But they’re interacting. We’re asking good, thoughtful questions. We’re giving space to people so that they can have that social element involved. Then, cognitively, we are challenging them. Like I said, we have an action plan, and they have a reflection and a space where they can think about it. And then, afterward, we send messages to their managers and say, “These are the action plans that your staff created. Please meet with them in the next two weeks to talk about how they can execute their action plans, and let them know how you can support them. Here are some prompts, by the way, that may be helpful when you have these discussions.” You really see the contrast of how it’s more integrated and expanded. LXD, the way we talk about it at Howles Associates, we’re incorporating those dimensions of being able to think about it, feel about it, interact with others socially, and do something.

Jeff Cobb: [17:45] Just hearing and listening to that, it’s a much richer experience. Obviously, you don’t have to do all of those things when you’re putting together this more instructional-design-2.0-type experience, but you can do a lot of those things. There are a lot of possibilities available in Webinars and other types of virtual live training that I think learning businesses have just not fully appreciated or tapped into before. I think we’re always trying to think through ways…. A podcast can be a fairly passive medium because you’re usually sitting in a car and listening, that sort of thing. But we do always like to challenge listeners to reflect on what’s being said here. And, I would say, think about your own exhibit A because I think a lot of listeners probably have plenty of exhibit As in their portfolios. And think about some of those exhibit B characteristics that you could potentially take advantage of. Look at them as opportunities for your learning experiences. And, for listeners, if you have to stop and rewind and listen to that again—or you’ll be able to go to the episode page for this episode and look at the transcript there and see everything Diana just said—but don’t just sit there passively. Think about what you can actually do with what we’re discussing here around that more ideal learning experience.

Tips for Applying LXD in New OfferingsJeff Cobb: [19:06] Can you talk a little bit more about some of the essential strategies and practices for applying LXD when you are developing your new offerings?

Diana Howles: [19:15] Absolutely. One of the things is something that we referred to earlier, Jeff, and that’s this idea of bringing in target learners (if you target learners) early on to the design process. Something that you can do is do some interviews with either some of the actual learners, representative learners, or customers in this case—so one or two or three. You do interviews, you have conversations with them, you can do focus groups, you get to know their demographics, and then you come back to the table. You can either bring them in and run ideas by them, or you can create what’s called learner personas. I’m sure some of our listeners have experimented with this. The idea is that we create a fictional character. This is Ria. This is Joe. This is Robert. This is Susan. We give them characteristics. Project manager, has been working there for five years. Or somebody who’s a new hire, and they are more shy. Or somebody else is a leader. But we give them characteristics, and we imagine that they are their part of the experience. You can even have characters. You can use a lot of the software and applications that are available today to create a fictional character there and give them a name. As you’re designing, you have them right at the forefront, and you’re thinking, “How would this target learner respond to this? What would help this individual?”

Diana Howles: [20:40] As you know, Jeff, there’s the idea of the false consensus effect, which basically says that we have this tendency or bias to assume that everyone thinks like us, or what I know, you know too. But that is not the reality. We are all very different. Using personas and learner personas on the front end helps us address that. Because, we joke, we think we know our customers, and we don’t. We’re very different. So bringing them in on the front end, as you may have experienced too, that’s where you get some of your best ideas. My business partner was developing a leadership development course—which I do talk about this story in the book—and he actually invited some target learners in and provided them with pizza. He changed the trajectory of that course, and that course was so successful, but it was because he incorporated the feedback of a few target learners very early on.

Jeff Cobb: [21:40] Absolutely. Again, it just comes up so often—really engaging with your audience and making sure that you are incorporating their perspectives. Any other key tips that you would offer to listeners around designing their learning experiences?

Diana Howles: [21:54] Yes, there’s another tool as well that learners are welcome to experiment with, and that is journey mapping. Again, you think about, if we were to take virtual training as the context, if you think about a blended learning solution, where there’s some pre-work, then maybe there’s the live online course with some assignments, and then maybe there’s some more post-work, you think about what is the learner going to feel at this point in the course—the pre, the live, and the post? What are they going to do? What kinds of things are you going to do? What kinds of things would they be thinking about? As you sketch this out, it really stretches you.

The learner personas help you shift your mindset. But these journey maps that you create to guide the design, they’re very insightful, and they inform you about sometimes making changes for the better good of the learning solution. Just tools to help us out of our own mindset. By the way, learning experience design is a mindset, but it’s also a process and a set of principles and tools as well.

Diana Howles

Receptiveness to LXDJeff Cobb: [23:05] It’s occurred to me, as we’ve been talking, to me, this sounds like, yes, this is what we need to be doing. Of course, we need to be thinking about learning as an experience and designing in a way to support that. But do you get any pushback? Do you find people who are uncomfortable, who are like, “No, I like ADDIE. I’ve always done it this way. This is how I’m going to continue to do it”? How receptive are organizations and the people you work with, in your experience, to this approach to creating learning?

Diana Howles: [23:33] Absolutely. I do have one client who definitely wants to use ADDIE and will continue to use ADDIE. But I have introduced other things to that client. So, for example, bringing in early feedback, focus groups, changing the design, and then user testing early on. I have introduced those kinds of things. But, yes, they are definitely committed to using ADDIE for now, which is fine. But I think you do hear a lot of different perspectives. There are those who insist that LXD is just a rebrand of instructional design. Or learning experience design is instructional design plus learning sciences. There’s just a lot of, I guess, not real good clarity around what learning experience design is. But, like I said, I like to think about it as an instructional design 2.0. It’s rejuvenating this discipline and expanding it from where we were, growing it. It’s evolving. And now we have even more tool sets and, as I mentioned, terms with which to talk about how to make good design. So some people will argue, yes, “I think skilled instructional designers have been doing learning experience design all along,” and I would agree with that. Why? Because they’re learner- or customer-centered, and they keep that at the forefront. So that’s what’s driving us, not this content-centric approach.

Assessing Learning Offerings for Adherence to LXD PrinciplesJeff Cobb: [24:58] I think that probably is what it comes down to. No matter what you call this, if what you’re doing is really centered on the learner and you really are using evidence-based approaches to achieving what the learner needs to achieve, then you’re probably doing learning experience design, whether you’re calling it that or not in the end. Well, as we’re wrapping up, maybe we can flip the table a little bit. We’ve asked you before about your approaches to lifelong learning because you’ve been on the show relatively recently, so I won’t ask you about that, but I would love your perspective—and I think this could be a useful mindset for listeners to get into as well because it is taking that learner mindset and how would a learner approach this—but, for you, if you’re trying to assess whether a particular learning offering really does adhere to those LXD principles—that it is learner-centric, that it is evidence-based, that it is going to provide that really effective learning experience—what clues do you look for as the consumer, as the customer for a learning experience?

Diana Howles: [25:59] I really love the challenge of that question. I think, ideally, we’re looking at the outcomes. Remember, it’s learner-centered, but it’s also task-based. If we break down the word learning experience design, learning is about outcomes. We have to have goals, learner goals, and they have to be achieved. The second word experience is about what we’ve talked a lot about today, incorporating the four dimensions, and really making sure that it’s an integration, a very tightly woven integration, and interaction with all sorts of things. You think about when you bring home a product that you’re excited about. You have a good experience at the store or online when you buy it. Finally, the product comes to your home. The box is beautiful. It’s aesthetically pleasing. You open the product. It works. It’s functional. Then you go and get customer support or tech support, and it’s helpful, and your issues get resolved. That whole experience from A to Z is pleasant, motivating, easy, and intuitive, and you’re satisfied by it. All of that.

Diana Howles: [27:05] Then the last word, design. This idea of creating and building something, and we’re putting more emphasis on that design part right up front because sometimes we think about development as the bigger chunk, but, actually, design is where we need to be front-loading it because, in a sense, we go slower to go faster. Up front, if we go slower, we go faster.

I think when you talk about how do you assess whether something is really effective or not, I would look at the evaluation. I would look and see what are learners saying about that learning solution. Was it impactful? Was it meaningful to them? Was it engaging? Were they able to learn?

Diana Howles

It’s hard to look at a solution and say, “Well, did they use learner personas to create this? Did they really get feedback? What is involved with that?” But I would look at the evaluation data and see what learners are saying. Were they able to successfully apply this, and did it make a difference when they were back in their organization?

Jeff Cobb: [28:10] We’ve talked a lot over the years on the show and articles we’ve written about the importance of social proof, testimonials, and things like that around the learning experiences that you create. I think a lot of organizations say, “Yeah, yeah” and kind of put that off. But, really, if you want other learners to know that what you’re doing is impactful, those are the best people to hear it from. It’s people that you’ve already been successful with before. So it’s just a takeaway item, an action item for folks who are listening today. It all comes back to the learning experience you’re creating and what people are going to say about that in the end. So go get that social proof. Go get those testimonials.

Wrap-up: [28:56] Diana Howles is the author of Next Level Virtual Training: Advance Your Facilitation and CEO of Howles Associates, which specializes in virtual training, virtual presentation coaching, and learning experience design.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics* Virtual Facilitation with Diana Howles * LX Strategy with Dr. Bucky Dodd * Learning Engineering with Jim Goodell * Designing Smarter Learning Experiences with Connie Malamed

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Chris McLeodCOVID permanently altered the operations and offerings of many learning businesses, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke University is one such example.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with return guest Chris McLeod, who directs OLLI at Duke, about the pandemic-driven changes her group made and their related short- and long-term implications. Chris shares how COVID got them to rethink the competitive environment and the importance of social offerings as a key differentiator. They also discuss how the OLLI at Duke team worked together during the early days of COVID, balancing a member-driven approach to the course catalog with staff oversight, and the enduring appeal of the humanities.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLIs)Celisa Steele: [00:02:11] Tell us about the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke University, a little bit more about what it does, and also the work done by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes in general.

Chris McLeod: [00:02:23] There are about 400 learning and retirement communities or organizations in the country. A hundred and twenty-five have been endowed by the Bernard Osher Foundation out of San Francisco. Mr. Osher was very prescient and forward-thinking in recognizing the role of lifelong learning to living a long and healthy life, and he has invested over $300 million in endowing many of these institutes. It gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility and freedom in terms of programming. We offer, primarily, courses, both online and in-person, but we also offer a variety of social activities, outings, and local field trips. Our real focus is just fostering connections among members with each other and with the instructors. There are no tests or grades. The only thing that’s required is a real appetite for learning and curiosity. The majority of our members are from North Carolina, specifically the Durham-Chapel Hill area. There are a handful from Raleigh and the Triad. Several hundred, I would say, from across the state and about the same amount from other states in the country. Ever since the pandemic, we have been broadcasting online, and so we’re engaging a lot more Duke alumni through our marketing efforts.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:46] Well, great. And I definitely want to talk about the pandemic a little bit more. I want to acknowledge, too, that you’re a return guest. You spoke with Jeff in June of 2019, and, at that point, you were still pretty new in your role at OLLI at Duke. I think you were just about a year in at that point.

Chris McLeod: [00:04:03] Yes.

COVID’s Impact on OLLI at DukeCelisa Steele: [00:04:04] And so now here we are talking almost four years later. It’s probably an understatement to say that a lot has changed in that time span. Let’s just go ahead and talk about how has the COVID pandemic impacted OLLI at Duke?

Chris McLeod: [00:04:19] Well, I remember talking to Jeff and him asking me about online learning, and I said, “Our members are not interested.” And I remember thinking to myself, “And neither am I.” But COVID has really been a catalyst for creativity and innovation for our team and for our community. We moved 100 percent of our programming online within three weeks of our shutdown. We hosted our first short term—it was a four-week term. We invited four of our most popular instructors to learn with us and jump on and teach Zoom. One couple in particular, who teach a lot of history courses, had been teaching for us for more than 20 years, and we really wanted them to be models in terms of jumping in the deep end. And, I think, even today, they would say it was quite an adventure. One of the things we were really fortunate with was that we had a number of volunteers who were dedicated to figuring this out with us. I also had a young woman who I had just hired, who was previously part-time and just had a real appetite for technology, and she has led our program in some really exciting ways and taught the rest of us how to use Zoom. Within the first three months of being online, we trained over 1,500 older adults just how to use Zoom.

Chris McLeod: [00:05:40] We were having these open Zoom basic sessions early on because we felt like we wanted everybody to just learn how to get on it. We were probably ten days ahead of most people when we started doing this. So every single time we did a session, we learned something new. I remember one of our volunteers, Howard Koslow, who helped us initially with Zoom and throughout the first two years, but he trained us how to use Zoom on a desktop. And then, when it was over, he said, “Now we need to develop directions for how to use Zoom on your iPad, on your iPhone, and on an Android.” Some were even showing up on Kindles. And I just thought I was going to lose it.

Here we are three years later, and it’s just amazing how much the world has changed. One of the things I think I’m most proud of is that we’ve really developed an online protocol for how we run our courses.

Chris McLeod

Every single one of our courses has an OLLI staff person that provides technical support for the instructor, and most of our courses have a moderator that supports the instructor by reading questions in chat or calling on people in the order in which they raise their hands.

Chris McLeod: [00:06:58] We’re really recognized by our members and by other OLLIs for our courses are very orderly. There are not a lot of disruptions, not a lot of dog barking or husbands or wives yelling in the background. We had lots of that early on, and so I’m really proud of our team. The other real big change for us is that, before COVID, we were offering in-person classes in 23 different classroom locations across four counties, and now we’re only offering classes in one main classroom facility and two—I would call them—sponsor sites. But, as a result, we’re now able to serve a much broader spectrum of the older adult community. It always troubled me that, even with as many locations as we had, we could still only serve those who could get in their cars and drive. We knew there were caregivers at home. We knew there were people who had issues with sight or hearing that we had difficulty accommodating. And now, with Zoom, many of our members who had hearing issues, some have come back because they’ve learned that Zoom makes the class much more accessible for them.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:15] I know when you and Jeff spoke, you had cited both space and, I think, staffing as two of the challenges that you were dealing with, and I think you were going to be raising funds for a facility, and I think you were just two full-time staff at that point. So just catch us up a little bit. Do you have more staff at this point? Is that focus on a physical facility still as important as it was?

Chris McLeod: [00:08:40] Well, I will say we have doubled our full-time staff and tripled our part-time staff. We now have four full-time individuals, the fourth just starting this past fall, and we’ve added four or five part-time staff to help support our online courses and our in-person. We are not focused right now on getting a larger facility. We aren’t using now the full capacity of our classroom at the Judea Reform Congregation. I think until demand for in-person classes rebounds in a significant way, which I expect will happen given the demographic trends and the large percentage of older adults moving to North Carolina, particularly the Triangle, I’m not worried about it rebounding, but we’re still trying to understand what the slow return to campus means for us.

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The Staying Power of COVID-Prompted ChangesCelisa Steele: [00:10:56] And so you talked about some of the changes that COVID brought about, most especially, obviously, that big shift to online and doing it so quickly and really supporting the learners along the way. So it wasn’t just about getting the content online. It was also about making sure that the learners were comfortable in that environment and able to access those classes. When you look at what changes you made related to COVID, which of those pandemic changes are you rolling back, and which ones are keepers that you’re going to maintain as you move forward?

Chris McLeod: [00:11:30] I would say we’re rolling back almost nothing. Right now, two-thirds of our enrollment is online every term, and that’s been pretty consistent for at least the last year or so. We feel like we’ve all developed a great deal more confidence technically, in general.

We’re starting to think about OLLI in a two-campus concept. We have online classes and in-person, and we’ve divided up the team to support those learners and that campus, if you will, accordingly.

Chris McLeod

I think that we will probably add another staff person within the next year to focus more on resuming and supporting some of the social activities and in-person activities that we’re trying to rebuild, which we think will also make a difference in terms of getting people to return. But some of the hesitations I hear from folks are concerns around COVID. The other is, “Wow, it’s just so convenient to be able to walk downstairs in my bathrobe and take the class.” And the other challenge is that our most popular instructors have stayed online. Pre-COVID, we had as many as 20 percent of our membership on a wait list. We’re talking about 500 people on a wait list every term because, even with 23 locations, we didn’t have enough space. Now that’s less of the case. We still allow instructors to teach the size class they want to teach, so we still have wait lists, but they’re not as extensive.

COVID Changed the Competitive LandscapeCelisa Steele: [00:12:58] When I think about COVID, I think, obviously, about how so many organizations had to shift online and online exclusively for a period of time, including groups that hadn’t ever done online learning before. And so it seems to me that even as OLLI was making that shift to move online, others were doing it too. And then, by going online, you potentially had competition that you didn’t have in the past. I’m just curious to know how you feel COVID has impacted the competitive landscape, the other options that your learners have, and think about when they’re comparing: “Should I be doing this with OLLI at Duke or going somewhere else for it?”

Chris McLeod: [00:13:41] It’s an excellent question. From the very beginning, that was on my mind because I had taken a Coursera course. I’d been a part of other online communities—a meditation community and others. And so I was familiar with, at least, in some cases, some of the higher-production values. Many of our members have taken the Great Courses, which are not live. They were asynchronous, as they say. But we really tried to focus on engaging our members in conversation before class, getting them used to speaking up, that type of thing. What we did last spring was invest a lot of time in putting together a very extensive member survey and a series of focus groups to look at what do they value and appreciate most about OLLI classes. Are they taking courses elsewhere? What are the differences? What are they like and not like? And so it was really helpful to understand that our courses are known for being more intimate. They love that they can ask the question of the instructor in real time. They appreciate that we’re still doing recordings. They’re not as high-production-value as many of the others, but they feel like they don’t miss out when they have a medical appointment or something that might interfere. And they really feel some of our smaller classes are almost like graduate seminars, and that isn’t something that’s very available in other settings.

Chris McLeod: [00:15:09] And, again, we work really hard to make sure they proceed smoothly and there are not a lot of technical glitches. There were a handful of folks—I would say 20 or 25 percent—who were taking courses on at least one other platform. We had several folks who were members of more than one OLLI since there are 125. We had several who had moved out of the area and decided, “Oh, wow, now I can rejoin OLLI at Duke even though I’ve moved to Texas.” I think recognizing what they appreciated made me feel more comfortable about offering smaller classes. Particularly poetry and literature seem to be really popular. And I think I’ve heard from a caregiver or two who just say, “I organize everything around my Tuesday poetry class. It’s what’s keeping me alive right now, keeping me going.” I think none of us really appreciated how meaningful OLLI was to folks ’til this fall when we hosted a series of in-person socials, and people came up to my staff with tears in their eyes, and they just said, “Thank you for everything you’ve done.” It was really a moving experience. And I think none of us will ever forget who we went through the pandemic with. I’m sure many of your listeners can appreciate that, as much as colleagues, as well as our members.

Chris McLeod: [00:16:25] One thing that was particularly, I think, poignant to me was how important it was for my staff and I to really be completely honest about what was going on in each other’s lives at that point because we were online and meeting and trying to organize things 10 or 12 hours a day, and we needed to know when the other person either wasn’t going to be around, needed a break, or had a family crisis. And I think it made me wonder how my career might have been different had I not drawn such bright lines. But, as a result, we’re a very tight team. I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve had zero turnover in the last three years. I can tell you I have a lot of colleagues who lost their entire team, and probably anywhere from a quarter to a third of OLLI directors nationally have retired in the last three years. I can tell you that, at a different point in my career, I might just say the same thing. But truly, this has been one of the most exciting, exhilarating, and exhausting periods of my career. But I never knew it could be so much fun and require so much creativity.

Humanities and the Future of Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:17:33] There’s so much in what you shared there. I think that idea of both exhilaration and exhaustion, in some ways, characterized the pandemic for a lot of people—when you were able, if you were able, to pick up and see some of the opportunities, which you were fortunate to be able to do and work with your team on. You also mentioned just how much the classes meant to some of the learners and how they shared that with your staff—the poetry class that kept the caregiver going. And I did relisten to your conversation with Jeff before you and I spoke today, just to refresh my memory about what you guys had covered. I noted that you had said that the humanities made for really popular options—typically, poetry, music, and history, those were the things that folks really seemed to be excited about, maybe because they hadn’t had time when they were getting their original academic degree. And so this was their chance to go back either to what they loved or hadn’t had a chance to explore. Anyhow, in listening to that, it really struck me, given all of the recent upheavals and cutting back on the humanities in higher ed, I’d just be curious what comments or thoughts you might have on what those current higher ed cutbacks in humanities might mean in terms of what lifelong learning looks like in the future.

Chris McLeod: [00:18:55] I think the reason humanities are so popular among our demographic is because many of them went to college when you were supposed to do the sciences. My father did not take a single humanities class. That was back when you could do that because he was pre-med. And I think of those who either were afraid to take them because of grades or because they had so many core requirements—humanities still remained very popular among our members. The other thing that’s been interesting, as I was listening to the Coursera CEO speak the other day on the Coursera conference, ChatGPT is all the rage. I remember as recently as three weeks ago, “Okay, I’m drawing the line there. I am not learning about that.” And then I’m listening to him talk about how he uses ChatGPT as a thought partner in his writing and how he uses it to organize concepts and ideas. And he said, no matter what we do online, it’s still important for people to be able to think critically, that there’s a huge potential, and it’s already happening that this type of thing will be used to manipulate in some really evil ways, but that the importance of thinking, writing, and communicating is going to always be important in terms of leadership and connection with each other. The other thing that was really interesting too, and that I think may not have happened but for COVID, was that during this racial reckoning with the George Floyd murder and several of the other protests that were erupting all across the country, our members had a tremendous curiosity and interest in learning more about that.

Chris McLeod: [00:20:40] We were fortunate to have recruited some amazing instructors who had friends and family members share first-person narratives of their encounters with law enforcement in their careers and of growing up in the Jim Crow South. The first woman PhD. Different experiences. We had one particular program where there were three African American men who were interviewed, and they were among the first at UNC, Duke, and NC State. I’m not sure our members would have enrolled and shown up and sat through some difficult conversations had they not been able to do so from their own homes, where they felt a degree of safety and protection, if you will, a little bit more, from the discomfort. I will say we didn’t do a very good job of giving them time to process what they were hearing. There was a tremendous amount of information. But what we heard from folks was, “Wow, we really needed to debrief and talk with each other afterwards.” So too much of the conversation was one-way, but/and it was very powerful. And I’m really proud of the work that our curriculum committee and board did to make sure we had material that was relevant and spoke to what was happening currently.

OLLI’s Approach to Its PortfolioCelisa Steele: [00:22:05] Well, that makes me want to ask a question about how do you typically approach making determinations about what goes into your portfolio of offerings? And then what stays, what gets cut, or what gets modified, as you’re saying, to potentially add time for more of that debriefing and processing?

Chris McLeod: [00:22:22] OLLI at Duke, we’re among the oldest and actually among the 10 or 12 largest OLLIs in the country. But we have a history of our curriculum being curated by a group of volunteers. When I joined as director, that was really uncomfortable for me, but I tried to respect the process, and I would put new instructors in the pipeline to be considered. And, of course, many were considered, engaged, and taught during those first couple of years, and that practice continues. We do have a curriculum committee of 12 area chairs that oversee courses in different subject areas. We’ve had an amazing volunteer, Beth Anderson, who’s been our curriculum chair for the past five years and who’s stepping down at the end of June. During COVID, I felt like we needed to have a little more staff time and focus on developing our curriculum. We were inadvertently finding some gaps. I think there are certain courses we need to teach every term: memoir; we have a couple of courses on legacy—writing a legacy letter; end-of-life courses that speak about how to manage and be a healthcare advocate for yourself or a loved one.

Chris McLeod: [00:23:40] I think just because of supply and demand, we didn’t always have those courses. I think, given that we’re broadcasting from Duke’s campus to across the country, in fact, across the world, we need to make sure all of our courses reflect the values and brand of Duke University, and I think that will be best done by a staff person in partnership with our volunteer committee. It’s very important to have a member voice in curriculum. But what I began to appreciate was that we were only teaching courses that reflected the instructors who showed up and wanted to teach. And now we need to make sure there are certain courses that are covered every term.

Fundamental Shifts in Learner Needs and WantsCelisa Steele: [00:24:21] So whether you want to take the view of history going back since you talked to Jeff roughly four years ago or going back to COVID, but, in those last three or four years, a lot’s changed. There’s been the pandemic. There’s been ChatGPT, as you just mentioned. There’s been the racial reckoning in this country. Maybe there are other events that will pop to mind for you when you’re thinking about your learners. But, given that time span and what’s happened there, do you think anything is fundamentally different about what your learners need and want now than it was in the past?

Chris McLeod: [00:24:57] There’s an enormous shift going on right now. Sadly, with the transition online, we lost hundreds of members who couldn’t make the transition. They either didn’t have the equipment. They didn’t have a camera on their laptop. I was shocked to find out how many people were registering for courses on their phones. We have a number of people who take OLLI courses on their phones. They may be relatively technically competent, but they may not be able to go out, buy a laptop, have it all set up and run, or have a son or daughter around who could help them do that. I lost a lot of sleep over that initially, but we had no choice but to press forward. I think our members are younger and more tech-savvy. We used to get a lot of complaints about our registration process, and now I get none. So I think there is a shift to younger members.

But I think the biggest shift that I’m noticing is what our members are looking for. Early on, most of our courses were a more traditional lecture of the expert and the sage on the stage, so to speak. I think our members are expecting more interaction. They have always had a tremendous amount of expertise and life experience that they bring to the classroom, but there’s a much higher expectation that that will be acknowledged and incorporated and invited to add to the class discussion.

Chris McLeod

Our members, right now, there’s a 50-year span between folks in their late 40s, I would say, all the way to their early 90s.

Chris McLeod: [00:26:32] I talked to a couple of folks who were getting Zoom set up for their parents in their late 80s, and one woman who was 94, her daughter registered for her but would get it set up for her. And so that’s a pretty broad range to try to figure out what are they interested in learning? I think we feel really challenged by that demographic spread. And, frankly, my staff ranges from the mid-30s to the late 70s, so we’re our own experiment. I would say that we all communicate really well and get along, and I think there’s a lot of two-way mentoring going on. But I never really thought about it as an issue until you start reading all these articles about “okay boomer” and the rivalries between generations. That’s just not been my experience at Duke or within our membership. But this shift from more the instructor-centric type of teaching, where the instructor is thinking about their experience teaching and how the information is coming across, versus the conversation around how can we make this a good experience for the learner? What are the different learning styles? And being more respectful of that, that’s something that we’re also grappling with. I think we have a little bit better mixture, but, still, at least half of our classes are taught by faculty who retired within the last 10 or 15 years, and so they teach often in a more traditional way. Not all, but many do.

Trends and the Future of Lifelong LearningCelisa Steele: [00:28:01] And that harkens back to what you were saying about competition. I think you have acknowledged and recognized that one of the strengths of OLLI at Duke is this personal connection. It’s this chance to talk with the others in the classroom, to ask questions of that teacher, that instructor, who is that expert. But it sounds like you’re recognizing that where you particularly excel is when it’s not just that lecture. It’s the other aspects and other pieces of it as well. When you think about the future of lifelong learning, what is it that interests you? Are there trends or developments that you are keeping an eye on?

Chris McLeod: [00:28:47] To me, one of the things that’s really exciting is the degree to which we’re engaging Duke alumni. We’ve been able to basically, through e-mail, e-mail 25,000-30,000 Duke alumni every term. When we first did it, I was literally terrified because I had no idea: “Are we going to get 20 members or 200?” Honestly, we started out with a much smaller list because I just wasn’t sure what the conversion rate might be, and I couldn’t afford to overwhelm my staff. When we first started doing it, we would get anywhere from 50 to 75 new members. So it was a pretty strong yield. I haven’t been able to look at the data long enough to see are these folks transactional? Were they just around during COVID, or have they stuck it out? Because, for our in-person members, the average tenure can be anywhere from 5 to 20 years. But my bet is that it will become more of a transactional type of membership for folks. We’re going to be working really hard to foster a sense of community and belonging. I hope down the road to be able to do some in-person events with some of our online instructors, to put them on tour, if you will, let them meet some people in other communities, particularly in North Carolina, and then see if we might engage folks online.

Chris McLeod: [00:30:03] I think I’m really interested in how our courses are taught. I think that’s something that will evolve over time. I think, to me, one of the things that’s most exciting is that our division has just joined with another division on Duke’s campus called Duke Learning and Innovation, and they have been helping faculty teach more technology-enabled, learner-centric courses, and I think we can learn a lot from them and then begin to share some of those practices with our instructors. There’s a lot going on at Duke, and we’re just beginning to talk about, “Gosh, how could Coursera work with OLLI? Is there a possibility?” Because Duke faculty are using it in their courses, and there are a lot of opportunities to experiment.

Personal Lifelong Learning HabitsCelisa Steele: [00:30:46] This is the Leading Learning Podcast, which means one of our questions that we like to ask of all guests has to do with your own approach to lifelong learning. Would you share with us a little bit about what habits, practices, or sources you might use for your own ongoing learning, whether that’s professionally or personally?

Chris McLeod: [00:31:06] One of the benefits of the last couple of years is that, early on, before we could add part-time staff, all of us were doing tech support for our classes. So I sat in more OLLI classes than the first two years of the pandemic than I had. I had only sat in two classes one time here and there before because things were just so busy. But I believe a lot in storytelling, and I think hearing the power of the first-person narrative is really very compelling. I really enjoy the TED Talks, listening to people who’ve done amazing things, courageous things, and talk about their experiences. I did take some LinkedIn Learning on a few things, on managing a remote team. I think we fumbled through it. Usually, when I watched those things, I’d always learn something, but I always ended up feeling like, “We did pretty well for not knowing what we were doing.” I’m a big reader, but I would say one of the big challenges is, during COVID, I’ve found that being on screen so much, mostly through meetings in the last year, I just find it really hard to read at the level and the pace I used to.

Chris McLeod: [00:32:19] I’m more likely now to listen to a book on tape, a podcast, or watch a YouTube interview. It doesn’t mean my book collection has gotten any smaller or that I’ve stopped ordering books. You know how that goes. But it’s really a variety. And I think it’s one of the ways this job is so exhilarating is that we’re all surrounded by such interesting people who move here from all over the country. And, again, we’ve been able to bring in speakers from all over the country. So that part is fun. And they often have, not surprisingly, a real passion for what they do. And that’s contagious.

Wrap-up: [00:33:07] Chris McLeod is director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke University.

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Episodes on Related Topics* Leading a Lifelong Learning Institute with Chris McLeod of OLLI at Duke * Relevant, Efficient, and Economical: Learning Touchstones with Ray Schroeder * The New Blended Learning

The post Lifelong Learning Through COVID with Chris McLeod appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb,
Leading Learning Podcast co-hostsWe believe deeply in the power of learning to transform individuals, organizations, and communities. That’s why we focus the Leading Learning Podcast on serving the learning businesses and learning business professionals that create and support adult lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development.

Learning business professionals need to invest in their own learning and development so they can grow and help the learning businesses they serve improve their reach, revenue, and impact. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, we highlight one of our existing resources: the informal learning business curriculum. We also take a high-level look at the why, what, and how of learning for learning business professionals.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:17] We want to call your attention to a resource we’ve had up on the Leading Learning site for quite a while now that we call the “informal learning business curriculum.”

Celisa Steele: [00:01:29] Informal learning is a huge part of how most adults grow and improve, and this resource that we’re calling the informal learning business curriculum is simply a Web page, and that Web page curates and collects a number of podcast episodes. But we haven’t devoted a podcast episode to the informal learning business curriculum—that is, until today.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:52] Not until today, but that is what we are going to do today. I’m wondering if we should be referring to it as the ILBC or something.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:59] It did seem to beg for an acronym. It’s long and unwieldy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:03] We’ll see how it plays out in the audience. If you’re in favor of an acronym, by all means, go with ILBC, or give us another clever name for it. But, for right now, we’re going to stick with the informal learning business curriculum, and we’re going to take a look at that with a high-level approach of why, what, and how.

Why Learn As a Learning Business ProfessionalCelisa Steele: [00:02:28] Let’s start with why. A sense of identity can really help with a learner having clarity around why it’s important to learn something. One thing that we’ve given airtime to quite a bit on the podcast, and we’ve also given a lot of ink or printer toner to it, is this concept of—

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:50] Pixels, I think.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:52] Pixels also. But we’ve devoted a lot of energy to this idea of learning businesses and the third sector of education. Those are two terms that, essentially, we coined, and we coined them because we felt like there was a need to create a sense of shared identity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:10] There really is because it’s a sector, it’s a business, and it’s people within the business who are doing really important work. We think, historically, they often haven’t thought of themselves as being part of a community, as a well-defined group of people who are engaged in this whole business of adult lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development. That term, “learning business,” we’re obviously not the first people to say “the learning business,” but we have a specific way in which we’re using it, which is that you’re not internal corporate L&D. You’re not an academic degree program. You’re really in the business of serving those adult lifelong learners who are participating in continuing education and professional development. So you care deeply about learning and creating impactful learning experiences, but you’re also doing that as a business. You have to generate revenue and be sustainable in doing it. In doing that, you are playing a critical role in what we have talked about as this third sector of education.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:15] And just to go back to the business side of learning businesses for a minute, that means that you have to typically make the case to learners: “Come learn this with us.” And so, for us, we have spent a lot of time in the association sector. There is a shared identity among associations, and they very often do have a learning business. It’s very much tied to their mission in many cases. For us, learning businesses expand beyond associations. It can also be continuing education units that might be housed within an academic institution. But, again, they aren’t granting degrees per se. It could be for-profit training companies, but, basically, it’s any type of organization that really is committed to helping people in a field, profession, or industry grow and learn. And they’re doing that by making the case to them to come learn with us and therefore generating revenue to further that mission. Come back and learn with us some more. We’re going to support moving the needle and improving whatever field, industry, or profession we are targeting.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:21] If you share our view that this is a defined group and this is a community that does have an identity, it makes sense that there would be learning, education, training, and things to know that people in this community really need to be focused on and continue to improve upon over time. That’s really the basis for having this idea of a learning business curriculum.

This is content. It’s information. It’s knowledge. It’s experiences that are intended for this group in the learning business, these people who are serving the third sector. We think it’s important to embrace that identity and then pursue the education and the learning that goes with that identity.

Jeff Cobb

Celisa Steele: [00:06:04] For a quick recap in terms of what we mean by the “third sector,” for folks who don’t recall or who might be hearing the term for the first time if you’re a newer listener, we consider the first sector of education to really be that K-12, well-established education system that serves our youngest learners. And then we have higher education. We have a number, but it’s not a majority that go on from that first sector, the K-12, into higher ed, the second sector. But then there’s this third sector, which is huge. It’s how we continue to grow and learn after we’ve completed whatever formal education we’re going to. So it’s a huge sector that we are a part of and that learning businesses are a part of.

The Third Sector of EducationJeff Cobb: [00:06:50] And it tends to be hidden in plain sight. I think it’s enormous but underappreciated. And, again, the work that we do as learning businesses and learning business professionals really is the foundation of that sector, which brings us back again to this idea that we need to learn how to do that well. You can’t currently go to a higher education institution and get a degree in the learning business. At this point, what we’re offering—what may be the best game in town—is the informal learning business curriculum.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:21] Once you have a sense of identity, if you can understand that you are a part of this third sector and that you are one of the other types of learning businesses that are serving adult lifelong learners, that can be really important. It just reminds me of Dan Pink, and some of his recent writing is getting at the difference between identifying as a kind of person versus someone who does something. And so he talks about the difference between being someone who runs and being a runner, the difference between playing a guitar and being a musician, or writing and being a writer. The idea being, the more closely you identify with that noun, it feels a little bit closer to who you are. It feels a little bit more core, a little bit more central. We’re hoping that you’ll embrace that label of learning business professional and that you will identify with this importance and this belief in this importance of what lifelong learning really means for individuals and for society at large.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:24] Yes, it’s going to help you in your own work. It’s going to help you identify with peers within your organization and at other organizations. It’s going to help you find resources and recognize the resources that are for you. So why the learning business curriculum? Why engage in the learning business curriculum? Because you are a learning business professional in the learning business, and this is content, this is material that can help you excel at that.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:54] We do encourage you to learn with others. Identify as a learning business professional—we hope you will—but then also recognizing that puts you in a group. We all know the importance of social learning and peer learning. There can be accountability there. There can be the opportunity for bouncing ideas off one another and getting feedback. We know how important feedback is for learning. So we encourage you to embrace this identity and then to also seek out others who have a similar identity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:23] Then gather together around the learning business curriculum.

Sponsor: Thinkific[00:09:31] We’re grateful to Thinkific for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast. At Leading Learning, we believe reach, revenue, and impact are essential for all learning businesses. Thinkific Plus is a new-generation platform purpose-built to help growing businesses scale revenue.

Right now, as a Leading Learning listener, you can get a free month of Thinkific Plus by going to our special URL. Start your free month today at thinkific.com/learning.

What to Learn As a Learning Business ProfessionalCelisa Steele: [00:10:47] We’ve touched on why to learn. The next big area we want to talk about is what to learn, and getting clarity about what to learn really is a necessary precursor to effective learning. Of course, that can sometimes be a bit of a “gotcha.” If you’re really new to a field, even knowing what you need to know can be hard to figure out because you’re just such a novice that you don’t really understand what the choices are. And so we have a resource that we have put together that we think helps folks who are new to learning businesses, it also helps folks who have been in learning businesses for a while, and this is the Learning Business Maturity Model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:31] That’s right. If you’re going to have a curriculum, you have to have something that’s going to structure that curriculum. You have to have a way of defining that body of knowledge that is going to be the right one for this group that we’ve identified, the learning business professionals. The Learning Business Maturity Model enabled us to do that. We didn’t create it specifically to create a curriculum; the curriculum flowed out of it naturally once we had identified those knowledge areas that we were seeing as so important in the learning businesses that we’ve worked with for years and years. That naturally prompted us to think, “Okay, well, what’s important in the area of each of these domains?” The domains are leadership, strategy, marketing, capacity, and portfolio.

The Tagoras Learning Business Maturity Model ™Celisa Steele: [00:12:19] If you go to the Leading Learning site, leadinglearning.com, and if you go to the podcast area, you’ll see that we actually, more or less, align all of our episodes with those domains. We use those as the categories on the Leading Learning Web site, with a little bit of finesse there. We’ve added trends just because sometimes things are breaking news—something like ChatGPT, for example—and we feel like that’s the best way to categorize those. For those of you who are extra attentive on the Web site, we use the word learning rather than portfolio. Just thinking for folks who may not be as familiar with the Learning Business Maturity Model, that might be more immediately understandable than portfolio as a navigation item.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:09] We have to have some flexibility in these and be willing to shape and evolve them over time. Naturally, anybody who’s showing up on the Leading Learning Web site for the first time, particularly if they’ve never heard this concept of the learning business, if they’ve never thought of themselves as a learning business professional or thought about the third sector or anything else, then we want the terminology to be as understandable as possible. A word like portfolio may not immediately jump out to somebody as “Oh, I know what they mean by portfolio,” and we’re really talking about the learning experiences. What are those experiences in your portfolio as a learning business? This is essentially a taxonomy of sorts, a high-level taxonomy. That’s always tricky territory, but important to be able to name things and have a common language and a common point of reference around the important areas of knowledge and activity within your organization, within whatever field or industry you’re serving. In fact, we have an interview coming up with Stephanie Lemieux of Dovecot. We’re going to talk about taxonomy in some depth because it is very important, and, with the Learning Business Maturity Model, we took a high-level pass at a taxonomy, and then this curriculum we’re talking about flows out of that taxonomy.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:25] The maturity model offers these five domains, which get you thinking, “Okay, what is it that I need to know about leadership? What is it that I need to know about strategy? What is it that I need to know about marketing? What do I need to know about capacity and portfolio?” The other thing that the maturity model does is begin to give you a sense of a trajectory. At the most basic level, anytime we set out to learn, it’s about improving; it’s about getting better. But, if you can be a little bit more specific about that, that can be even more helpful. In terms of the Learning Business Maturity Model, it’s about moving from stage one (static) to stage four (innovative), and, obviously, two other stages along the way there. And that helps you begin to chart what it looks like to get better and having at least a rough idea of what are some of the goals and milestones along this way to improving and getting better. I know our son, for example, is a runner, and, as a very clear goal, he wants a sub-five mile. Having that clarity allows you to know, “Okay, what is it that I need to do in terms of training? What is it that I need to work towards in terms of performance?” The more clarity you can have, the easier it becomes to figure out what the what is when it comes to learning and improving as a learning business professional.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:48] The Learning Business Maturity Model does have an assessment to go along with it, so you can assess and see where your organization is in the different domains and what stage you’re at. That’s going to give you information about where you do need to be investing some time and effort to learn and change. And you can use that as a map for how to dive into the curriculum. If you see that we need to develop more or I need to develop more (depending on how you’re using it) in the area of strategy or in the area of marketing, you’re going to be able to see that there are specific episodes or specific resources in the curriculum that relate to different areas of marketing, and you can home in on those and say, “That’s where I’m going to focus right now.” This isn’t something you have to go through in a lockstep fashion. In fact, we encourage you to really use it where you have the most need in your organization, as a catalyst for your own reflection, for your own discussion, for setting those goals that you just referred to, those milestones, and use the material that we’re providing here as one of the tools that’s going to help get you to those milestones.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:51] And, as big a fan as we are of having some clarity around what it is you want to study and what it is you want to learn, we do believe in the value of that. That’s what we’re talking about here with the Learning Business Maturity Model. But I do also want to put in a plug for allowing some time for serendipity and free exploration and not always feeling like, if you’re going to sit down to read, it has to very clearly be something that’s going to help you get to that next stage of maturity in strategy, for example. We’re both liberal arts majors, so I definitely am a big fan of this idea of intersection, and whatever you’re doing in one area may—or may not—have bearing on another area in the end. But I think allowing some time for exploring what you want to explore and going where your interest leads you can also be fruitful.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:44] Definitely. And we take the informal part of the informal learning business curriculum seriously. You can, of course, put as much structure as you want on this and make it lockstep and milestone-driven. But also, as you’re saying, Celisa, just allowing for some space around it. You might one day show up on the Leading Learning site and read an article. It might be a month or two before you come back, but, in the meantime, maybe that sparked some exploration in different areas for you, some conversations, and led to some of that serendipity that you’re talking about, which is often some of the most important stuff when it comes to our ongoing growth and development.

How to Learn As a Learning Business ProfessionalCelisa Steele: [00:18:29] We’ve talked about why, we’ve talked about what, and that brings us to how. The how in our minds ties to learning science and what we know about effective learning practices and learning approaches.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:45] One big one, of course, is time—and having regular times but also over time, so repeated exposure to the content, material, the knowledge that really make up the body of knowledge, the competencies around being a learning business professional. Something like this curriculum is a great practice, I think, to put some time on your own calendar, maybe once a week, maybe once a month. We would certainly advocate more than once a month. Once a week sounds good. It doesn’t have to be much. Maybe you put 15 or 30 minutes on your calendar to say, “I’m going to go and familiarize myself with this particular episode.” You might listen to the episode. You might read the show notes. You might scan it. You might get some of the major ideas from it and reflect on it, but have time on your calendar that you’re going to do that on a regular basis. And you can do that for yourself. We also recommend doing that with a group within your organization because the episodes that we highlight as part of the curriculum can be a great basis for conversation. Have everybody listen to them, and then come together as a group, whether that’s the team within your learning business or whether you’re in a bigger organization that has other parts of the organization that you want to familiarize with some of the concepts, the main ideas, the main knowledge. You might bring in your CEO, your head of IT, or your head of marketing if that’s the type of organization you’re in, and have some conversation around some of these specific materials within the curriculum.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:20] Basically, this means learning is not going to happen if you do not make time for learning to happen. And so we do advocate making sure that you’re carving out time and carving it out regularly. This ties to the idea of spaced learning. We know that we need to revisit content. We need to continue to come back to ideas and then elaborate. That’s how you get more fluent in whatever skill or knowledge you’re talking about over time. We’ve talked about time. Another thing that we would advocate is making sure that you are allowing for both strategic learning and more tactical learning. What I mean by that is, strategic is more of “Okay, I need to get familiar with a concept.” I guess, not to get too meta here, but thinking about strategy could be a strategic thing that you’re doing. That’s a big, meaty concept—strategy. But you still need to dig into it. You shouldn’t be afraid of it, even though it’s big and meaty, and we have some tools that can help you do that. For example, we have an episode on the Product Value Profile, and that begins to get that strategy down to a tactical level. That’s what we’re advocates of—both taking a big-picture view of big concepts and embracing those but also digging in some and getting very tactical and specific. What is it that you can do with a particular idea or a particular piece of knowledge?

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:44] I can think specifically—and this is on the page for the curriculum right now. One of the things we start with is the series that we did, I believe, back in 2020-21, which was around big topics and big shifts that were happening in the learning business and in the world as it impacted the learning business. A lot of higher-level conceptual conversation could be had around those that you then have to work into specific actions you’re going to take as an organization. On the other hand, right after that, we list our Tool Talk episodes, which are very concretely about things like the Product Value Profile, the Value Ramp, or the Market Insight Matrix—specific tools that you can apply in specific ways within your organization. We definitely span that more strategic/conceptual and the more tactical/practical action levels with the content that we cover.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:37] So far, in talking about how, we’ve talked about time and then about this balance of strategic and tactical approaches. Next we want to talk about the social and collaborative side of learning.

Materials can be really helpful for individual learning, but it can be even more rich and valuable if you’re able to bring in multiple and diverse perspectives on those resources so that you’re getting not just what it is that you think about a particular idea or piece of information, but you’re also hearing from your team, from your colleagues, from those in your organization and those outside your organization.

Celisa Steele

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:19] We already alluded to this a little bit in the time section, talking about scheduling time not just for yourself, but also potentially for a team or a group, even if you don’t do that on a regular basis. Having some level of interaction around these materials is just really helpful. We do often hear from organizations that are making use of the materials in those team- or group-type conversations. I talked to a person from a trade association recently that had done this with the leadership in the organization, not just in the learning part of the organization, but, I believe, the CEO and the head of marketing—it’s that type of organization; they’ve got those people—were all involved. It was all the leadership team for the organization, and they were talking about our five Cs episode that we did not too long ago, and that was just a good catalyst for conversation, both about what was in that episode, but then it automatically draws you to what’s going on in your organization, your situation, and can help to surface issues that it would be harder to get surfaced otherwise. It can be really effective for that. We just know that social interaction is so helpful around learning anything. Even if you’re not doing these sorts of group discussions, sharing your thoughts on an episode on social media and getting some feedback and some interplay around that, that’s another form of using social around learning. So think about the ways that you can take what you get from any of the curriculum materials and get it out there in the world and get some feedback and some interaction around it.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:48] We’ve talked about time. We’ve talked about balancing strategic and tactical. We’ve talked about social and collaborative opportunities. We would also urge you to think about application, to make sure that you are doing something with what you’re learning. That might take the shape of creating a project so that you can get practical and hands-on with something that you’re learning. The Tool Talks that we’ve already mentioned, I think, lend themselves to this very easily. You have these tools, and they are meant to be used. So don’t just listen about that tool; you want to actually go and make use of that tool. That’s how you’re going to begin to get the most value out of it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:30] We try to provide these kinds of opportunities in the podcast episodes as well. The Tool Talks, obviously, are very focused on those sorts of opportunities, but we’ll often call out areas where you should ask yourself a question or reflect on an action item out of what we’re talking about. I just interviewed, for example, Susie Wise recently, and we were talking about belonging and community, and she’s got a great book that has exercises all throughout the book. We talk about some of those exercises and specific calls to action in there to pause. So actually do these exercises as part of your personal work or within your organization. Podcasts don’t get thought about enough, I think, as media for learning. But they can be so great in terms of the knowledge and the content you can get from them, but they can also spark action. And we certainly try to do that with the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:22] And then, tied to this application and doing something with what you’re learning is feedback. We, again, know that feedback is really essential to learning. If you’re going to try out a tool or if you’re going to reflect on a key question, we invite you to also make sure that you’re getting some feedback on it. Again, this could be with the peers internal to your organization or external to your organization. It could go back to your idea of sharing on social media, Jeff. If we see something out there on social media, we’ll respond.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:58] We’ve now covered why to engage with something like the learning business curriculum—I should say the informal learning business curriculum.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:08] ILBC.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:09] ILBC. It’s because we all are part of this thing called the learning business. We all are learning business professionals serving this third sector of education, and there are specific areas of knowledge that we need to continue to develop in and progress towards mastery of, over time. So that’s the why. We’ve covered the what of the learning business curriculum, really drawing on our Learning Business Maturity Model as an underlying structure. But, of course, you can use that as a jumping-off point and go from there to add what’s meaningful in the context of your own learning business. And now we’ve looked at the how to do that—making the time, repeating over time, being both strategic and tactical with the materials, engaging with others around it, making sure that you’re focusing on actually applying what you’re hearing or what you’re reading (depending on how you decide to engage with the curriculum), and that you’re getting and giving feedback around it.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:11]

The takeaway from all of this is that we really encourage you to get serious—or continue to be serious—about your own learning and development. As a learning business professional, you really owe it to yourself and to those you serve to make sure that you are growing and improving.

Celisa Steele

And we offer the informal learning business curriculum, which you can find a link to in the show notes for this episode, we offer that as a point of departure. You can use it for yourself, use it with others, and then, of course, augment it.

Wrap-up: [00:28:56] We’ve published more than 350 episodes of the Leading Learning Podcast, but we’re just getting started in terms of the areas we could explore. We truly welcome and invite your input on how we should focus our efforts going forward. What topics should we cover or go deeper on as part of our evolving informal learning business curriculum?

You can leave a comment to suggest what else we should cover on the bottom of this page.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics* The Surge of the Third Sector of Education (seven-episode series) * Tool Talks (ongoing informal series on tools useful to learning businesses) * The Learning Business MBA (seven-episode series) * Maturity, Learning, and Desired States

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Amanda KaiserEngagement is at the heart of most thriving learning businesses. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, we talk about engagement with Amanda Kaiser, an engagement strategist, keynote speaker, and author of Elevating Engagement: Uncommon Strategies for Creating a Thriving Member Community.

Amanda’s background and focus are on community engagement in the context of associations, but her perspective on engagement is valuable for learning businesses of all types.

Co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Amanda about the necessary components of engagement, including a high-level look at the six stages of engagement she covers in her book. Jeff and Amanda get into specific tactics and approaches such as e-mail communication, social proof, and priming members and learners for participation. They also discuss the primary importance of creating an organizational culture that supports and values engagement over transactions.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

A Focus on EngagementJeff Cobb: [00:01:39] I know you work with organizations to help them in a number of different ways. Can you tell us a bit about the work that you do?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:01:46] Absolutely. I’m a researcher at heart. I research, I experiment, I speak, and I write about engagement. And my interest in engagement really started when I was working to help guide the Crayola brand. I worked in marketing at Crayola, and that’s what propelled me into this field. And, if you think, Jeff, about your own experiences with that very iconic yellow box with the green chevrons, for most people, it brings up a lot of emotions—the thrill of opening a new box, the possibilities, the creativity, and remembering your childhood. So that’s a really good example of brand engagement. And nowadays I study brand engagement but also attendee engagement, member engagement, and volunteer engagement, just to name a few places where engagement becomes really important. That’s what I’m working on these days.

Defining EngagementJeff Cobb: [00:02:36] It’s interesting you brought up Crayola. I knew that was part of your background, but, until you said that, I hadn’t made the connection between Crayola and engagement because I just know from having had young children myself and just seeing young children, particularly when you see a child with a crayon in their hand or a box of crayons and that paper in front of them, you’re talking about somebody who’s engaged. They are just so focused. So crayons and Crayola, I guess, are all about engagement. Now, the main focus of our discussion today is your new book, which is about engagement, and it’s called Elevating Engagement: Uncommon Strategies for Creating a Thriving Member Community. I think to tee up the conversation, it might be useful to talk about at least a couple of terms. One is engagement. What do you mean when you use the word engagement? Because it’s one of those terms I think gets thrown around a lot these days. We need to engage people more, for whatever it is. How do you define that, and what led to your deep focus on it?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:03:43] Absolutely. I’m so glad you asked that question because, you’re right, people are throwing around terms. There are a million definitions for engagement. In the way that I think about engagement, there are transactions, and then there’s engagement. I think most of our interactions with organizations are transactional—you give me value, and I give you cash. And so let me give you an example. The closest dry cleaner to me is adequate. They’re just averagely adequate. They take my blazers, and, a week later, I have clean blazers. And I think that they do an okay business, but, when I drop off and pick up, there’s never anybody else there. Five years ago, I lived in a neighborhood that had the best dry cleaner. She was the best. She knew my name. I would hand her my blazers, and she would ooh and aah over the fabric. My son was younger at the time. She just loved my son. And the place was always just a bunch of activity. When I was dropping off and picking up, people were always dropping off and picking up, and, when they’d leave, they’d have this huge smile on their faces. With my current dry cleaner, my relationship with them is purely transactional. But my old dry cleaner—that’s engagement. I feel like that’s engagement.

Engagement is more than a transaction. We’re starting to get into that realm of feelings, and those feelings are what brings us back for more. And so I think that there are a lot of businesses where transactions are okay, but… the kinds of businesses that we work with and serve, you’ve got to have engagement. It’s got to be more than just a transaction.

Amanda Kaiser

Community and the Need for ElevationJeff Cobb: [00:05:23] I definitely want to talk about that. It’s so great to use the example of a dry cleaner because you do think of that, for me, as the ultimate transactional business. Do I really care about engagement with my dry cleaner? And yet, when it happens, you notice it, and it feels good. I have a tailor that I use. When I say tailor, I mean all she’s doing is taking up the hem in my new pants or something like that. I’m not having suits made or anything. So I won’t see her for six months or a year, and I walk through the door, and she says, “Hey, Jeff!” And just how on earth is she remembering me? And so, like you said, the engagement’s there. And, in what would otherwise be a fairly transactional business, I will never go anywhere else to get my pants hemmed as a result of just that simple…because it made me, like you said, it’s a feeling. It makes you feel so good. Now, I know that for you (and you referenced our work—we both work a great deal in the membership world and the association world), you’re really focused on engagement in communities. That was the second term I wanted to ask you about as we’re heading deeper into the conversation is community. How do you define community? I feel like there’s an issue with engagement and community, or maybe it’s particularly with membership organizations and traditional associations that there needs to be more engagement than has traditionally been the case. Or, as you said, it needs to be elevated now. Talk to me about community and then this need for elevation.

Amanda Kaiser: [00:06:48] I like to use the word community fairly loosely. You’re right—professionals are communities of their peers. With trade societies, the same kind of thing—there’s a lot of community there. But I also study online communities. Every time you bring a group together for an event, even if it’s just an hour-long event, you have an opportunity to make a community. There are communities popping up and going away wherever you look. So this is not just an association thing, but I think, wherever you look, there are communities that are doing it really well, community leaders that are engaging people really well, and communities that are really floundering. I’ve noticed, especially with online communities, that there have been a lot of online communities that have popped up, and then they’ve waned because there’s not enough engagement, not enough interest. So why am I writing this book now? When I look at communities and organizations that have engagement, there’s something almost magical about them. They’re certainly thriving from every single business metric we can talk about, but there’s something more. There’s that energy. Say they have an event or a conference, and you feel the energy the moment you step through the door. If they have an online event, the same kind of thing—you feel the energy or the warmth. You feel something. And, in today’s world of work, I feel like that’s really important. It’s important when we can get people to a place where they can bring their whole authentic selves, where they can collaborate with other people. That’s why the book now.

I think there are a lot of communities that are struggling, and there are a few communities that are doing really well. And I think it’s really time for us to sit down and talk about what makes engagement really engaging.

Amanda Kaiser

Experience Versus Value in Community EngagementJeff Cobb: [00:08:43] You make it clear very early in the book that experience is really at the core of this. And I was struck by that. I get it, and I understand and value experience, but you often hear so much about delivering value. “We need to find the value.” “We need to articulate the value.” “We need to make sure the value is appreciated.” Can you talk to me a little bit about experience versus value, and how they both play into having an engaging community?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:09:12] I arrived here after a lot of work, actually. In the last 10 years, I have conducted more than 477 in-depth, qualitative interviews with professionals from all different kinds of organizations. I’ve talked to university professors. I’ve talked to rocket scientists. I’ve talked to rock scientists, lawyers, CPAs, and all sorts of people. All in an effort to figure out what engagement truly was. And so what happened, as a result of all of these conversations, was that I found a formula for engagement. And that formula is value plus experience equals engagement. If you think about my current dry cleaner, they do a good job with my clothes. That’s the value part. I like to think about value as the base layer. So you get the value part, and the value part, again, is very transactional. If, say, a new dry cleaner opened up nearby, I’d try them. There’s no reason to be particularly loyal.

But, when we want more than just that transaction, what we want to start doing is to layer on experience. So you get your base layer of value, and then you layer on a layer of positive experiences. So value plus experiences equals engagement.

Amanda Kaiser

And these positive experiences don’t have to be elaborate. One of the questions that I’m getting a lot lately is, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so busy. It’s almost like you’re asking me to do a second job, Amanda. How do I provide all of this value, and now all of these experiences?” I don’t think it has to be. I think, certainly, if you are a big organization with lots of money, lots of time, and lots of scale, you might have to invest in experiences. But for small organizations or these one-on-one discussions, maybe not really. My favorite dry cleaner, she smiled at people. She was super chatty, those kinds of things. Your tailor remembered your name. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time.

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Stages of Engagement1. ObserveJeff Cobb: [00:12:26] I think the great thing about the book is how you articulate this experience plus value equals engagement. Great formula for everybody to remember. If you remember one thing from the podcast today, that might be the main takeaway to have. But you also laid out very nicely the stages that an organization or a community goes through in achieving engagement. I don’t think they necessarily have to be linear lockstep. You can talk about that a little bit. But these are the different perspectives or areas to look at when thinking about engagement. There are six of them. And I think we have enough time here today to talk about each of those, at least a little bit. We may go deeper on some of them than others, but I’ll name them, and then we can go through each one: observe, assess, participate, contribute, collaborate, and lead. So why don’t we just take them in that order? Observe—how do you describe or define that stage of engagement?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:13:25] This is when you’ve got people who are newcomers to you. They’re newcomers to, say, a conference, new newcomers to your Web site, newcomers to your community. And so what happens is that they’re wondering if they should engage. What they do is observe everything: e-mail, your Web site, signage, registration, how people are behaving with each other, online communities, everything, especially e-mails. E-mail is a big one. For a lot of us, our biggest channel to communicate with other people is through e-mail. They’re observing everything. So observe is the first stage. And you’re right, Jeff—you had said people don’t necessarily go lockstep through all of these six in order. Sometimes they skip over a stage or reverse the order, and that’s totally okay. But it also helps to think through these six stages because, if people are going immediately from observe to lead, you might end up with some problems, and then you can reverse engineer out of that. But the other thing that I did was write the book so that if you have a particular question, you don’t have to read 200 pages to get to your question. You can actually pick up and open that chapter and read it, and it’ll make sense.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:42] Right. And it definitely resonated in this observe area. Of course, once you decide you’re going to join, you’re going to be part of a community, even before you make that decision to join, you’re going to be watching. You’re going to be saying, “Is this for me? Are these my people? Is this going to be helpful to me and an experience that I’m going to enjoy?” A lot of times, organizations—people that are trying to facilitate a community, organize a community—can flub up at this point. And you referenced e-mail. Can you talk about what might go wrong with e-mail, or what might go wrong at this stage, and how do you avoid that?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:15:14] You’re absolutely right. The other thing about every single stage is that there are go/no-go decisions that people tend to make when they’re trying to figure out whether they want to engage further. I tried to highlight all of those, and e-mail is such a critical one. For most organizations, their biggest channel of communication is e-mail. Here’s what happens, say, in the example of a member joining. A member joins, they hit join, and then they start getting e-mails, and they might get the ubiquitous welcome e-mail, which tends to be lists and lists. And so it’ll say, “Welcome, Jeff, to the oldest, largest association for your profession or industry. And so now you have access to 37 member benefits.” And they will list all of the 37 member benefits. “By the way, we have about 22,000 articles on our Web site, but we’ve carefully curated a good 22 for you. Here are the 22 articles that you should probably read right now. And we also have a learning library that contains about 250 on-demand courses that you can grab. And, by the way, here’s a list of the top 10 most popular.” So here’s what happens. People look at that e-mail, and they say, “Oh, my gosh, not only do I not have time to look at all of this, I don’t even have time to figure out what I should be looking at.” And so with that one e-mail, we’ve just trained them that, every time they interact with us, we’re going to take a lot of time. That’s one of those places where things can get a little dicey. A welcome e-mail should be super warm, super quick, and perhaps informative but at least super warm and super quick. Maybe they’ll walk away with a teeny, little tidbit. They’re happy, and they’re ready to open the next e-mail.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:54] I like that—warm and quick for that initial e-mail. Everybody should keep that in mind. So that’s observe. And you obviously go quite a bit deeper than that in the book. But, for the sake of our conversation today, let’s move on to assess. What’s happening there?

AssessAmanda Kaiser: [00:17:09] You referenced this before. People are starting to ask themselves questions. “Do people like me engage in an organization, event, or community like this?” “Do people like me do stuff like this?” “Did I make the right decision in joining?” They take everything that they’ve observed, from your e-mails to your signage, through the registration process to what they’re seeing in the online community digests, and they start to make these judgments. If the answer is “Yes, people like me do engage in communities like this,” then maybe they’ll move on. What helps them to decide that people like me engage in a community like this? Well, one of the tips from the book is social proof. And so here’s an unconventional way, perhaps, to do some social proof. There are a lot of organizations that are doing virtual onboarding events. Maybe every week, every month, every quarter, they’re inviting all of their new attendees, their new members, onto a virtual onboarding or virtual orientation event. And one of the things you can do is have relatively new members—members who have been in your association for a year—ask them to be the chat ambassadors. And so they might be young professionals, and you have all of these new members coming in, and another relatively new member is the chat ambassador. It helps for people to see somebody a lot like them who’s already a member. So, wherever you can, try to leverage social proof. It really helps people know that there are people like them in a community like this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:47] I love that—chat ambassador. Nice phrase there. And that shows it’s not all just about standing a video camera up in front of somebody and getting them to say something nice. In fact, I think something like a chat ambassador would probably be a lot more effective in most situations. So we’ve done observe and assess. The next one is participate, which, to me, is starting to sound pretty positive. It sounds like something good is starting to happen here in terms of your overall topic of engagement—somebody engaging. We might want to go a little deeper on this one. What’s happening in this participate stage?

ParticipateAmanda Kaiser: [00:19:23] They’ve decided tentatively that this organization is for people like me, and this is where they start dipping their toe into the water, and they interact just a bit because they want to see how they’re going to be received. Maybe what they do is contribute to the chat in a Webinar, maybe they respond to a post in your online community, or maybe they comment on a social media post. And so, again, they dip their toe in the water just to see how they’re received. One of the things I like to do as a speaker and facilitator is to prime for participation because I think that there are a couple of things that happen.

I want people to get participating as quickly as they feel comfortable because, if there’s a huge lag, sometimes it makes it harder to participate later. To the extent you can and to the extent you want participation, think about all of the ways that you can prime for participation.

Amanda Kaiser

If you’d like, Jeff, I can give one example if there’s time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:27] Please do, yes.

Amanda Kaiser: [00:20:28] Okay. This is one of my favorite ideas. If I can, I’ll reel off some ideas, and I’ll tell you where I stole them from. This particular idea is about engaging your early birds. If you’re having some kind of live event, a live course, or a live Webinar, there’s always a group of your attendees that log in at least a couple of minutes early, but they might log in five, ten, even half an hour early. Some people log in super, super early. I call these folks “the early birds.” And this idea that I stole from a friend of mine—his name is Mark Collard. He has a database of icebreakers, activities, and energizers that you can use in your meetings, your courses, and your events. And so Mark has this idea of an “unofficial start.” So, when people start coming into your waiting room or, live, when people start coming into your room, start. It can be something as simple as just letting everybody into the room and having a very unofficial conversation. “How’s it going? Why are you here? What are you hoping to learn?” Or you can come up with some kind of unofficial start activity. I love the unofficial start activities where you just post a question and chat. “Hey, as you’re coming in, introduce yourself, and tell me a little bit about this topic.” And those things help prime people for participation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:49] We’ve actually got a course called “Presenting for Impact,” where we’re helping presenters become more educationally impactful. I think it’s the same phrase—I can’t remember my own writing—but priming for participation because it is so important. You have to give people the opportunities to be able to participate, make it clear that they’re there, and make it easy and welcoming for them to do that. It seems like it’s also a great time for positive reinforcement and appreciation when that happens, I would guess.

Amanda Kaiser: [00:22:16] Yes, I absolutely agree. With these kinds of things—you’ve probably found the same thing—they really set the tone. They set the tone for the rest of your time together. And so, as the leader, facilitator, and teacher, you’re setting the tone with how you’re cueing up those activities but also how you’re responding to the way people are responding to them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:44] We’ve got observe, assess, and now participation. Now we’re moving to contribute. What’s going on here?

ContributeAmanda Kaiser: [00:22:52] We’ve moved from participate (dipping your toe into the water) into contribute. It’s a little bit more meaningful. Here we’re talking about people who are going to speak for you, maybe in concurrent sessions. They’re writing articles. Maybe they’re being interviewed, or maybe they’re mentoring. They’re bringing a little bit more of themselves to the game. And, generally speaking, when we get to contribution, it’s the things that take a little bit more time. Participating, I can just do that on the fly, fairly quickly. But, if I’m contributing, it might take me half an hour or 15 minutes. It might take me 100 hours to build a concurrent session. These are things that take time. And what people need to know here is that their contribution is valued. They might also need to know how to contribute. In terms of the go/no-go decision that happens here, I find that professionals talk about two different problems. One problem is “It feels like people are trying to force me to contribute before I’m ready, or I don’t have time right now.” We try to push people to do things they don’t want to do. The other is “I’m ready to contribute. I want to write a journal article, I want to speak, and I keep raising my hand, but nobody’s taking me up on it.” So, to the extent that we can make room for both things that happen, the better off we’re going to be in having people make that decision to engage and contribute and then continue in their six-step journey.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:22] And, with something like contribution, obviously it’s going to be true in any community that some people are going to be more motivated, more inclined to contribute than others. Do you aim to try to find even very small ways for everybody to contribute, or do you just resign yourself to the fact that some people may never really contribute, but you can still have an engaged community?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:24:45] I think you can still have an engaged community. There’s this term in the association world of mailbox members. They join in. They read. They participate when they can, and they don’t do much more. Some of those people are members for 20 years, and that’s okay. And, if you push them to do more, they might resist, and that might be a deal-breaker for them. I think that, with some people, there’s going to be a sub-segment that is ready to just keep moving up that ladder. And what we don’t want to do is accidentally throw barriers up in front of them to prevent them from doing that. But I think the opposite is also true. I’ve been playing a lot with the whole idea of gratitude and thank-yous. You have somebody that spent 100 hours on a concurrent session, and often there’s no thank-you from the organization for doing that. There might be a few thank-yous from people who sat through that session but probably not from the staff, not from the board, or something like that. Well, 100 hours is a lot of hours. And so one of the nice things about public thank-yous—even if you say we have 100 speakers—along with our board members, our committee, our sponsors, and our exhibitors, we also thank the speakers that help do this. When people hear the public thank-yous, then they’ll be more likely to say, “Oh, hey, being a speaker is a good thing. They’re recognizing them, and maybe that’s something I’ll try out.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:13] Yes, definitely. I’ve personally been in that situation where you put in that contribution and don’t necessarily get much thanks for it. I think it is so important to make sure you’re recognizing those contributors, particularly the ones who are contributing at that level. Now, the next stage, one I’m particularly interested in, is collaborate. Mostly because Leading Learning is a site that’s all about learning. It’s an initiative that’s all about learning. Our business at Tagoras is all about learning. And I think, so often within communities, the most powerful, most useful learning comes out of the collaborations that happen in the community. Certainly among the people who are collaborating, who are hands-on doing whatever they’re doing, but that also tends to ripple out into the community. It’s where new ideas and innovations and new ways of doing things come from. I think we tend to think learning has to happen in courses, classes, seminars, and that sort of thing. But so much happens in these collaborative-type situations that we find ourselves in. How do you think about this collaborate stage and the role of collaboration in engagement and in community?

CollaborateAmanda Kaiser: [00:27:23] Well, we are super like-minded, I think, when it comes to collaborate. I’ll tell you how I got there. I was doing these interviews, and what I found was that there was this certain sub-segment of very engaged members that I would talk to that I started calling the “innovators.” And what’s really happening is that people get to a certain stage in their careers where they start having these very big, very thorny, very seemingly unsolvable problems or at least problems that they can’t solve themselves or solve within their organization. And so there are some people who get to that stage and say, “The problem can’t be solved.” Then there are what I call my “innovators” that think, “Well, I don’t know if the problem can be solved, but it can’t be solved by me. But I think it could be solved by a bunch of us working together. I’d like to find that bunch of us. And I don’t know if I can solve this problem, but I’d like to be part of the solution.” And that’s the collaborate stage. Again, another go/no-go decision. So, when people are part of, say, an association or a community, and they’re raising their hand, saying, “Hey, I want to collaborate; I want to get together with like-minded people and solve this problem,” a lot of times they’ll step out of the association and form a community and do it on their own.

Amanda Kaiser: [00:28:42] And that’s a shame because I think that it would be great if it happened within the walls of the association because the experiments they have, the conversations they have, and the conclusions they come to could be captured and then sent back out to the entire community. I think there’s really a lot of power there. I think you referenced this idea that collaboration doesn’t just have to be for the collaborators if there is a way for you to capture that work and then send it back out. Arianna Rehak and I—she’s the CEO of Matchbox Virtual Media—we got together during the deep, dark depths of COVID to put on the Virtual Networking Incubator. We had 150 people that played with all kinds of activities, platforms, and technology with us. And then, at the end, I wrote a research report on everything that we learned together. So that’s just an example of how we use that really great, really deep group learning, and then we extended the learning much further than the 150 of us that were doing those experiments.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:49] And is that report available online somewhere?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:29:51] It is, yes.

Access the report Amanda Kaiser wrote on hosting meaningful networking events.Jeff Cobb: [00:29:51] It is. Okay. We’ll make sure we get a link to that in the show notes. We love Arianna; she’s been on the podcast twice now[episodes 239 and 111]. So I’m sure that was a fantastic collaboration. I remember hearing about it, but I haven’t actually seen the report, so I would like to. We’re now at our final stage out of the six stages: lead. What happens here?

LeadAmanda Kaiser: [00:30:10] You might be more familiar with the terminology of volunteer. Volunteers, they’re people who might organize an event. They might create new resources. They might help manage the community or all of the governance. They’re on a committee to leading a committee. They’re on your board, leading a board. That’s the whole lead stage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:30] It seems to me that that’s an ownership stage too. You’re seeing the community members actually step up and take ownership of the community, not just the organizers. And I think, if you are somebody organizing a community, that has to be the most gratifying thing in the world to see that that starts to happen. The book has been out now for a couple of months—two to three months—is that about right? And I know—I’ve written books myself before—you finish it, it goes off to press or whatever, you put it out there in the world, and then you think, “I would love if I could have talked about this more.” Or “Now I’ve learned this since writing the book.” Or “My thinking has changed in some way.” Anything like that for you? New ideas that have come along now that you’ve put this out there and are living with it?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:31:20] Yes, I’ve got a couple of ideas for bonus chapters. And one idea that I’ve been playing with recently is the whole idea of culture. And so, when I read resources on culture, we talk about organizational culture, I think what people are talking about is staff culture.

Every community actually has a culture. Whether it’s a pop-up community that’s forming just around a one-hour event or around a couple-of-day conference or your online community, all of those things have a culture. And what I’ve noticed is that this high engagement often correlates with a very strong, positive community identity or culture. And I think the leaders have a lot to do with how that culture manifests.

Amanda Kaiser

Actually, there are two things here. If you don’t do anything to cultivate your culture, you get this potluck thing that happens, and that can be good or bad. But I do believe that, as community leaders, we can have a very positive impact on our culture. And so I’m going to go back to what Arianna and I did with the Virtual Networking Incubator. We wanted it to be a place that was very experimental.

Amanda Kaiser: [00:32:34] We wanted people to be able to, off the top of their heads, throw out half of an idea, and somebody else would ping off that half of an idea and say, “Oh, what about this?” And then somebody else would grab it and then say, “Oh, what about this?” We wanted that to be able to happen, and we wanted it to be able to happen when 80 or 90 people were in a Zoom room together. And so we said, “Hey, it’s really important for us to have a culture that’s very open, very kind, and very generous.” We tried to model that in every possible way we could. Arianna and I were writing e-mails, I was doing the facilitation, and we were just trying to—before every single gathering, I would get those words in my head, and I would just try to model it every single time. We had the loveliest culture. People would talk about the gatherings and about each other: “This is the most joyful thing that I did this week.” And so I’d love to start having much more conversations around member culture and how we can cultivate really good ones.

Personal Approach to Lifelong Learning and the Role of CommunityJeff Cobb: [00:33:37] We might have to have another discussion about that at some point. We focus a lot on learning culture because we think there needs to be a culture in which learning is valued, appreciated, and promoted. And it’s not just within the organization. We’re talking about in the community and the broader constituency that an organization is trying to serve. And that has to be modeled by the organization. It has to be modeled by the organizational leaders. It has to be modeled by—if there are volunteer leaders—the volunteer leaders. All of those feed into the culture. And it’s only when that’s there that you really get this vibrant learning atmosphere that enriches the entire field, profession, or whatever the community is serving. I think it is just so important. I’d love to wrap up by asking you about your own learning. We’re all about lifelong learning here at the Leading Learning Podcast, so I’d love to know how you approach your own development and learning, both personally and professionally. And, particularly in the context of this conversation, what role does community play for you in helping you to learn, grow, and develop over time?

Amanda Kaiser: [00:34:38] As a very naturally curious person, I find myself signing up for classes, courses, training, and books. You can see my bookshelf behind me. That is nothing compared to my bedside table, which is just packed with books. So books are really a go-to for me. I’m always listening to podcasts. I’m kind of a mess when it comes to learning. I try to learn as much as I can all the time. In terms of community, what I tend to do is gravitate toward live virtual learning events. And I might be saying virtual because we’re still coming out of COVID, and so my recent experiences are a lot around virtual learning events. What I love is when I find a really great facilitator who is particularly adept at engaging everybody and getting everybody to participate. For me, it’s super interesting because, selfishly, I love to see how they’re doing and what they’re doing, but I find myself just getting really engaged in the topic because I’m learning from the facilitator, but I also have the opportunity to learn from all of my peers, and sometimes that’s just the best kind of learning. When you’ve got not only the expert in the room but 20, 30, or 80 other experts, it’s pretty powerful. I feel like at the end of some of those events, we get much further than any one person could have ever gotten by themselves.

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:02] Yes, that’s great. Learning is really happening when it’s got that social aspect to it—people sharing their experiences and helping each other.

Wrap-up: [00:27:47] Amanda Kaiser is a keynote speaker and author of Elevating Engagement.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics* Tool Talk: The Learner Engagement Loop * Learner Engagement – What It Is and How to Foster It * 3 Conditions of Learner Engagement * Designing Engaging Learning with Tracy King and Aaron Wolowiec

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee Ingrid ChristensenGlobalization is a strategy that makes sense for many learning businesses, and going global usually involves language services.

This episode features Ingrid Christensen, president and founder of INGCO International, a full-service language solutions company, and author of The Language of Trust: Communicate to Build Meaningful Relationships in Business and Life.

Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele and Ingrid talk about what localization, globalization, translation, and interpretation are and their role in diversity, equity, and inclusion. They also discuss trust as a necessary leadership skill and ways for learning businesses to build trust through marketing and instructional materials, credentials, feedback, and more.

Listen to the ShowINGCO InternationalCelisa Steele: [00:01:43] Just tell us a little bit more about INGCO International, the work that it does, your role there—just unpack that a little bit.

Ingrid Christensen: [00:01:52] Absolutely. Language services is a big and juicy area. There are lots of things that fall into our industry. It’s a little-known fact that revenue-wise we are larger than the global music business. So, for being a bit of a hidden industry, we’re actually quite large. I have the random, fell-into-my-lap story of how I came into language services, but I guess had a knack for languages. I studied languages in college and had an unfortunate job at a sports bar that I did not love and needed something more interesting and fulfilling. And this was while I was in college. I found a job at a local interpretation company in Minneapolis, and that really was my first foray into language services. I didn’t really know much about it. And, long story short, that led me into a career as a freelance Spanish interpreter. I had to become certified as a medical and legal Spanish interpreter and worked freelance for about five or six years before deciding to launch my own company. Seventeen years ago (actually, in February, we just turned 17), I launched INGCO International. I now have a staff of just about 20 individuals globally, and we serve mostly global corporations and organizations that need to, for one reason or another, provide documentation, training, or any kind of service in another language. The main services that we offer under our umbrella fall under language services, and they are translation, interpretation, localization, and globalization. And I’ll unpack that a little bit because they can be a little bit confusing because I think a lot of people don’t have a ton of experience in this area.

Ingrid Christensen: [00:03:51] Interpretation is anything that’s spoken. An interpreter would be like an interpreter you see at the United Nations or an ASL interpreter you see at a concert or a medical interpreter that goes with a family to a medical appointment at a hospital or an interpreter that works in the court system or the education system. That’s the typical spoken interpreting solution. Then there’s a written translation, which is anything written. That could be a Web site. It could be training material, marketing material, a legal contract, really anything that’s written from one language to another. Then you move up into this concept of localization. Localization is part of a general business strategy that is known as globalization. I like to think of it as, say, you have a product, and you’re going to take your product to Europe. Europe is a big area. There are lots of different languages spoken. The act of taking your process there is your business strategy of globalization. Localization would be making sure that product looks, sounds, and feels appropriate for each of the different areas and languages spoken in Europe. So you may decide you need your content in Spanish, French, Italian, German, or whatever other languages you would need it in. Localization is pinpointing it for a specific culture, location, or audience, and it’s part of that bigger globalization umbrella.

The Role of Interpretation, Translation, and Localization in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)Celisa Steele: [00:05:24] Thank you for walking us through those terms. I do think it’s very helpful and very practical. Interpretation, it’s the spoken language; translation, it’s anything written; then you have globalization as a bigger strategy; and localization is how you make things appropriate in particular regions and areas. I’ve been thinking that, over the last several years, it seems that we’ve heard a lot more about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. In preparing to talk to you, it occurred to me that it feels like interpretation, translation, and localization would have a place in these DEIA initiatives. I’m curious to (a) get your thoughts on that and whether you agree with that. And then (b), knowing that you’ve had these 17 years working in the interpretation and language services area, what changes have you seen during that time?

Ingrid Christensen: [00:06:25] Those are two big questions. Yes, and a lot. To get to your first question, I do think that DEI, accessibility, belonging, and all of these kinds of buzzwords have always been naturally embedded in the services that we provide. Our core value, our core purpose have always been to provide equitable access to communication. Whether that communication be written or spoken, that’s really the main purpose and the main reason why we survive, why we thrive, and why we exist. I do think it’s really important to note that accessibility, access, and belonging are embedded in the nature that language services is. Because, in order to really make somebody feel like they belong, give them a seat at the table, and make sure that they have equal access, they have to communicate. I can’t think of a way to provide somebody access to a program, a solution, a product, or service if they can’t understand what it says or what they’re being told. I think that any language services, at the root of what we do is all about accessibility, belonging, and making sure that…. This is DEI in action, is what I like to say. These are the tangible things that an organization can do to walk the walk and talk the talk when they’re really invested in DEI.

Ingrid Christensen: [00:08:02] It can be a big effort, and it could be a small effort. It just depends on the particular organization and what their overarching goals are. I do think that you hit the nail on the head there that everything we do is embedded in accessibility. When I think about this larger DEIA umbrella, I like to think of it as a kind thing to do. It’s a human thing to do, to provide access. It’s in many ways and many times a legal requirement to provide access to information. And there are some statistics that prove that up to 80 percent of consumers will not even consider buying your product or service if it isn’t marketed and/or sold to them in their native language when there are so many options out there.

As an organization, if you’re really looking at expanding and having globalization as part of your business strategy, you need to speak the language of your customers. That’s also marketing. We need to talk to people like they want to be spoken to, in a way that they can hear us, in a way that they can understand us. I think that’s really the nature of what translation and interpreting is.

Ingrid Christensen

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Major Shifts and Changes in Interpretation and Language ServicesCelisa Steele: [00:10:37] The second part of my two-pronged, very meaty question was aroundwhat have you seen change in your years working in this field? I would be curious to know are you seeing more demand or a different kind of demand? Or what would you characterize as the major shifts or changes?

Ingrid Christensen: [00:10:55] I would say that for a lot of organizations, when before it was a nice-to-have, now it’s a must-have. Organizations that want to and need to compete on a global scale must, by nature, have a comprehensive language access program built in from day one. When you think about how we, as consumers, have access to any product, any service at our fingertips, and, if you remember that stat I just dropped, 80 percent of consumers are not going to buy something in a language they don’t understand.

If globalization is in your wheelhouse, and that’s a strategy, that’s a tactic for you to reach your profitability and your revenue goals, regardless if you are a for-profit or nonprofit organization, you have to think about speaking the language of your consumers, of your customers.

Ingrid Christensen

Now, yes, have I seen the industry change? For sure. When I started, we barely had e-mail, and we barely had the Internet. I used to work out of stacks of dictionaries all around me, and our clients would courier us a document to translate. We’d type it out, print it out, and courier it back. Obviously, we don’t have to do that anymore.

Ingrid Christensen: [00:12:16] That’s one way that technology has enabled us to do our work faster, with more clarity and more consistency. I think we, at INGCO International, as an organization, embrace technology because I think technology is our friend. It only allows us to do our job better, faster, and smarter. We’ve had access to different machine translation solutions along the way, different machine translation protocols, translation protocols, and different programs that we’ve had access to. And our technology enablement has just exploded over the past 10 years. The affordability has made it much more accessible to all organizations and organizations of all sizes. I would say that, like every industry, technology has shifted and changed 100 percent the way that we do our work. I could also talk about how languages ebb and flow depending on migration, how migration comes and goes, how refugees come and go. Certainly, that has affected the different language volumes that we see access to, for example. That’s another big way that our industry has changed. I could go on and on in nuance, but there are lots of changes. And I don’t think they’re going to stop. They’re going to keep coming.

Common Misconceptions About Language ServicesCelisa Steele: [00:13:39] Given your depth and breadth of experience with language services, I’m curious to know are there typical missteps or misconceptions that organizations have around language services? Any insight there to share with us?

Ingrid Christensen: [00:13:54] I think so. I think thinking that it’s something that’s a one-and-done solution; it’s not. I think that our content is constantly changing. I know my content, even on our Web site, is constantly changing, which would require a constant update in your localization and translation process. The other thing I think that especially global organizations need to remember and/or seize the opportunity is the value in globalization and how localization really fits into the larger business strategy and understand that it is a very powerful revenue driver if done correctly and understanding that it requires constant nourishment and constant focus and attention so that you get it right. I would say that thinking that it’s a quick fix—no, it’s not, just like anything. And thinking that it’s a one-and-done activity. I think that it requires constant attention, just like any other business strategy.

The Language of Trust: Communicate to Build Meaningful Relationships in Business and LifeCelisa Steele: [00:15:06] I hear you using the word strategy repeatedly, and thinking about language services as a strategic part of what your learning business is doing makes a lot of sense. And then also, I think, hearing you speak to the fact that, usually, this fits with an organization’s mission. If you’re really out there to serve learners, making sure to speak their language, literally, is really important. I know that you’ve recently published a book called The Language of Trust. I’d love to pivot a little bit and talk about that book. Let’s start by talking about what’s the relationship between these language services and interpretation, which we’ve just been talking about, and trust?

Ingrid Christensen: [00:15:51] Thank you for that. The Language of Trust has been a lifelong seed that was planted in the back of my head that finally came to fruition. It’s been a big project, a fun project. When I think about anecdotally and the research that I completed when writing this book, I think about the number-one way to cultivate and nourish trust is through communication. I think especially when you’re communicating with somebody in a different language, trust-based communication is even more vital. One, you have to make sure that you’re actually understood. You can’t even begin to build a trusting relationship with somebody if you can’t be on the same level of understanding. And, two, I think that translation and interpreting provide a base level of comfort, knowing that you’re providing accurate and consistent language and vocabulary, and it shows that the organization in general is attempting to even gain the trust of the people that they’re trying to work with. I think that for me, at least, speaking to somebody in a language that they understand with words that they can understand is the most human form of trust-based communication that I can find. And it’s really, really vital, I think, for organizations, especially learning organizations, that when they’re trying to impart some knowledge from one person to another, making sure that they’re doing so in a way that is understandable, accurate, and consistent is vital to building that trust-based relationship.

Ways for Leaders to Establish and Maintain TrustCelisa Steele: [00:17:46] If we want to cultivate trust as a leader in an organization, what does that look like? What are some concrete ways that we can establish and maintain trust?

Ingrid Christensen: [00:17:57] I think that, first and foremost, recognizing the importance of trust, recognizing that it’s something to be valued and something to focus on.

I think that this is going to sound pretty similar to what a lot of other people say about a lot of things in life, but for trust creation to flourish and nourish, we have to stop, to take time, to think and reflect. We have to take time to learn. We have to take time to listen and communicate effectively. We have to lead with listening. We have to commit to open, honest, and vulnerable communication, and we have to meet people where they are. A lot of this isn’t rocket science.

Ingrid Christensen

It’s just slowing down, taking the time to, number one, reflect, and then really committing to carving out time to cultivate and nourish trust with the people that matter most to you. Whether you’re working on building trusting relationships with your coworkers, with your family, with friends, with clients, with customers—all of these different pockets of people that touch this web of life that we lead, all of those individuals, if they’re important to us, they’re deserving of our trust. We ought to, I believe, spend time in quality trust nourishment and creation. Finally, do what you say you’re going to do. There is nothing that creates trust as much as being consistent and accountable. And when you say you’re going to do something, actually do it. Whether you’re providing a product or service or you’re giving feedback to your employees or team members, that act of accountability really shines because you’re walking the walk and talking the talk. You’re doing both things. And that is, for me, based on the individuals that I research, the number-one way to create trust.

Cultivating Trust in Learning ExperiencesCelisa Steele: [00:20:07] That makes a lot of sense (a) that it takes time, energy, and effort to cultivate the trust, and then (b) it does come down to, in many ways, just the relationship with individuals. I’m thinking we have learning business leaders who have the team that they’re working with and the people that they’re managing, even customers, as you said. And so there are these opportunities for one-on-one exchanges or even small-group exchanges, where you can create trust and continue trust. But I’m also thinking of learning businesses having a lot of less direct opportunities to potentially create trust. I’m thinking about learning experiences where there might be course materials that go along with an in-person seminar or materials that accompany a conference session or just the content that goes into an online e-learning course. When you think about more of those products and more of an indirect relationship or channel for creating trust, do you have thoughts on how that might work and what trust might look like in those contexts?

Ingrid Christensen: [00:21:14] I do. I’ve thought a lot about trust, especially in relation to a very digital world that most of us are used to. We’re much less interactive in person than we’ve ever been before. And, certainly, I love e-learning, and I love the different learning platforms that are out there because it’s easy, and it’s quick, and you don’t have to drive across town or fly across the country to take courses. But there is that added challenge of how do you truly, authentically engage with your audience? How do you garnish and cultivate trust with them? And I understand that kind of dilemma, the push and pull. Some of my tips and tricks for this are, whenever possible, look for opportunities to engage before, during, and after. I know that’s hard. But, when you’re creating content, can you build in engagement even before a course starts? Maybe there are engagement opportunities during. Maybe there are moments to pause. Maybe there are moments to reflect. Maybe there are moments to, within the platform, engage with other students or other participants in the program. And, after, how can you build in touchpoints after the program to keep that engagement and keep that communication and conversation going? Another way that I have found, based on my research, that’s great for building trust and nourishing trust is something as simple as credentialing—taking the time to become credentialed and certified and showing your credentialing as a proof point that you can be a trusted advisor or a trusted educator. I think there’s something to be said about licensing and credentialing that is really important for students to be able to “trust the master.”

Ingrid Christensen: [00:23:02] I think a third way is clear and concise documented processes. Nobody likes to document processes any more than I do. It’s not my favorite activity. But there’s something really important when you show somebody what they’re going to learn, you teach them, and then you remind them of what they learned. It’s almost like the human brain needs to see what they’re going to do. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. It’s the series of repetitions that I think is really important. And, of course, as educators, I’m sure your listeners are a million times stronger and more educated than I am as far as learning comprehension. But I think it comes back to that basic nature of tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. So, as much as possible, building in those opportunities for engagement, credentialing, and really outlining the process. As much as possible, practice the different opportunities to lean into different senses. Even though we’re audio and video, what else could we add into a learning platform to engage some of the other senses?

We can show vulnerability through our words, our actions, and our body language. But how else can we build in those trust points? And then, certainly, ask for feedback. I don’t know of a better way to help push that trust development along the line except for feedback. I think that’s something that’s really important.

Ingrid Christensen

Lifelong Learning HabitsCelisa Steele: [00:24:38] Thank you for that. This is the Leading Learning Podcast, so we always like to make sure, when we have a guest on, to ask about their own practices, habits, or sources for their own continued lifelong learning. Ingrid, tell us a little bit about how you approach your own lifelong learning.

Ingrid Christensen: [00:24:59] Thank you. One of my personal values is that every day I strive to be a better version of myself. And so I do carve out purposeful time daily to strengthen my own education and knowledge, whether that’s reading, whether that’s reflection, whether it’s listening to podcasts, whether it’s writing. I spend a lot of time writing. There’s something about the act of writing that I think reinforces knowledge within me. I also think that engaging in new and fun things to work the brain in a different way for me has been a bit of a shift. I think, as I move into this next stage of my life, what else can I learn in different ways to keep the mind fresh and active? I live in Minnesota. It’s a terrible winter. We have zero sunlight, it’s freezing, and we’re buried under like a million feet of snow. But this winter I decided that I was going to get off the couch at least one day a week. I took an improv class, and it was something that was super fun, and I laughed. It got me out of the house, got me thinking, and got my brain working in a different way. I’m certainly not going to become a comedian or a professional improv artist, but it was fun, and it was different. I constantly ask myself, “How can I build these opportunities into my life, even if it’s in just short snippets of leaning into learning and becoming a better version of myself?” I think especially when there are different seasons of life and recognizing that we need to honor each of those different seasons and really what works for us at every different point in time.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:46] Given your background and your professional life, I’m curious—do you do some of your reading and learning in Spanish or some other language, or do you tend to do it mostly in English?

Ingrid Christensen: [00:26:59] I do. This is going to sound a little cheesy, but during the pandemic, I jumped on the Peloton, whatever, trend, just like everyone else because I couldn’t go to the gym, like other people. And I try to take classes in Spanish just because it’s fun and because it works my brain in a different way. I try to listen to music in Spanish. I try to watch some of my Netflix bingeing in Spanish-spoken TV shows and programs because I think it’s really important for my brain to keep the language up. So, yes, it’s fun and makes me think a little bit more.

Wrap-up: [00:27:47] Ingrid Christensen is president of INGCO International and author of The Language of Trust.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics* Spanning Leadership and Learning with Dr. Wanda Wallace * Reaching Outside Your Comfort Zone with Dr. Andy Molinsky * The Art and Science of Effective Feedback

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Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb,
Leading Learning Podcast co-hostsCompetition is a significant issue for most learning businesses, and, because the lifelong learning landscape is constantly evolving, the competitive landscape is also constantly shifting, making it critical for every learning business to periodically revisit its strategy to remain relevant and competitive.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb highlight five forces driving competition for learning businesses using the framework first described by Michael Porter in his classic 1979 Harvard Business Review article.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesCelisa Steele: [00:00:37] Competition is a really significant issue for most learning businesses, and the competitive landscape for lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development is evolving and changing. And so we think that talking about competition warrants a little airtime on the podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:56] Definitely. We’ve talked about competition before on the podcast, but the make-up of the lifelong learning landscape and the drivers of lifelong learning are, as you said, evolving, which means the competitive landscape is also evolving. That changing nature, plus the importance of competition in determining whether a learning business survives and, hopefully, thrives, means this is a topic that warrants some discussion and thought on an ongoing basis.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:25] There are many ways to think about competition, and in the past we’ve drawn on blue ocean strategy. If we boil it down, what it’s really trying to do is make the competition irrelevant. The idea is that you’re going to do things differently enough that you essentially have no competitors. So rather than being part of a bloody red ocean where there’s lots of competition, you’re going to place yourself in a wide-open blue ocean.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:07] And we do love and frequently use some of those blue ocean tools, the strategy canvas in particular, for really helping to identify the competitive factors in your market and how to stand out on those competitive factors and establish new and different competitive factors that others just aren’t focused on. We think that’s very powerful, and you’ll see some discussion of that in what we link to, links to how to access those kinds of tools. But, for today’s conversation, we’re going to go to a classic—Blue Ocean Strategy is really a classic at this point. Kim and Mauborgne published their original book in 2004, so it’s almost two decades old.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:47] And they have a new book coming out later in 2023. I saw an announcement just last week, and that book is going to be called Beyond Disruption. I look forward to reading that. Maybe that’s the topic of a future podcast episode.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:01] Definitely. I will probably be on the presale list for that. You can call me a fanboy for Kim and Mauborgne’s work. Today, we’re going to center our conversation on a more classic classic, or at least an older one, and this is going to be around Michael Porter’s Five Forces. Porter first described those forces in a 1979 Harvard Business Review article that really became the foundation of his competitive strategy, which was just one of the monumental works on strategy out there in the business world.

Michael Porter’s Five Forces Framework, Harvard Business SchoolAn Overview of Porter’s Five ForcesCelisa Steele: [00:03:35] As the name of the model suggests, there are five forces driving competition that Michael Porter looks at. I’ll just give you an overview of those five forces, and then we’ll talk about each of those a little bit more: (1) threat of new entrants, (2) bargaining power of suppliers, (3) bargaining power of buyers (4) threat of substitute products and services, and (5) rivalry among existing competitors.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:10] Let’s look at that first one, the threat of new entrants. This is other learning businesses entering your market and going after your customers, which certainly we’ve seen plenty of over the past several years. I think it’s good exercise as a thought experiment to step back and say, “If I wanted to, could I go out and start my own education business today?” And this is independent of whatever your current organization or whatever your current learning business is. How would you go about doing that? If you were to go out on your own and start a learning business today, what exactly would you do? Because someone somewhere is thinking about that right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:55] As you said, Jeff, this is a good, interesting thought experiment. We encourage you to pause the podcast now, take a moment to reflect, and really think about this. If you wanted to start a learning business that would essentially be a competitor to what you’re already doing now, how would you go about doing that? And our guess is that once you’ve given it a little bit of thought, you’ll realize it’s actually not all that hard to enter your market. You buy an Articulate license, you hire a freelancer on Fiverr or some other platform, and you get a Zoom license, maybe a low-cost or free learning platform, and it’s pretty easy to stand up a product or an offering—even a couple products or offerings—in a limited time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:42] It’s just easier than ever for new entrants to get into the education business, largely because of technology changes—higher accessibility, ease of use, and lower pricing. So that threat of new entrants is pretty high, and it’s quite real. I think most organizations have been feeling that in one way or another.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:03] It can be easy to be dismissive and be like, “Sure, it’s one thing to put together a course in Articulate, but is it going to actually get any traction? Who’s going to come to it?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:11] “Is it going to be any good?”

Celisa Steele: [00:06:12] “Is it going to be any good?” It’s the whole “If we build it, will they come?” type discussion. And so it’s very easy to ascribe all those attributes to these new entrants and just think they’re not going to have the quality. They’re not going to have the reputation. They’re not going to have the expertise that we have. It’s pretty easy to just ignore them, but we encourage you not to write off the new entrants.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:34] You need to be very clear about your sources of competitive advantage and what you’re going to need to do to hang on to them—and, potentially, add to them. I’ll reference, again, that strategy canvas that you see in work like Blue Ocean Strategy. What factors are you competing on? And can you really compete on them well if you compare yourself to others in the marketplace? Are there competitive factors that you can discover and start putting into place that are going to stand you out more? Even if you never get to a blue ocean, you still have to differentiate. That was at the core of Michael Porter’s work as well.

One key source of protection that a learning business has against the threat of new entrants is brand, and it’s loyalty. It’s the loyalty that your brand either already inspires in learners or that it might inspire in prospective learners.

Celisa Steele

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:26] I think this is so important and so often undervalued by learning businesses these days, particularly ones that may operate within the context of a larger organization like an association or a university. They’re just taking the sheen of that brand, and they may not have a strong brand around the learning business itself. That’s so important. But it’s also important to have the sense of affiliation, belonging that your prospective customers have for whatever organization you’re associated with. If you are an association, for example, how strongly do members feel affiliated with you, as an association?

Celisa Steele: [00:08:05] There was a report that ASAE published back in 2010 calle The Decision to Learn, and the authors made the point that a sense of affiliation is a really important factor for learners when they’re evaluating offerings from associations versus those from other providers. And so, if the learner’s association is offering a product, if they have that sense of affiliation with that association, they’re going to tend to go with that offering versus some other competitor where they don’t necessarily have that same level of affiliation with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:40] Of course, this applies beyond associations. It just makes a lot of sense if you really identify with an organization, if you feel that sense of affiliation, particularly if you feel a deep sense of loyalty, you’re much more likely to do something with that organization and with that learning business. You can see this in the academic market, for example. Universities and colleges are often able to capitalize on their brands, whether it’s a regional brand, a national brand, or an international brand. And, of course, those organizations have alumni networks. They essentially have a membership, so that the affiliation as a member kind of plays in there as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:17] And, even beyond associations, even beyond the academic market, that sense of affiliation, that sense of belonging can still work to the advantage of other types of learning businesses. For us, that’s a big part of the power of community. We recently had an episode where we talked about how and why to build a learning community. And part of it is because that does make you much more competitive because that sense of affiliation and that sense of belonging that people have with you through that community means it’s much harder to turn somewhere else to get a learning product or service.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:53] Fundamentally, so much of this comes down to relationships. It’s the sense of affiliation or loyalty that the prospective learners may have with you, but it’s also your relationships with your subject matter experts. We’re going to get to that in a minute. It’s your relationships with the employers in your marketplace. As an action item here, when you’re thinking about the threat of new entrants, first of all, you need to be aware of whether they’re there or not or what opportunities there might be for them to come in, and make sure you’re tuning in to that. But also to back up and think about “What are our competitive factors? What are we competing on? Are those the best things to be competing on? Are there other factors that we can bring into play?” And then let’s check our relationships, whether you’re doing a Net Promoter Score or some other way of going out and finding out “Do we have the relationship with our prospective learners? Do we have strong relationships with our subject matter experts? Do we have strong relationships with the employers in our marketplace?”

Sponsor: Thinkific[00:11:01] We’re grateful to Thinkific for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast. As a Leading Learning listener, you know the importance we place on reach, revenue, and impact for learning businesses.

Bargaining Power of SuppliersCelisa Steele: [00:12:17] So let’s move from the threat of new entrants—the first of the five forces we’re going to talk about—to the next, which is bargaining power of suppliers. To even think about this, you, of course, have to first identify who are the suppliers that you deal with.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:35] And you’re dealing in intellectual property, basically, so it may be strange to think about the fact that you have suppliers, but most learning businesses are reliant upon subject matter experts as suppliers of the knowledge, the skills, and the expertise that they then need to be able to share with their audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:54] As we were just talking about with that threat of new entrants, technology has made it very easy for a subject matter expert to offer a Webinar on her own or connect directly with learners through LinkedIn or other social media, and to stop that SME from entering into competition with you and becoming that new entrant that you have to worry about—that first of the five forces that we talked about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:21] Or going to work for one of those new entrants. There are a lot more opportunities for those subject matter experts now, as suppliers, in this whole learning and education industry that we work in. So that does increase their bargaining power. When you go to them and say, “We want you to create a learning experience for us,” they’re going to be saying, “Okay, is this where I should do this learning experience, or should I do this myself and put it out in the marketplace?” Or “What about this great new commercial company over here that’s actually going to pay me a lot more money to do this and give me, potentially, more prestige or whatever?” So those types of things are now going through a subject matter expert’s mind, that 10, 20 years ago just weren’t big factors.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:02] This means that you need to put yourself in your SME’s shoes. You really need to think through those kinds of choices that they’re being faced with. We think this is a pretty strong argument for investing in your subject matter experts. So make sure that you’re offering them something valuable. What can you provide them that they might not be able to do on their own or that they might not be able to do with that other learning provider? It could be something like getting them access to audiences that they’d have difficulty tapping into otherwise. It could be helping them be better at presenting their expertise. You have the subject matter experts. They know their stuff, whatever their domain or their field is, but often they don’t necessarily know how best to convey that expertise to learners and help others actually pick up that skill and knowledge that they already have.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:53] Particularly if you’re a trade or professional association or somebody who’s bringing in people who are young, starting in their career as an expert, investing in them early, helping them to become really good at it, that helps breed that loyalty that we were talking about earlier, that sense of affiliation. A lot of times, it makes sense to shine a spotlight on your subject matter experts. That’s particularly true if you happen to be an organization that has access to some of the best in whatever field or industry you’re in. And certainly that can be true if you’re an academic institution or if you’re a leading association in your market. Some commercial providers have the cachet—you think of somebody like Google now, who’s in the lifelong learning business at this point, offering credentials and such. They can attract top-notch subject matter experts. Shining a light on those people helps to stand you out competitively. And that threat of new entrants area that we just talked about, it also builds the relationship with that subject matter expert.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:56] And you might say, “Hey, isn’t that a little bit dangerous to put too much emphasis on this subject matter expert that I might lose, that might decide to go out on her own or decide to work for another learning provider?” But I think our take on it is they already could do that. This is about showing, again, that you have a good relationship. It goes back to the relationships that you were emphasizing earlier, Jeff. And so you want to help spotlight them and their expertise, and then that’s hopefully going to make them loyal to you and want them to work and present their content through your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:29] I might get a little bit on a soapbox now. A pet peeve of mine is that, often when dealing with organizations as a subject matter expert, when they’re getting you to do a Webinar or present at their conference or something like that, the language and tone that organizations often use in dealing with subject matter experts is, frankly, condescending at times. It’s not a level of professional peers working together—and those are just some organizations. I don’t want to paint too broadly with that brush. But it’s out there. Definitely make sure that you’re not doing that when working with your subject matter experts.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:00] In terms of what you can do in this area, if you agree with us and you want to help invest in your subject matter experts or if you want to help make them better at presenting their expertise, we can recommend“Presenting for Impact.”This is a free online course that we have made available. It’s something that you can vet, take a look at yourself, and then think about how you might use it with your subject matter experts to help show them how to do their work better and that you’re valuing the work that they are doing for you and that you’re willing to invest some time and resources in helping them do that even better. And, again, another soapbox to get up on.

We feel like investing in subject matter experts makes just so much sense because it’s one of the ways that a learning business can really help make sure that the learning it’s offering, those conference sessions, those Webinars, whatever it might be, that those are actually impactful, meaningful learning experiences. And that helps, of course, to increase the impact that your learning business has.

Celisa Steele

Bargaining Power of BuyersJeff Cobb: [00:18:08] We’ve talked about the threat of new entrants and the bargaining power of suppliers. Let’s turn now to the third in our list, bargaining power of buyers. And, by buyers, we’re talking about anybody who has that economic decision-making authority around enrolling in and participating in, registering for your learning experiences. And that may be your learners, but, in many cases, it’s also or only going to be their employers.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:39] Think about who’s actually providing the dollars that it costs to invest in your learning experience. And also the time. Again, this is where sometimes, even if the learners are paying out of their own pocket, the employers are giving them time away from work to pursue that. So really thinking about who are these people who are buying and what is it that they value. Of course, these buyers have more options than ever before, and that gives them a lot of power to drive a hard bargain in terms of what it is they expect from you and what it is they want from you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:14] I think it’s more important than ever to make sure that you really do understand your buyers. Who’s making that decision, and what are their characteristics? What matters to them? What do they actually value? Because they do have all of those options. Spend the time to ideally segment your market. Determine which parts of your audience are really the most important to what you’re trying to achieve as a learning business. Who are your best buyers? And that may be homing in on specific industries or specific subsets of whatever industry you’re serving, on specific sets of employers. But you really want to make sure that you’re getting at those buyers that are going to produce the best results for your learning business and whom you can produce the best results for, and focus on connecting with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:04] A key here is to make sure that you understand what employers in your field or industry need so that whatever education and learning offerings you put out there really do translate to someone being able to gain or maintain employment, to do a good and important job, and that they have the skills and knowledge that they need. So make sure that you’re including employers and other industry representatives when you’re thinking about, “Okay, what is it that we offer?” And that can mean in terms of actual content. It can also then come down to the level of credentials. What is it that you’re going to provide a credential for? What do those credentials need to look like? We’ve talked recently about this idea of workable credentials.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:53] I think what this comes down to is that we’re talking about the bargaining power of buyers. You want to get yourself in a position where they’re not even inclined to bargain, the value that you are offering is so clear, so it’s kind of a no-brainer. Yes, we’re going to go with this as an employer, or I’m going to go with this as an individual learner. So, if those credentials are actually meaningful, they have some recognized value to them, they truly demonstrate that you’ve acquired the skills or knowledge that you need, then that’s going to help reduce any desire for bargaining. It’s going to make you the clearer choice. Doing things like creating pathways, clarifying what’s needed, and making the discovery of appropriate learning experiences along a career trajectory or an onboarding for a job or whatever it is. But really defining the way—showing learners the way, showing employers the way—making it easy and valuable. And, if you home in on that, then, yes, they’ve got more choices than ever before, but the more you become the clearer choice, the less bargaining there is.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:53] And we’re talking about the evolving competitive landscape. We’re talking about how there’s so much more competition today than ever before, and, therefore, buyers have more choices. But that does create a lot of noise. And so this point that you’re just raising, Jeff—how can you stand out, how can you become that signal that emerges from the noise—if you can be that clear path, if you can show them exactly what they need, why it’s valuable, and why they should do it with you, then that really sets you up to succeed as a learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:23] So, actions to take in this area. First of all, be clear on who your buyers really are. Who’s making that economic decision? Who has major influence in it? What matters to those people, and what’s driving those decisions? And then figure out how you can make yourself the clearest, easiest choice, the no-brainer that’s going to make it unnecessary to bargain. It sounds easy, but it’s hard work to do that. Stepping back and starting that process of thinking about buyers and thinking about that path of purchase from a buyer knowing about you to them actually being a customer, how are you paving that path to make it as easy as possible?

Threat of Substitute Products and ServicesCelisa Steele: [00:23:12] The fourth of the five forces that we want to talk about is the threat of substitute products or services. This is basically how easy is it for someone else to create and offer the same kind of product or service that you offer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:28] We saw a lot of this going on during COVID. COVID added a bunch of new competitors for most learning businesses because too many learning businesses hadn’t been online before, and suddenly everything’s online, and online, of course, isn’t limited by geography. And self-paced, on-demand isn’t even limited by time zone. So the opportunity opens up for those substitute products and services that new entrants can offer but also your existing competition can offer in your marketplace.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:01] And, when thinking about substitute products and services, don’t just think about content and topics, but also think about formats and other options that you’re giving learners. This might be where things like alternative credentials come in. Rather than a longer certification, perhaps breaking something down into stackable credentials because that could help stand you out and look different from another product or service. This might also be a place where microlearning could come into play. Again the idea of a larger certification—if you have a larger learning program, by breaking it down into microlearning, that’s a way where you might have a little bit less of a threat of substitute products and services if the format or the options that you’re giving learners are a little bit different than what others are doing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:51] I think the key here is you just don’t want it to be easy for anybody to substitute for whatever it is you’re offering.

There are always going to be alternatives. People can always go down some other path. But, if they really want the value that you’re offering, they can only get it from you. That’s what you’re aiming for.

Jeff Cobb

And so looking at things like giving flexibility and format, looking at things like building those intangible, human-centered elements into your learning experiences, like the community around it or your ability to run cohort-based learning that nobody else can match, you’re going to want to be looking for those kinds of opportunities that are much harder for somebody to offer a true substitute for.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:41] I think that informal learning can be a bigger threat than some learning businesses realize. You tend to look at who else is offering a course in this subject or who else is offering a conference or a seminar. But we all know that people turn to YouTube, or they’ll ask a question of their peers on LinkedIn, and those are ways that people can readily get to the content they need. They can get it quickly. They can get it in a targeted manner. And so don’t forget to think about those as potential substitutes to what you’re offering. Even if what you’re offering are formal courses, there may be these informal offerings that are also a threat to your market.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:24] A lot of what we’ve been talking about before is looking at who else is in your business and who you’re working with in your business in terms of your customers and suppliers. This is really about the products themselves. In terms of an action here, stepping back and saying, “Okay, let’s look at our products and the extent to which they really do deliver some sort of experience that, if it’s not completely unique, it’s as distinctive and hard to replicate as possible. Can we leverage some of those informal elements? Can we leverage community? Can we do things with our content to make it available in different ways?” But, in general, really assessing your portfolio and saying, “Okay, what has the threat of substitution in our portfolio, and how do we fix that?”

Rivalry Among Existing CompetitorsCelisa Steele: [00:27:13] So the last of the five forces that we want to discuss is rivalry among existing competitors. And we’ll say right upfront that in some markets—and I’m thinking of the markets for continuing professional education, continuing medical education, and continuing legal education, for example—those markets are incredibly competitive, and the result is usually a really strong downward price pressure.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:43] You have to be aware of whoever your historical competitors have been before those new entrants showed up. How are they adapting? How are they changing? How are they shifting? Again, how can you position yourself differently from them? And it goes back to everything we’ve already been talking about: your relationship with your customers, your relationship with your suppliers, the nature of your products, and how you are or are not reacting to those new entrants into the marketplace. All of those factor in here. If you’re in a marketplace where you’ve traditionally had organization X and organization Y competing with you, how are they responding to all of those things, and how are you responding differently in a way that’s really going to continue to stand you out? Because everybody’s feeling the competition now. New entrants coming in see an opportunity, so they feel like they can compete in the market space. Your existing competitors are seeing those new entrants and the changing dynamics. They are going to be responding, or they’re probably going to be out of business at some point if they’re not. So to the extent that they are responding, you need to be tuned in to that.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:51] And I think this is a place, again, to make sure that you have as wide-eyed a view as possible of who your current competitors really are. Learning businesses are comprised of different types of organizations. We have associations, we have continuing education units housed within academic institutions, and we have training companies. So making sure that you’re broadly looking across all these organizations that are serving this third sector of education, that are helping adults after they’ve completed their formal education to continue to learn. And looking across that broad range of organizations and making sure that you are aware of everyone that you’re competing with and that your learners are considering as options instead of you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:40] We’ve seen again and again that organizations often aren’t aware of the new entrants or who’s actually getting traction as a new entrant. But, when you look at it, they’re often not fully aware of who their existing competitors are as well. You have to spend the time to do a good competitive landscape survey and figure out who really matters in your market.

Analyzing Your CompetitionCelisa Steele: [00:30:00] So that’s been a quick tour of the five forces that Michael Porter brought to our attention way back in 1979. The takeaway, though, whether you use Michael Porter’s five forces or something else, is that you really need to understand the competitive landscape in which your learning business operates. And, as with so much in the world of learning, this is not a one-and-done. You and your team need to periodically reassess, re-evaluate your competitors, and update your understanding of who and what you’re competing on and on what factors you’re competing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:38] And Porter’s five forces obviously can be used to assess your market and potential markets that you might go after with your learning business. But you need to ideally do this on an ongoing basis to develop a cadence, a rhythm for this, for going back out and looking at who’s competing and what the opportunities are. We look at tracking and assessing competition regularly as one part of staying in tune with your market. We’ve talked about this many times before. It’s an ongoing process. We’ve actually defined a framework, using the Market Insight Matrix, to give you a structure for doing this on an ongoing basis. The competitive part would only be one aspect of that. But you want your understanding, your analysis, and your response to your competition to be part of that ongoing marketing, market knowledge that also looks at your products and your customers and just keeps you in tune with your market on an ongoing basis—not just the once every three years “Let’s go do a competitive analysis,” once every five years “Let’s go do a member survey” sort of thing. That’s just not going to get you where you need to go in today’s market for lifelong learning.

Competition is a perennial concern for any business, and learning businesses need to take the time and energy to evaluate and then re-evaluate periodically the competitive landscape in which they operate so that they can survive and thrive.

Jeff Cobb

Wrap-up: [00:30:00]

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Episodes on Related Topics* The 5th C of the Learning Business Landscape * Blue Ocean Strategy for Your Learning Business * Tool Talk: The Market Insight Matrix * How and Why to Make a Learning Community

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Leading Learning Podcast interviewee David CapranosProviding practical and valuable education and credentials is critical to the role learning businesses can play in creating and maintaining a skilled workforce. In this episode, we dig into the causes and solutions to the skills gap in a conversation with David Capranos, director of market strategy and research at Wiley University Services.

Leading Learning co-host Jeff Cobb and David talk about the report David co-authored titled “Closing the Skills Gap: Employer Perspectives on Educating the Post-Pandemic Workforce,” and they get into related topics such as the growing relevance and appeal of alternative credentials to both learners and employers, the rising demand for softer skills, the role of learning in employee retention, empathy, partnerships to support career-connected education, and educational tourism.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

“Closing the Skills Gap: Employer Perspectives on Educating the Post-Pandemic Workforce” ReportJeff Cobb: [00:01:34] The main focus of our discussion today is a report recently released that you coauthored with Andrew Magda, and that’s titled “Closing the Skills Gap: Employer Perspectives on Educating the Post-Pandemic Workforce.” Could you give us a little bit of background on that report—how it came about and why you were seeing the particular need to do research on the skills gap right now?

David Capranos: [00:01:59] We see ourselves in this space in between employers, educators, and those that need to be educated—the learners out there. And one thing that we were seeing as a theme from a lot of our employers is just this acknowledgement of a gap in the skills that they would like to have in their organizations versus the ones that they either currently have or see in the open market. And so a few years ago we did our first survey, back in 2019, pre-pandemic days, and then, of course, through seeing a lot of the shifts and changes just in the global marketplace and the workforce out there, we decided it was important to do another one towards the end of the pandemic to just see what’s happening in the market today.

Recognizing a Skills Gap ExistsJeff Cobb: [00:02:37] And I definitely want to get to the post-pandemic aspect of that because it does seem like a lot changed because of the pandemic, and I want to home in on that. But just on the skills gap in general, I’d love to get more perspective on that. We’ve been hearing about a skills gap for many years. As you indicated, you’ve done some research in the past around this. But I do occasionally come across people who say, “Well, there is no skills gap. This is a fiction of the employers.” It does seem to be based a good bit on employer perception, so what’s your sense of how employers arrive at that perception? Is it just what they feel like they’re experiencing, or is there data that they tend to be drawing on? I don’t know if that’s assessments that they’re giving their employees or prospective employees, but how are they really determining that, yes, there is in fact a skills gap here?

David Capranos: [00:03:24] As any good social scientist, I’ll probably say it’s a bit of both. There’s a mix of things that are happening. I think there is the intensity around it that probably does wax and wane with what kind of a market we’re facing on the employment side of things. I think we were in a pretty tight labor market a year ago when this survey was conducted, or it’s loosening a little bit now with some layoffs. You just get that sense out there, but you can really see it in the data too. You can see jobs staying open longer. It’s harder to fill certain positions. Things along those lines are actual mathematical signals that we’re getting on top of the more feelings part of it. It was interesting for us to see actually in the data, and in the report you can see that we asked this question back in 2021 of a number of different levels throughout the organization: “Are you experiencing a skills gap right now?” And the C-suite was saying, “Definitely, yes.” We had a pretty big response in that group, but among front-level managers, not so much. During and post-pandemic, everybody’s on the same page now; everybody’s bubbled up to that idea that there is a skills gap out there. So that’s another interesting factor too. I think, depending on where you sit in an organization, you see it or feel it earlier than in other places.

Causes of the Skills GapJeff Cobb: [00:04:36] And why do these skill gaps emerge in the first place? I guess this may be at the root of the connection to higher education, but is it purely an education thing that the people just aren’t trained to do these jobs? Or what else is going on that causes a skills gap to emerge?

David Capranos: [00:04:52] I don’t know if education is the only thing that’s out there. It’s interesting, when we thought about this a few years ago, the big concern was baby boomers exiting the workforce, so we had this—let’s call it a knowledge drain or skills drain—on the horizon where you get a lot of these people aging out of professions, and the thought was that the average age or average experience in a profession would really be declining in the next few years. And so that was the cause of the potential skills gap. I think with education you get these attitudes out there that it’s like, “Oh, the folks coming out of college are underprepared.” That’s a pretty common article that we see written out there in the media. But, when you do some of this survey work, and you actually ask the folks that are hiring and training these people, we don’t see that quite as much from them, that attitude.

The Pandemic’s Impact on the Skills GapJeff Cobb: [00:05:35] Yes, it seems like retirement would be an issue. And I know that during the pandemic too we had this whole concept of the Great Resignation happening, and people exiting jobs that they didn’t want to be in in the first place and saw the door open for that. The title of your report does specifically reference the pandemic, and one of your key findings is that the skills gap did in fact spread to more organizations during the pandemic. Can you talk a little bit more about the impact that the pandemic had, why it made the skills gap spread? Did it make it deeper or different at the same time?

David Capranos: [00:06:10] I think you’re right to call out that Great Resignation piece of it. I think we had something on the order of 50 million people leave their jobs willingly, willingly disconnect from their jobs over the last few years as they’re redefining what’s important to them. We see a lot of different reasons for that. People are doing it for higher pay. They’re doing it for quality-of-life issues and things along those lines. And so this realignment is obviously going to cause potential pain points for some organizations as they lose folks that would have been highly skilled. They’re going to turn to newer, younger employees, and they’re obviously not going to have the same tenure as those. That’s where you get some of that misalignment, some of that friction in the market, and that’s where I think a lot of the skills gap can be created.

The Difference in Demand for Soft Versus Hard SkillsJeff Cobb: [00:06:50] Can you say a bit more about the difference between what are typically called soft skills in this versus hard skills? I noticed that there’s been, according to the report, a big jump in demand for softer skills. I thought it was interesting that there’s also been a drop in the demand for harder skills. How is that dynamic playing out?

David Capranos: [00:07:10] It’s interesting that we’re still even talking about this hard-and-soft-skill dynamic. I think that was something that some of the folks that read the report might see as an older frame. Now we’re often talking about things like “human-centered skills,” “business-enablement skills,” or some of these new frames to think about this type of skilling. What we did, though, was we asked these questions over a period of two or three years, and it was interesting that the intensity level on some of those harder skills waned while the intensity level on some of these softer skills grew during the pandemic or post-pandemic period. Our thinking around it is that especially there are a few different things that are happening. One is collectively and socially. I think we’re a lot more interested in empathy than we have been in previous times, so it’s not just a buzzword. It’s something that’s finding its way into a lot of our decision-making. It’s something that we’re seeing happen in the corporate space—a lot more focus on empathy.

David Capranos: [00:08:03] I think, beyond that, you’ve got some real structural things that are happening, where, for example, moving a team to remote work. When you’ve got a distributed team, things like keeping that team together and keeping them engaged are going to be a little bit more tricky, a little bit more of a softer skill, a longer-term durable skill that’s going to be needed rather than only focusing on the project management or the time management element of it. And so a lot of organizations are understanding this. Another theme that’s out there is retention. Because of the Great Resignation, like we just mentioned, there are a lot of folks exiting the workforce. There are a lot of people leaving for better work, things along those lines. And so companies are really concerned with “How do we retain folks?,” and a lot of that comes from the soft-skill side of the ledger.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:47] I guess it would make sense, particularly if you have a concern with getting younger employees and new entrants into the workforce at the level that you would want. Not that younger people don’t have those sorts of soft skills but usually develop those over time in the workforce for a while and figure out how to navigate and negotiate the space. It’s to be expected. I guess that somebody coming straight in from university might be a little more lacking in those types of skills than somebody who’s been in the workforce for quite a while.

David Capranos: [00:09:16] I think that’s an interesting perspective. One of the things that we’ve been very focused on is how do you validate those softer skills? And, in turn, the question becomes how do you build them?

A lot of us think it’s skills that are definitely honed over the length of a career, but I think it’s also important to realize that there are a lot of educational opportunities out there that might be focused on how to do better brainstorming, how to communicate better, how to do things like this that are soft skills that you can learn, that you can be taught. A lot of the companies that we’re looking at and asking are more open to using alternative ways of validating those skills than just looking at experience alone.

David Capranos

We actually found this in the report. We asked a question: “With around five years of work experience, is that the equivalent to, let’s say, a university-sponsored certificate or a stack of microcredentials?” And a lot of companies are now saying, “Yes, we will consider those as equivalents to each other.”

Sponsor: Thinkific[00:10:22] We’re grateful to Thinkific for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast. As a Leading Learning listener, you know the importance we place on reach, revenue, and impact for learning businesses.

The Impact of a Skills Gap on Recruiting and RetentionJeff Cobb: [00:11:38] You mentioned retention and have touched on recruiting just a little bit. And I want to resurface this again because one of the things I got from the report—to be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it myself so much before—is that there’s more to a skills gap than just the idea that a person coming to a job doesn’t quite have the skill set they need at that point in time to do the work that’s needed. That’s the obvious understanding of what a skill gap could be. But, as the report brought out, there’s really something of almost a vicious cycle there that, once you have that, it does start to feed into recruiting and retention. It almost feels like a skill gap can have the potential to spiral out of control. Can you talk about that dynamic a little bit?

David Capranos: [00:12:24] I think that was something too that we’d been wondering about and wanted to test as a question out there. This idea that if you have an existing skills gap, does that make you a less desirable place to work? And I think that, now more than ever, there’s transparency on what it’s like to work for places. We have the emergence of things like Glassdoor and all these other Web sites out there that’ll do ratings on employers. And so some of the HR professionals out there have an awareness of this and think that, “Hey, if we’ve already got these existing challenges, maybe that makes us less desirable,” and that, like you said, creates a bit of a vicious cycle.

How Employers and Educators and Credentialing Providers Can Address the Skills GapJeff Cobb: [00:12:57] I’m thoroughly convinced that there is an issue out there. Even having raised the question about whether the skills gap exists, I think it does. We see it ourselves, as an employer. It can be hard to fit the people to the job in all sorts of ways. Can you talk a little bit about then what we do to address it, whether you’re an employer or an education and credentialing provider? And I will give a call out to that, throughout the report, at the end of each section, you make some suggestions, and then you have a nice checklist for employers at the end, and a nice checklist for educators at the end. But maybe you could cover a little bit of that here. What do you do if you’re an employer? What do you do if you’re an education or credentialing provider?

David Capranos: [00:13:41] Thanks for that. We tried to build this report in such a way that it made sense for both audiences because I think a lot of how we see ourselves is as sitting in between those two audiences. We see them both as potential partners with us to think through career-connected education. Part of that, on the university side, is a very retail-type experience—so adult learning, and there’s an online shopping cart, and you come in, and you take your certificate, and you leave, those sorts of operations. I think on the employer side too it can be things where we bring someone in for a three-day seminar. You learn in the building, and you keep that all siloed. What we think is the best opportunity, though, is to connect those groups better. So let’s find ways to bring groups of employees to the university. Let’s find ways for the university to offer content that is leveraging a case study for a local employer or connecting to different employers. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for these groups to be interacting, and we actually found that half the companies out there said that they did partner with some sort of university, college, or school to get this work done—but it was 75 percent that had done it in the past. So it seems like there was a little bit of pulling back. Maybe it’s an every-few-years sort of thing. We think that could be ratcheted up quite a bit, and there’s a lot of opportunity there.

Employer Acceptance of CredentialsJeff Cobb: [00:14:57] We definitely see a lot of room for more partnerships and deeper, more meaningful partnerships than we’ve been seeing so far. And, as you indicated, it does seem like it can be a sporadic thing rather than a truly strategic thing that organizations are pursuing over time. I want to focus in on something you mentioned a little bit already, and this is around the different ways to validate that an employee might be job-ready, might have the skill set, or at least be approaching the skill set that’s needed. Traditionally, a degree has been the big thing, and it’s clear that employers still look at degrees. Obviously, in spite of the fire that higher education has come under for cost and everything else, it’s still an important thing. But it does seem like we’re finding other types of experience and other types of credentials emerge as being more important than they have been in the past. Can you talk a little bit about the willingness of employers to consider candidates who’ve earned other types of credentials?

David Capranos: [00:15:57] One of the questions that we asked specifically was just “What credential are you most open to using to validate a skill?” So this might not specifically be to hire someone, but it might be just to validate a specific skill that you’re looking for. And it was interesting for us to find that, actually, industry certification trumped a college degree in a lot of places. And so what that could be is anything, from some obvious ones, like I would rather have a certified public accountant than just someone with an accounting degree. I would definitely rather have a licensed nurse than just someone that happened to have taken some nursing classes. Or things along those lines. There are some obvious ones that are out there, but even, you could imagine, maybe I’d prefer a PMP professional to someone with just a project management degree. And going down from there. I will say, though, that a college degree is still very high and still probably the best way to signal a well-rounded candidate in a lot of spaces.

But we were seeing things like college certificates, boot camps, badges, MOOCs, project portfolios, and things along those lines not only competing a little bit with other validation tools but growing too, over time. So the interest in these things is shifting, and HR professionals are getting much more comfortable with using something like a certificate or boot camp experience or things like that to validate a skill than they would have been a few years ago.

David Capranos

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:20] I’m glad you brought up that point too about industry certifications actually having a little bit of an edge over college degrees. I actually have that in my notes. I think it was 51 percent to 45 percent in terms of what HR professionals would look at when assessing skills and employability. And I know a lot of our listeners’ ears will perk up when they hear that because a lot of them are offering different types of certifications. Also, I noted down a quote that says, “During the last three years, more employers have become open to interviewing candidates with specific experience or credentials instead of a college degree.” And, of course, that last three years marks the pandemic. Was that just the pandemic that helped to pry open that openness to those alternate experiences?

David Capranos: [00:18:06] It has to be part of what we consider when we’re evaluating this, that it’s a really tight labor market like we mentioned before, that the workforce participation rate is down, that we get people exiting good jobs to get even better jobs, and things along those lines. It was an employee market versus an employer market. But these are long-term trends—the strength of digital badges, microcredentials, certificates, and things along those lines has been on an upward trajectory. Maybe it spikes a little bit during this pandemic/post-pandemic period, but it looks like it’s something that’s going to continue to see some strength in the years to come.

The Future Learning LandscapeJeff Cobb: [00:18:49] As you rightly note, these are long-term trends we’re talking about. You’re obviously taking a snapshot of a point in time now, but you’ve done research in the past, and I’m sure you will return to doing this type of research in the future to reexamine this landscape. If you look three to five years out just based on the trajectory you’re seeing right now, what would you expect to be the same or to be different when you do this research a few years out?

David Capranos: [00:19:15]

I think we’ve been experiencing a long-term trend here where learning and development has been pushed onto the employee. I think that it’s become your responsibility to educate yourself throughout your career.

David Capranos

There are a lot of reasons why that might be a better model. People have more fluidity. They move between jobs more. There’s easier access to these tools, especially through online learning. There are a lot of things swirling together to make that a trend. But I think, moving forward, what we’re going to get is more sophistication around actually evaluating these things. I know myself I’ve taken a number of adult learning classes. They’re not all created equal, but they all look equal on my LinkedIn profile. So it’s one of those things where I think we’re going to get professionals, even companies are stepping in and getting better ways of evaluating that learning and really getting to some more standardization where we understand this is what a certificate is. This is what a microcredential is. And this is the actual skills validation that came from it rather than just a black box of they did some adult learning.

Lifelong Learning As the Responsibility of the EmployeeJeff Cobb: [00:20:18] I think that is very true. In fact, we’ve had some organizations represented on the show, like 1EdTech, for instance, that used to be IMS Global, where they’re really working around standards around digital credentials and have some common language around that for employers, for the issuers, and for the learners. I know it wasn’t explicit. I don’t think it was anywhere buried in there explicitly as part of this report, but I imagine it’s probably something you’ve seen or thought about, that whole idea of the employee really being responsible for ongoing learning/education at this point. I know I’ve read in the past (I believe probably Google and Microsoft) that some of the big tech companies are actually trying to assess that in their job candidates can we see evidence that this person is a lifelong learner, that they are invested in continuing to learn and grow, and that’s actually something they’re looking for? Have you had any conversations or seen any evidence around that in working with employers?

David Capranos: [00:21:10] Obviously, you see it with employers, but it’s interesting that I see it with the students too. Some of the work that I do is surveying learners in online bachelor’s and master’s programs, things along those lines, and in a survey that we do every year called the “Voice of the Online Learner.” In that survey, we ask a lot of questions about how are you approaching your learning throughout your career, and what are your plans moving forward? And these are folks that are mid-master’s degree, and they’re already telling us, “We’re open to getting more. I’ll probably be back in a few years and get another certificate.” A lot of them actually say they really want to come back to the same source of education and be almost repeat customers, for lack of a better term. I think what we’re seeing is an emergence of an educated class—a group of people that just know that they need to readdress these skills over time.

David Capranos: [00:21:58] And when I connect that to some of the skills gap research that we did around what’s the shelf life of a given skill, how long can you have a given skill before having the need to train or retrain it, we see that those lifetimes are pretty short. And a lot of the employers only think that it’s maybe three to five years for a given skill.

It’s something where we’re seeing that there’s always going to be a place for this four to five years of education at the beginning of your adulthood, but it’s something that you’re going to have to continue and maintain throughout your life just because the pace of change in society and technology and everything else is moving so quickly. There’s no way that you can learn it all in your 20s and not recalibrate throughout your career.

David Capranos

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:38] And that does seem to be a strong message that comes out of the report. I think it’s just a strong message in the work and learning landscape. I know that for educators, for example, in your checklist at the end, the imperatives that you gave them—there was something similar for employers—to repeat process again and again because people have to keep coming back to this stuff. The skills change. The education and training necessary for the skills change. And obviously that goes to the educators, it goes to the employers, and, most of all, it goes to the learners themselves.

David Capranos: [00:23:09] Something that’s so important in the learning design consultation that we do, we speak to our university partners and learning partners and tell them, “Plan this with the idea that you’re going to have to update it.” Historically, you would get content that would sit on the shelf for years, like a comparative literature program that doesn’t even have to change much over a 10-year period. But, if you’re going to be doing something in strategic analysis or something dealing with data, the tools change, the techniques change, and there’s a need for a refresh pretty often. So build that in, have that adaptability, understand those refresh rates, and, most of all probably, plan for it. Plan for it fiscally, plan for it with staffing, and be ready to make those updates.

A Need for Smaller Learning ExperiencesJeff Cobb: [00:23:53] And it does seem to be a strong argument for, and probably a driver of, one of the key trends out there towards smaller chunks of content, smaller learning experiences so that they can be updated more readily. They’re more digestible—you can get at the specific bit of learning that you need at a particular moment or that you need to upgrade rather than, as you’re saying, having this monolithic program of learning that you can’t possibly go back and repeat again.

David Capranos: [00:24:19] Yes, that’s such a good point, that smaller, leaner approach. And I think that’s where we get this conversation around stackable so often, and I think the idea that, classically, it’s stackable within a degree, so maybe it’s your core plus electives, but, also, stackable in terms of what we’ve seen emerge in the larger MOOC and microcredential space, where, in order to get this, you get these three smaller products, and they evolve into a larger product. I think that type of thinking is really important, and thinking about that over stretches of time is what’s going to be interesting because today those cycles are very condensed, and they still end up being pretty large educational opportunities. But I think folks are going to have to think about what’s my 30-year curriculum? How am I going to engage with this person? One of the things that often comes up for me is that, as someone with an MBA, early in my career, I’m managing my own work; in the middle of my career, I’m managing other people’s work; and, later in my career, I hope to manage the work of other people managing other people’s work. Those are very different leadership skills, and so maybe I needed three different leadership courses throughout my life rather than the one that I took 10 years ago.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:23] That’s a good point. I think increasingly people do have to really consciously look at their life as a trajectory and their work and career as a trajectory and what types of learning are going to have to happen across that trajectory if you are going to be successful and, just frankly, achieve the fulfillment and satisfaction that you want out of life and work. Arguably, that’s always been the case, but it just feels so much more urgent these days with everything feeling so fast-paced.

David Capranos: [00:25:52] Well, there’s a lot more opportunity for validation too, so maybe you do that on your own. There have always been folks that are going to engage with material and learn and take books and stuff, but I think now there are more formalized ways of showing other people that you’ve done it. It is something that becomes more important as we have careers change a lot more dynamically than they did historically. When you look at someone from my generation, they’re going to change employers and careers many more times than people from the baby boomers and Gen Xers. It’s going to continue to see more of that dynamism at play, and you’re going to have to validate what you’ve done more than you have in the past.

Lifelong Learning HabitsJeff Cobb: [00:26:25] Well, we’ve obviously been talking about what employers and educators need to do, but also what learners and individuals need to do throughout careers and throughout life. I’d be interested—and it’s always interesting to hear from our guests—what you, yourself, are doing as you think about your own life and career trajectory and how you approach lifelong learning. We’re talking about skills here, so maintaining and updating your own skills, how do you approach all of that? What are some of your habits, practices, and things that you do?

David Capranos: [00:26:56] Thanks for the question. It’s really a blend of things. In my role, data is really important, so, over time, I’ve refreshed my skills on data analysis, statistical methods, and things along those lines. Technology is an important part of it, so I’ve taken classes in things like Tableau, for example, as data visualization became more important to us, and I was noticing people on my team were a lot more effective with certain tools than I was. “Hey, I’ve got to go out, and I’ve got to do some learning in these spaces.” I think, for me, something that I try to balance is a mix of looking at formal education—taking classes at universities—then also informal education—a lot of YouTube and things along those lines. And even in myself, I say, “Wow, I wish I could validate what I just learned over the last few months,” and so I look more and more for those educational products. One thing that I’ve been playing around with too is the idea (I haven’t done it yet) of education tourism. And so what I’ve seen is that in a lot of big cities, there’ll be big universities that’ll offer education programs that are three to five days in length, and it’s in a city that I’d love to travel to, like New York or London, and I think that’s something that’s on the roadmap for me—that is, how can I go do some learning but maybe a little bit of touring as well?

Wrap-up: [00:28:14] David Capranos is director of market strategy and research at Wiley University Services and co-author of the report “Closing the Skills Gap: Employer Perspectives on Educating the Post-Pandemic Workforce.” Wiley University Services offers a number of thought leadership resources beyond the skills gap report.

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Episodes on Related Topics* The Value of Workforce Development Now * Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech * The Third Sector of Education: Sustaining and Shaping Society * Unbundling the Future of Learning with UPCEA’s Jim Fong

The post Closing the Skills Gap with David Capranos appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Melissa Majors,
Leading Learning Podcast intervieweeMelissa Majors is a keynote speaker, author of The Seven Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders, and founder of Melissa Majors Consulting, where she helps leaders lead better and cultivate high-performing and engaged teams. Prior to starting her consulting practice, Melissa spent 20 years leading education services teams and divisions across a variety of industries, both large and small.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Melissa about what inclusive leadership is, its benefits, psychological safety, tactical empathy, and focusing on desired behaviors rather than leading with labels to get around DEI fatigue. They also talk about how to be inclusive in product design and development.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

What is Inclusive Leadership?Celisa Steele: [00:01:41] Inclusive leadership is a focus for you. So maybe we should just go ahead and, here near the beginning of our conversation, have you explain what inclusive leadership is.

Melissa Majors: [00:01:51] Yes, I’m happy to do that. I mentioned my secret sauce over the many years that I’ve had managing high-performing teams. Before I had a label, I was inclusive. Everybody felt they belonged. They all felt like they could lean in and take risks without retaliation. We were really great at transforming conflict, not shying away from it. And so I wanted to know, beyond my own experience, what were other leaders doing to involve others equally? That’s my definition for inclusion—involving others equally. And so I launched a series of research to find out what were other leaders doing and discovered they have shared behaviors that fall into seven different categories, which I cover in my book The Seven Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders. But what I discovered is that oftentimes we unintentionally exclude people.

Melissa Majors: [00:02:44] Our brains get in the way—our natural wiring, our outdated wiring of our brains get in the way, and we unintentionally exclude people. Like snap judgments that we make about people. In a nanosecond, your brain will assess whether somebody is a friend or a foe. And an example of how that gets in the way is that we prefer familiarity. Our brain doesn’t have to work as hard to assess whether you’re a potential threat if you seem familiar and similar to me. And so, oftentimes, our brain can mislead us into misjudging people’s character, and that certainly is a hindrance then to leading people equally. Those are some of the things that I use to describe and overcome to mitigate those risks related to inclusive leadership.

Benefits of Inclusive LeadershipCelisa Steele: [00:03:30] So that’s the what—what inclusive leadership is. And now I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about why we should focus on inclusive leadership. What are the benefits of leading inclusively?

Melissa Majors: [00:03:42] That’s such a good question, Celisa.

I discovered that the most inclusive leaders recognize that being inclusive is so much more than a moral obligation. It truly is a business imperative.

Melissa Majors

There’s research by McKinsey and Company that came out a couple of years ago, and it just continues to be validated by other big research firms (Gartner and others), that the most inclusive companies are outperforming the least inclusive ones with 49 percent higher profitability. Who can afford to leave that kind of competitive advantage on the table? And more about the why is those teams are not just higher performing in terms of financial performance. They have higher engagement; they have better retention; they’re much better at mitigating and uncovering risks to ideas, decisions, and solutions; they’re more innovative as a result of being more inclusive. And so there is a clear bottom-line benefit when we do this well.

Barriers to Inclusive LeadershipCelisa Steele: [00:04:42] Given the benefits that make a strong case for inclusive leadership, what are the barriers? What are the challenges? Why isn’t inclusive leadership practiced more broadly?

Melissa Majors: [00:04:55] That’s another great question. Again, going back to the research that I did, 80 percent of C-suite leaders that I interviewed recognize and acknowledge that they’re missing the mark related to being inclusive and don’t know what to do about it. Especially during 2020, there was a huge racial reckoning here in the United States and around the world. There were leaders running to their closest Web designer to post statements and pacts that they commit to being more inclusive, but they didn’t know how to operationalize inclusion beyond that goal and that commitment. And so, oftentimes, though, that commitment fizzled out without habits, which is why I think having habits is so important. Number one, establishing sustainable change through habits is one of the biggest barriers to operationalizing inclusion. Our brains are the even bigger challenge. As I mentioned earlier, our brains get in the way, and so often we unintentionally exclude people. It’s easier to empathize with people who are more similar to us than different. And so understanding how you can overcome some of that natural wiring to empathize with all people and listen to perspectives that are different from your own, that’s really, really important.

Melissa Majors: [00:06:10] I think one of the other challenges is convincing leaders why it’s necessary. There are a lot of practitioners in the DE&I space and companies that position the why based on social justice and morality. And this is not popular what I’m about to say, but it’s true that, whenever companies commit to something based on a moral need, they set themselves up for inaction and eventually deprioritization because, ultimately, the company has to thrive from a financial perspective, and they deprioritize things that don’t drive financial health. When you can create a case for diversity, equity, and inclusion that’s based on what matters most to the company in terms of financial health and cultural health, those solutions or those initiatives are sustainable whereas the others start to fizzle out. And that’s what we’re seeing now in our time as we’re starting to see downward pressure on the case for DE&I. Long story short, it’s really important that we align the business case and the why to what matters most to the company.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:20] That makes a lot of sense—there may be the moral and ethical reasons to do it, but also make sure that you’re making that business case about DEI initiatives and inclusive leadership.

Sponsor: Thinkific[00:07:36] We’re grateful to Thinkific for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast. As a Leading Learning listener, you know the importance we place on reach, revenue, and impact for learning businesses.

Blameless InclusionCelisa Steele: [00:08:48] One of the things that I’ve seen you write about that I would love to hear you talk about a little bit is this idea of blameless inclusion. Can you speak to that a little bit? About the psychological or emotional things that inclusion can bring up in people?

Melissa Majors: [00:09:07] Yes, absolutely. I’ll tell you a story to answer the question. A couple months back, I was about to deliver my signature speech on the book The Seven Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders. And, after the session, a woman walks up to me, and she says, “You proved me wrong. I expected to feel attacked when I walked in this room. I expected for you to make me feel ashamed of who I am as a person and my beliefs. And you did not. And, as a result of that approach, I’m much more open-minded, and I’m going to apply these concepts and tactics.” What I do and what other DE&I practitioners do is we’re negotiating behavior change. I wouldn’t just say DE&I. Anybody on this call that’s interested in education—if you’re educating people, you’re in the business of negotiating behavior change. And, in any negotiation, if you cause people to feel defensive, you’ve lost; you’ve shut them down; they’re not going to be open to the concepts. By design, I approach inclusion from a blameless, guilt-free perspective. I blame the brain, not people. And it opens people’s minds, like the woman in the story that I just shared, to lean into these concepts and apply the tactics.

Bias and InclusionCelisa Steele: [00:10:26] And so you’ve mentioned the brain and blaming the brain to the extent that there is any blame to go around. I think that probably ties to bias. But will you talk a little bit about bias, what it is, and how it relates to inclusion? I know you talked a little bit about familiarity and some of those things, but dig in a little bit more on bias.

Melissa Majors: [00:10:47] Bias is such a bad, but poorly branded. Biases are just a natural threat detection mechanism in all of our brains. We all have biases. We think we’re so much more sophisticated than we are, Celisa, but our brains have not evolved that much since we were hanging out in caves. We’re still very much wired for survival and reproduction. And biases become shortcuts, based on inputs you’ve had throughout your entire life, that tell your brain, based on patterns, “I already know this is not a threat. I don’t have to spend the time assessing a threat,” and it works really well for inanimate objects. So when you walk in a room and see an object that has a flat top and four legs, your brain says, “I don’t need to take the energy and time to assess that. It’s a table. It’s not a threat.” But when you walk in a room and see other people, your brain has to work even harder because, as I mentioned earlier, it will assess whether somebody is a friend or a foe.

Melissa Majors: [00:11:47] And those biases, again, those threat-detection mechanisms in our brain, can lead us to make uninformed or misjudgments about other people. But what I discovered about the most inclusive leaders is they embrace their bias, which is hard to do, because saying “Hi, I’m biased” is like saying “Hi, I’m a bigot” or “I’m a homophobe or a racist” or something like that. But they embrace their biases, label them, and then they can work even harder to compensate for those biases so they don’t seep out in interactions with other people, especially in leading teams. What I encourage your listeners to do is try to uncover their biases—and I have resources that I can share on that—but try to uncover your biases, and then you can compensate for them. But you have to embrace and acknowledge that they exist first.

Baking DEI Into Learning ExperiencesCelisa Steele: [00:12:38] You just mentioned our listeners. I am thinking about our listeners and about their role in designing and developing educational offerings. There’s, of course, an opportunity to directly teach about diversity, equity, and inclusion, have that be the subject matter and the focus of a particular learning experience. But I also see the opportunity for indirect opportunities, to bake some DEI concepts into some, if not all, of the learning experiences. I would love to hear your advice for how that might happen. How can we bake more diversity, equity, and inclusion into everything that we’re offering as a learning business?

Melissa Majors: [00:13:17] Well, first, I would suggest you lead with the behavior you want and not the label of DE&I. Unfortunately, there’s DE&I fatigue with that term, and so many people shut down when they hear that term. But, if you get rid of the label and just focus on the behaviors, like empathizing with people who are different from you. Think about any education designer, what’s the number one thing that you do? When you’re building an education product, you empathize with the people you serve, whether you do design thinking, needs assessment, whatever. You have to empathize with the people that you serve, and part of that is intentionally identifying the people you serve, deeply listening to their needs, and build that insight into building relevant products and services. That’s inclusion. So often those of us in education services who are building products and services may not involve enough diverse voices at the table, and then we build products that miss the mark or may be irrelevant for part of the demographic that we serve. Be inclusive. Think about what are our blind spots as designers and product developers? And what voices do we need to invite to the table so that we have that full perspective? That’s just a little bit about what that is, the case for, in terms of education design and development, but focus on the behaviors instead of leading with the labels.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:40] I like that advice a lot. And it seems, of course, to apply across the board to all situations. And it’s that learner-centric view of design, which, as you said, really is at the heart of what we know about best practices for how to create effective learning experiences.

Melissa Majors: [00:14:56] Can I follow up and give you a story I just heard? Her name is Karen Townsend, she’s an incredible practitioner and leadership expert. She gave me this example just yesterday, and it’s just really simple and profound, around inclusion and design. And she said, ten years ago or so, she would go into a card shop to buy a birthday card for her mom, and she would scan the cards, and she wouldn’t see any pictures of moms that looked like her mom. She’s an African American woman. Until Hallmark came out with a line of cards called Mahogany. And now she can walk into a store and buy a birthday card with a picture of a mom that actually looks like her mom. And what Hallmark discovered originally is they probably had product designers around the table that had a singular perspective.

Melissa Majors: [00:15:45] They were thinking about their mom in the design of these birthday cards, and that came out in the design of products. And they were excluding big demographics and revenue-generating opportunities with an audience they hadn’t tapped into before. Now when you go on a Hallmark store, you can buy cards for Yom Kippur, Diwali, and all sorts of cards that represent your life. And, yes, the Hallmark Company may have done this originally from a moral and social justice perspective in the product design. They also discovered there are revenue-generating opportunities by being more inclusive in the design process. I think that’s just a really simple and profound story that anyone, whether you’re designing education products or technology, can really wrap their minds around the case and the how to be inclusive in product design.

Considerations Around Inclusive MessagingCelisa Steele: [00:16:44] I have a question, thinking about the different segments of audiences that a learning business might serve. Some of them are going to represent different demographics and different points of view. To what extent does messaging need to be different for different groups? If you have some of the historically under-included groups and you have some of the groups who have been part of those doing the excluding of those under-included groups, can the same messaging work for both those groups or groups all along those spectrums? Or at times do we need more nuanced and targeted messages for different groups?

Melissa Majors: [00:17:24] It’s a really great question, Celisa. Where I have seen a lot of U.S.-based education services companies fumble in this area is in delivering global education. Because we have a U.S.-centric mindset, the product designers are probably based in the U.S., and so often it’s easy for us to overlook the needs and the localization requirements for global companies. Even just as simple as the time when we deliver virtual education. Is it time zone friendly for everyone? Or are we unintentionally prioritizing our comfort and convenience to host them during U.S.-based hours and causing our other learners around the world to dial in in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn in the morning? Simple little decisions like that. But, if you don’t have those voices at the table informing those decisions, it’s really easy to overlook those opportunities and then underserve the people you should be serving equally.

Preparing Instructors and Facilitators for InclusionCelisa Steele: [00:18:33] Another follow-up question that I have around how we can best make our educational offerings inclusive has to do with the role of instructors and facilitators. I’m thinking of instructor-led things, whether that’s online or physical classroom-type situations. They’re often either experts in a particular subject, or they’re experts in facilitation itself. But it seems to me that instructors and facilitators have a huge role to play in how inclusive that situation is. Any thoughts around how to best prepare our facilitators and instructors to help them be as aware of and inclusive as possible?

Melissa Majors: [00:19:11] Absolutely. It’s important for us all to recognize our blind spots. And I’ll tell you a story. Last year I was contracted to deliver education for a large audience in Italy. Now, these were all English speakers. It was their second language, of course. But I recognized my blind spots related to some of the challenges that are relevant in their workplaces. They have very different dynamics they’re facing as opposed to most of the U.S. audiences that I deliver training to. I recognized the blind spot and also said, “I need to partner with someone in this situation. I need to partner with an Italian facilitator and instructor who can add relevant context and color to this content.” And, once we started working together, I realized I didn’t need to be the one at the mic to deliver this education. And so I brought this Italian instructor on to add even more relevant stories and customize the workshop and the content so that we achieved the outcomes we needed to in that audience. So recognize your blind spots and your limits. One of my favorite sayings is “Do what you do best; outsource the rest.” Don’t be afraid to ask for help from people who have that context and insight.

The Seven Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders: EmpathyCelisa Steele: [00:20:33] That’s a lovely example. I want to talk a little bit about your book, which you’ve mentioned, The Seven Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders. And I know that one of those habits you highlight is empathy. You’ve already focused on the need to have habits and to get really practical about what inclusion looks like. What does empathy look like in action?

Melissa Majors: [00:20:57] I mentioned, based on my research and advances in neuroscience, we know it’s harder to empathize with people we see as them versus us. Our brain naturally prefers familiarity, so leaders have to work even harder to empathize across difference. And so I love Chris Voss, his definition of empathy. Chris Voss is the author of a book called Never Split the Difference. Highly recommend this read if you haven’t. But he was the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI for 25 years. So you go on vacation, Celisa, and you get kidnapped; the bad guys take you away. Chris is the one they would send in to negotiate your way to safety. And Chris said his weapons-grade negotiation tactic is empathy—tactical empathy. And the definition is this: “Describing and demonstrating an understanding of the needs, interests, and perspectives of others without necessarily agreeing.” “Without necessarily agreeing” is the key. So often, when we are attempting to empathize with others, we discount their perspective, we disagree, or we get defensive. And what he says, “With no defensiveness, no arguments, just listen to understand, not to disagree.” And so that is also how I recommend, teach, and equip leaders to be even more empathetic, with that definition and reminding them you’re not sympathizing, you’re empathizing. You don’t have to agree; you just have to understand.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:36] What I love about the focus on empathy is that it does seem like empathy contributes to psychological safety. And we know how important psychological safety is to learning—if a learner feels like they can really engage and participate fully, that’s going to lead to more learning coming out of that experience. I think that emphasis on empathy works from the leadership perspective but also from the learning perspective as well.

Melissa Majors: [00:23:03] Absolutely, it does. Step one is empathizing with people that need to consume the content and build relevant products and experiences, and then give them a choice in how they want to consume it.

Empathy is really the gateway to helping us understand not just what our learners need to learn but how they need to consume it in a way where they can remember the information and apply it. Because, if they can’t remember and apply the content and the information we share, it was a big old fat waste of time. And you solve for that through tactical empathy.

Melissa Majors

Lifelong Learning HabitsCelisa Steele: [00:23:49] This is the Leading Learning Podcast, so we always love to ask guests about their own lifelong learning habits. I think it’s especially interesting with you, given your educational services background. Would you share with us what habits, practices, or resources you tend to make use of to continue learning, professionally and personally too?

Melissa Majors: [00:24:11] Absolutely. I am a terrible formal learning student. You know those that do, we’re just terrible students. But I’m an incredible informal learning student. And one question—I’m happy to share this with the audience—that has really helped me become an even better leader and educator is that no matter the situation, whether I perceive it as good or bad, I ask, “What is the lesson I should be learning in this moment?” And, even though it may feel disappointing to me, it pivots that experience into something that turns into wisdom for myself. And so whether it’s an article I’m reading online or a newscast or whatever the story is, I can glean wisdom from other people’s experiences informally by asking, “What is the lesson I should be learning in this moment?” And so that has really helped me. I love to read, though. I’m a big, big reader, and so I’ve got a couple books on my nightstand. That’s usually what I do before I go to bed. And I like to stay on top of cutting-edge and next practices because I’m naturally wired as a strategist and innovator. I love hearing about best practices and ways that we can continue and evolve and become even better through innovative leadership and education experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:38] Are there any cutting-edge topics that you’re currently looking at that you would like to share? Anything that pops to mind?

Melissa Majors: [00:25:46] Yes. There’s toxicity in the workplace and how to solve for that, power dynamics in the workplace, and unintentional consequences of being in positions of power. I’m digging into that research. I’m working on my second book. This is the first time I’m even mentioning this. I won’t say anything else about it, but those are some topics that I’m researching right now to inform how leaders can continue to thrive in this very complex environment and detox our teams and companies.

Prioritize Inclusion WorkCelisa Steele: [00:26:17] Is there anything else that comes to mind, or anything that you haven’t had a chance to share that you would love to have a chance to before we wrap up?

Melissa Majors: [00:26:25] I would like to share more around inclusive leadership and how it can solve so many of the issues that we’re facing on our teams and workplaces today, but it’s getting a bad rep. There are a lot of organizations and companies that are deprioritizing this work because they just have not seen the returns they were expecting. There isn’t a crisis in the headlines today that’s causing a lot of organizations to deprioritize this work. But, when we do it well, it not only leads to full team engagement, it can help retain the top performers you have on your teams by very simple human needs we have—belonging, social connection at work, being involved in key decisions, and being treated fairly. Those are all experiences that, when we get it right, we retain great talent and achieve incredible results on our teams. But so many of us are getting that wrong right now. And so, before you are deprioritized—the inclusion work—really think about those behaviors and the benefits of it related to detoxing your teams. And, if there’s anything I can do to help, call. I’m an open book. I’d love to share some of those concepts. But be careful not to deprioritize inclusion work too soon and then miss out on the incredible competitive and performance advantage that it offers.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:58] It seems to me too that inclusive leadership can also, in a way, be a form of self-care for the leader. I’ve seen you write about this idea of, as a leader, you don’t necessarily have to have all the answers, and it can be really important and freeing to admit that.

Melissa Majors: [00:28:14] Yes, I’m so glad you brought that up! As leaders, we unintentionally derive our value from feeling like we need to have all the answers and be the smartest person in the room. And that actually shuts people down. And then, as employees who ladder up to leaders, we expect those leaders to have all the answers. Well, that’s a bunch of baloney. Nobody has all the answers. But, if you work really well together and mitigate that misconception, the power dynamics in that relationship, you get everybody leaning in to share their ideas. And it’s at the intersection of all those diverse ideas coming together where the incredible decisions are made. But we unplug when it gets uncomfortable. Those are some concepts that I try to help teams with and through. Labeling what appears to be uncomfortable conversations, it’s actually part of the process, and that takes the sting and stress out of it when you’re able to do that and does lead to more self-care.

Melissa Majors: [00:29:10] And you feel better when you’ve got teams of people that are happy and thriving. You feel better as a leader. There are ways that we can do this even better, and I’m a big believer that inclusive leadership concepts and topics are an incredible method to get there. There’s one, also last piece of advice I’d like to give your audience, and that is to reframe their thinking around inclusion.

So often we think, “Oh, everything’s wrong. There’s so much that’s broken. We’re not making progress.” But the reality is we’re not broken. We’re just unfinished. There are still things we need to learn how to do to work, play, and thrive with people that are different from us. We’re still learning. This is a learning journey. So we’re not broken. We’re just unfinished.

Melissa Majors

Wrap-up: [00:30:07] Melissa Majors is the author of The Seven Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders, a keynote speaker, and the founder of Melissa Majors Consulting.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics* Diversity and Disruption with Shilpa Alimchandani * Getting Conscious About Bias with Howard Ross and Shilpa Alimchandani * Walking the Path to Learning with Tiffany Crosby * Access and Ability in Learning with Diane Elkins

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Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb,
Leading Learning Podcast co-hostsWe’re thrilled to reach another milestone: 350 episodes of the Leading Learning Podcast. We are grateful to our listeners for making this possible.

Milestones are opportunities to reflect, both on what’s past and what’s to come. In this episode, we focus on three areas we expect to be of continuing and growing importance in the learning landscape and for learning businesses: AI, the X factor, and the work/learn connection.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show NotesIntro: [00:00:00]

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] Welcome to episode 350 of the Leading Learning Podcast. Yes, that’s right—350 episodes, and we’re going to claim having 350 episodes out in the world as a milestone.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:40] I certainly think it’s a milestone. I think I’m prepared to have a Twitter duel with anybody who tries to tell me it’s not. That is a lot of podcast episodes that we’ve put out there, hopefully to the benefit of humanity or, at least, the learning business world. Milestones are always opportunities to reflect. We’re, of course, big fans of reflection, and that can be reflection on what’s past and what’s to come. But we want to focus this milestone episode—yes, it is a milestone—on three areas we’re thinking about, based on what we’re seeing happening with learning and what we’re hearing from learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:18] Yes, milestones are great times for reflection. We are big fans of reflection. But I think milestones are also great times for gratitude. So we want to be sure to thank you, dear listeners, for your very important part in getting us to this milestone. Without you, listeners, we would have not made it to 350. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing episodes with colleagues. Thank you for making time to discuss with your team and to delve into the ideas and topics that we touch on in episodes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:51] And we also want to thank all the interviewees who’ve carved out time to talk with Celisa or me and share their expertise, opinions, and stories. I’m not 100-percent certain how many of our episodes have been interviews, but we typically run a couple of interviews and then have a Jeff-and-Celisa episode, so we’ve certainly done at least 200 interviews and probably more like 250.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:16] We also want to be sure to thank the sponsors that we’ve had over the years, who have helped to offset the costs of the considerable effort that goes into doing the podcast week in and week out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:29] Yes, and, if you’re looking for a way to help Leading Learning out, we do hope you’ll sign up for our free newsletter, visit the show notes for episodes, follow us on social media (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and just generally spread the word so that others can benefit from what we’re doing here on the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:47] So with some thanks given, let’s now turn to those three areas that you mentioned, Jeff. And, for each of the three areas, we’ll offer a couple of points for consideration, things that might prompt some reflection or action in your learning business.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Jeff Cobb: [00:03:02] First up on our list is what’s really the elephant in the room these days, maybe the robotic elephant in the room, and that, of course, is artificial intelligence.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:15] That’s right. There’s been an incredible buzz about AI since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. In fact, we’ve dedicated a couple of recent podcast episodes to AI already, but AI still has our attention, and, in fact, we think it deserves attention because of the kinds of disruption that it’s causing or that it will cause.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:38] And it’s going to cause more because GPT-4 is now out. Going forward, ChatGPT will be based on that. It’s just going to continue getting better, even though there are still pitfalls with it, and we cover some of those in our episode on it. But, right now, we want to highlight two broad areas where AI seems most likely to impact learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:04] And the first area we have in mind is core work. What is it that you do day in and day out, and how will AI impact that? And, in particular, how might it help you do what you’re already doing faster and more efficiently? One way to think about this is to use the domains of the Learning Business Maturity Model as a way to categorize your core work. And, as a reminder, the Learning Business Maturity Model, which we’ve talked about on the podcast before, contains five domains: strategy, leadership, marketing, portfolio, and capacity. You can use those five areas as buckets to categorize the types of work that you’re already doing. And that can be all over the map, from decision-making to content production to evaluation and analysis. And what you want to do is make this documentation of what you’re already doing and then begin to think about how might AI be leveraged to help you do what you’re already doing faster and more efficiently?

The Tagoras Learning Business Maturity Model™Jeff Cobb: [00:05:20] It’s a great time to start doing that sort of inventory, to start experimenting. This is a great topic, if you’ve got a team that you’re working with, to sit down and have a session or a few sessions about this with your team. Whether you use the maturity model or you have other ways that you lay out your day-to-day operations, how can you layer AI on top of that to get that greater efficiency, to get that greater speed, and. frankly, just to get better at the things you’re doing? How is AI going to help you get better? You don’t have to have some fabulous, new innovation that you’re going after with AI—that may come eventually as you get used to using the tools, But, right now, just look at that core work and how does AI apply to that core work.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:02] And we do encourage you to actually do some experimentation. Do this inventory work, think about how AI could be applied, and then try it out. It’s not always going to be necessarily a win. You may find out that whatever AI tool you tried out at first isn’t actually all that helpful, but, in fact, your time and effort went up some. And then you’ll just have to assess. Is it because you are learning the new tools, and you can expect, actually, for that process to get much faster and better over time? Or is it just that it wasn’t a good fit? We don’t necessarily think that AI tools are going to be a panacea and fix everything, but you do need to be trying it out and do need to be thinking about where it could make sense in your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:45] And, along with that, if you have not yet tried ChatGPT or the tools that it’s built on like Jasper AI or just some of the other common tools that are out there, now is the time. You have to roll up your sleeves and actually see what these programs can do so that you have an understanding of that. I think if we were able to, we’d ask our listeners to raise their hands and say whether they actually have tried ChatGPT at this point or not. In fact, you can just do that wherever you are, as long as you’re not driving. Just randomly raise your hand if you’ve tried ChatGPT, and the people around you can stare at you and wonder what on earth you’re doing. But we’ll know in our hearts that, out there, you’ve told us you’ve tried ChatGPT or another AI tool.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:25] That’s the first area where we’re seeing an impact of AI on learning businesses, and it’s around the speed and efficiency with which you can do your core work. A second area where we see AI having implications for learning businesses is in the area of learner experience and learner expectations. And we would make the argument that learner expectations have already been changing. COVID was a big driver of this. Essentially everyone was forced online during the pandemic, and then there was the fatigue from being on Zoom all the time, and people were trying to figure out what they do or don’t like when it comes to e-learning experiences. And so these learner expectations have been changing and evolving. But now, with AI, it’s going to just be another push in learner expectations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:18] It’s the shift that we’ve just already been seeing for years, even pre-COVID, just now really being accelerated and reaching a tipping point. The adoption of ChatGPT itself is sort of a harbinger of this. It went from zero to more than 100 million users really rapidly. People are obviously jumping in and using this. And, when you start using AI tools, they become integrated into things like search and our everyday types of software that we use. Think of your common set of productivity tools that you’re using at work. AI is going to be there if it’s not there already. And what that is essentially enabling is on-the-fly creation of very targeted, very personalized learning content. You can think of, back in the day, electronic performance support systems (EPSS) were a big thing in the learning and training world. And that happened before the Web even came along. And then the Web came along and became an even bigger possibility. But we’re now reaching the point where that’s just such a reality.

It’s embedded in our lives. We all have these performance support systems and learning systems that AI is just making better and better for us all the time, and that’s inevitably going to change expectations. It’s going to inevitably change how expertise is thought of and valued and what role formal learning experiences really will best play moving forward since so much of this is really informal, in the flow of life and work.

Jeff Cobb

Celisa Steele: [00:09:45] If you think about these two points that we just raised, one is more internally focused. What is it that AI might mean for how you, as a learning business, operate? The second one is more externally focused on your learners, on the audience that you serve. What will this broader access to AI mean for what learners can and hope to do during a learning experience?

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:09] That’s one of the first areas we’re focused on as we find ourselves settling into this great milestone of 350 episodes of the podcast. And you’ve already heard from us on the podcast about AI. You’re hearing from us about it right now. You will, no doubt, be hearing quite a bit more from us about it as we move forward. But we promise to try to look at it in ways that are really useful, valuable, and helpful to learning businesses because, obviously, there’s a lot of buzz out there around AI right now, and people are probably getting sick of hearing about it. But we do have to embrace it and be constructive about how it’s going to shape our experience and our businesses going forward.

Leading Learning Newsletter[00:10:50] As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

The X FactorJeff Cobb: [00:11:48] The next area that we are focused on beyond AI (though related to AI in many ways) is what we’re describing as the X factor. And what we mean here is that there’s an ever-increasing focus on the total experience that customers, members, and learners have with our offerings. We’re thinking about the X factor as in UX, LX, and MX (user experience, learner experience, and member experience), and you can probably come up with some other places where X has been applied, but that X factor is really heavy out there right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:27] And so, again, in this area of the X factor, we’re going to offer two points in particular for your consideration. And the first point is just around the growing importance of humor—human interaction.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:42] Humor is important too.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:43] Humor is also important, and humans are particularly good at humor.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:47] Some are.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:48] That’s true. And so, in terms of what this means for learning businesses and learners, we’re seeing renewed and deeper interest in things like cohorts, communities, and coaching. And I think that a lot of this is driven by the desire, the need that humans have for interaction with one another. There’s been some pent-up demand for that kind of human interaction because, during the pandemic, we were limited in our ability to gather physically together. But now, as we’re emerging from the pandemic, as gathering together is safer, there’s this renewed acknowledgment that cohorts, communities, and coaching—any of these types of experiences that really make effective use of human interaction—can provide for richer, more personal, and then, ultimately, more effective learning experiences.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:45] It does contribute to more effective. Most certainly, this is happening in interaction. People are really having to express themselves, absorb other ideas, play with those ideas, share them, and negotiate them with others. That really contributes to a more effective learning experience than sitting in isolation in front of a screen and trying to absorb information. Though that does have its place. I won’t completely dis that—it does have its place—but there is this hunger for human interaction. Human interaction contributes to effectiveness. We are certainly susceptible to this and eager for interaction ourselves. In fact, we should mention that we got together with 15 learning business leaders in DC recently for a couple of hours just to share. We had three people talk about initiatives or areas of focus, and, in fact, we shared the very points that we’re talking about right now on this podcast. And there was also time for other questions, more sharing. I can say that I think the energy was just really high. People were eager to be able to have those kinds of conversations with others who were experiencing similar things, in our case, in this world of the learning business. And I think it’s safe to say that quite a bit of learning went on there, and it was really driven by human interaction.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:59] The second point we’ll raise around the X factor, we’re going to call this “accessible relevance,” and this is just the growing importance of getting to the right content easily and quickly. This is really upping the emphasis on things like search. It’s upping the emphasis and need for curation. And I will say that curation could include things like learning pathways that you might spell out for your learners, different career pathways for them. I think there’s also a growing relevance and need for accessible design and accessible technology, and that can mean accessible for people with disabilities. It can mean accessible in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It can mean accessible in terms of the time and budget that people have to spend on learning. Just broad accessibility concerns. And then there’s also a growing need and interest in smaller and more-targeted content, things like microlearning, because we have so many demands on our time, and yet we know that we need new skills and knowledge. And so microlearning can be that magic bullet that helps us get what we need but doesn’t take too much time and energy. All of these things get wrapped up in this overall concern with the X factor and what the experience is for the learner.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:27] And these are certainly topics most of which we’ve covered on the podcast before. I know we’ve talked about curation. We’ve had Diane Elkins on to talk about accessibility. This is what I can remember most recently. I think we’ve talked about it on other occasions as well. We’ve certainly talked about microlearning. We need to have an episode about search at some point. I’m not sure we really have focused on search enough, but it’s just so important when you’ve got assets distributed across Web sites and across the Web broadly. How do you provide search that’s really going to get people to what they want? And, by the way, how do you incorporate AI into that going forward since AI is already a part of search, and it’s going to be more so going forward? All of this leads to a need to assess, rebalance, and renovate your portfolio. We use in thinking about this—and we’ll see how well we can do this in the context of an audio episode because it’s a visual tool—but it’s a double-axis chart. We’re consultants at heart, and so we have to always be able to pull out a good double-axis chart. In this case, the axes that we’re thinking about, one running from left to right, would be one-time learning experiences over to recurring learning experiences. You can think of that as your horizontal axis. And then your vertical axis, on the bottom is very simple learning experiences, and then those go up to very complex learning experiences.

A double-axis chart can be used for portfolio assessment.Jeff Cobb: [00:17:50] As a double-axis chart does, this gives you four quadrants. In the lower left, where you have one-time and simple, you have things like what I think is too often still how e-learning is thought of, your on-demand, self-paced course for those one-time, simple experiences. Above that in the one-time complex, you have cohorts. We’ve talked about cohorts on the podcast before, and, certainly, those are extremely important. In the bottom right quadrant, where you have simple and recurring, you have things like subscription models. We’ve had Jack Coursen on the blog, writing about his subscription programs. Certainly, something we want to dive into more over time. And, in the top right, where you’ve got complex and recurring, this is happening over time, is community. And we’ve recently talked about community.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:54] Whether you use this double-axis chart or something else, the take-home message is to think about your portfolio and think about how well you are responding to and providing as close to an ideal learner experience as possible. Really think through your offerings and where they fit in that portfolio and what might be missing.

The Work/Learn ConnectionJeff Cobb: [00:19:24] That’s two areas we’re focused on—artificial intelligence and the X factor. And that brings us to our third area, which is the work/learn connection.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:36] We think that there’s a growing conversation, at least that we’re hearing, around the role of lifelong learning in work and in people’s careers. And, in particular, we’re seeing a lot of new interest or growing interest in the academic continuing education world, where, admittedly for them, this is a new area. They haven’t typically been as focused on work and career, and they’re seeing this now as a possibility for market expansion or at least a way to grow their influence and impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:12] It’s been a real boom in the academic world because, as we know, degree programs have been under fire now for a number of years because of the cost, the relevance, and that sort of thing. And we don’t expect them to go away. But academic institutions rightly are looking at how do we engage with a different type of adult learner, the non-traditional learner and the continuing learner. That’s always been there to some extent, but it’s really become a booming area of academia now. And, like you said, I think they’re very tuned to it, possibly because it does feel like a new and innovative area for them to expand into. It’s funny—where we have seen less focus on it is in the trade and professional association world. Our theory there is it’s sort of a “we’re soaking in it” thing. It’s just so much a part of what you’ve already been doing for so long that you don’t notice that it’s become a big deal. And so I think there’s certainly an opportunity for those organizations to wake up a little bit and realize, “Hey, we’re playing an extremely important role already in something that’s becoming more and more important. And let’s let our voice and our leadership be heard here.”

Celisa Steele [00:21:20] And that’s on the positive side. On the negative side, it’s also being aware that there is new interest from others in this area, which means competition. Just being aware of that, that is another reason to perhaps revisit and reinvigorate what you’re already doing to help professionals in whatever field or industry you serve. So the two areas that we’ll offer to think about in this work/learn connection area, the first one is around workable credentials. What we have in mind here is that there is an evolving demand for credentials that, one, have some value to them—and that’s value in the eyes of the learners themselves and in the eyes of employers—and then, two, credentials that don’t necessarily require a major time and money commitment, at least not on the level that’s associated with degrees or traditional big certifications.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:18] Right. This is that whole alternative credential world, things like badges, things like assessment-based certificates. We’re seeing the need and the demand for those go up, and, as you said, Celisa, seeing more ways to actually put some teeth and get some value in those. We find a lot of organizations that have certificate programs or even have certifications taking into account the value of those credentials in the employment market. And this is the workable side of this. You need employers to value those. You need learners to value them as something that’s going to contribute to their career development and advance them along their career paths. And we’re focused on work here, as a work/learn area, but the same can apply in more life-oriented credentials as well. But, in general, credentials are having a moment now.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:07] I think, if you are serious about making sure that your credential is valuable to employers, it means you need to make sure that you’re hearing their voice as you develop what goes into a particular credential so that it’s not just your guess about what someone needs to know to succeed in a particular position. You’re actually talking to those employers about what it takes to have a successful candidate and an employee that really just hits it out of the park in an area, and bake that into your credential. Take that into account.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:37] And pay attention to the standards that are evolving in this area as well. We recently had an episode with the folks at 1EdTech, formerly IMS Global, and they’re deeply involved in standards around the portability of credentials, the shareability of credentials, and establishing the validity of credentials. And you want to make sure that you’re paying attention to that as you’re deploying different types of, particularly, digital badges, microcredentials that can be used in a variety of ways. So that’s the workable credentials area. And then we also want to highlight the concept of demonstrable impact. We’ve talked about impact a lot over the years of the podcast, in our work. In fact, we’ve got at least one entire episode devoted to impact. But this one, we think, it’s just becoming more and more important, and it relates back to some of the other things that we’re talking about. There is more competition out there. There is just more noise out there in terms of learning opportunities, getting people’s attention, getting people to actually pull out the figurative wallet or literal wallet and pay for learning experiences. And, increasingly, you have to be able to show that you’re having impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:45] We’ve been asking for years about the decision factors that influence whether a person is willing to pay to participate in an educational experience. And we’ve been asking this of different organizations and audiences for lifelong learning, members of a trade or professional association. We’ll survey that audience and ask about these decision factors. There’s one question that has been a top two or three decision factor for years now and is growing stronger and stronger. The way we describe this is “The activity has been shown to produce demonstrable improvements in knowledge or performance for those who take part.” And so we’re asking survey respondents where they rank that on a one-to-five scale, along with a number of other types of decision factors. Usually, number one is the subject matter expert, the instructor, or the facilitator—their reputation. But this response to whether it’s actually creating demonstrable improvement is generally ranked two or three consistently for years, so learners do care about this. They do want to know that learning experiences have impact.

Artificial intelligence, the experience factor, and the work/learn connection all have our attention because we expect them to be of continuing and growing importance in the learning landscape, and they warrant discussion and action in learning businesses.

Celisa Steele

Wrap-up: [00:27:36]

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Episodes on Related Topics* Chatting about ChatGPT and Learning Businesses * Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer * Revisiting the Learning Business Maturity Model™ * Access and Ability in Learning with Diane Elkins * A Practical Approach to Microlearning with Jack Coursen * 5 Cs to Power Up Your Portfolio * How and Why to Make a Learning Community * Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech * One Word: Impact * Leading Learning at 300 * Turning the Lens on Leading Learning Listeners * Curate, Create, Commission with Veronica Diaz

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Learning businesses can play a critical role in creating learning pathways for adults that account for the realities of their work and life. Christine Carpenter, senior vice president of engagement at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), has spent years working with diverse stakeholders to establish such pathways and supporting on- and off-ramps to education for adult learners.

CAEL is a nonprofit membership organization and leader in the field of adult learning on a mission to build a transformative, equitable culture of lifelong learning and economic empowerment for all adult learners.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Christine about CAEL’s focus on supporting the learner/worker and the related role of credit for prior learning (CPL), competency-based education (CBE), and microcredentials. They also discuss CAEL’s “Adult Learner Leaders for Institutional Effectiveness” (ALLIES) framework and why our collective success is ultimately determined by the individual adult learner’s success.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

CAEL’s Mission to Improve Learners’ Economic Mobility[01:54] – Tell us about CAEL what does and your role.

CAEL is rooted in a social justice movement focused on improving economic mobility for traditionally underserved learners. Specifically, their goal was to improve the education and career pathways for adult learners. And to do this but working with others from organizations that together could support adult learners, helping them navigate the on- and off-ramps of education and employment.

CAEL has close to 4,000 individual members, representing post-secondary institutions, workforce development organizations, and employers, who all support the vision that “every adult can navigate lifelong learning and career pathways that fuel social mobility and community prosperity.”

CAEL strives to provide services that support not just their members but also the stakeholders and partners they work to build a transformative and equitable culture of lifelong learning and economic empowerment for all adult learners.

In Christine’s many years at CAEL, she’s been working to cultivate strategic relationships that bring industry and education together. Those partnerships inform how employers, labor, workforce development organizations, and post-secondary institutions can work together to reimagine how education, work-based learning, and employment fit together in a lifelong pathway that integrates learning and work. In fact, CAEL’s tagline is “linking learning and work.”

Defining Adult Learners[04:13] – How do you define or describe the adult learners that CAEL serves?

Adult learners traditionally have been categorized as 25 years and older, but CAEL believes in a more inclusive understanding, and CAEL tries to view adult learners as they view themselves. That’s key to how CAEL works with its members and partners.

Primarily, adult learners don’t actually identify themselves as a student first. It’s long down in the list. First, they’re parents; they’re veterans; they’re workers. And so what we try to do is help broaden that perspective of adult learners in thinking of it as someone who is trying to basically get education to fit in their lifestyle versus the opposite.

Christine Carpenter

Education costs time and money, and adult learners have split their resources among many responsibilities with work and family.

[06:06] – What socioeconomic or key demographics beyond age factor into how CAEL thinks about the adult learners it serves?

There are a lot of first-generation college-level learners. There are also underserved learners who’ve faced economic barriers because they haven’t known how to look for and connect to financial aid.

CAEL wants to help everyone understand that the possibilities in helping adult learners with education or along career pathway. But everyone has to understand that these adult learners look at education as only one of their many responsibilities and not as the top one.

Supporting the Learner/Worker[07:26] – CAEL focuses adult learners supports them indirectly, by working with partners—post-secondary education providers, employers, industry groups, workforce development organizations, etc. How do you balance the needs of CAEL’s members and the needs of the adult learners themselves—are they ever at odds?

CAEL’s mission is to help diverse stakeholders find alignment. CAEL operates a the intersection of learning and work.

You can see that if the learner, and, in some cases, you can say learner/worker is at the center, then, how are education providers, employers, industry, and workforce development supporting the adult learner at the center? Because we put that learner/worker at the center of everything we do.

Christine Carpenter

Learning and work are part of the same ecosystem, and the learner/worker should be at the center of that ecosystem.

What the employers needs has to be supported by what the learning provider can offer. Adult learners spend their lives at that intersection of learning and work. When we support the learner/worker, we support the broader community and economic mobility. And then all the stakeholders—employers, post-secondary institutions, and the learner/worker—benefit.

Employers will continue to have upskilling and reskilling needs, and learner/works will need those skills. So there’s not much need to balance competing demands from different stakeholders; it’s more a matter of having the stakeholders see their collection role today and in the future.

Leading Learning Newsletter[11:24] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) and Prior Learning Assessment (PLA)[12:22] – CAEL has deep experience with credit for prior learning, or CPL (previously referred to as prior learning assessment, or PLA). What is CPL, and how does it work?****

CPL is a term for various methods that post-secondary and other education and training providers use to evaluate learning that has occurred outside of the traditional academic environment. Sometimes, it’s still referred to as PLA. Credit for prior learningCPL is a term for various methods that post-secondary and other education and training providers use to evaluate learning that has occurred outside of the traditional academic environment. Sometimes, it’s still referred to as PLA.

CAEL changed the term from CPL to PLA in 2022 because it wants learner/workers to understand that their previous experience can help them get credit, and the term assessment can be confusing to learner/workers.

To learn more about this change in terminology, check out “Using the Right Terms: Announcing CAEL’s Switch from PLA to CPL.”

Credit for prior learning is used to grant college credit, certification, or advanced standing towards furthering an individual’s education or training. CPL is very important in supporting adult learners. Returning to education after having started and left in the past can be very difficult for adults.

Research has shown that students who participate in CPL are more likely to complete college and that they save time and money while earning a degree. CAEL has set up processes, policies, and ways that learning providers and post-secondary institutions can embed CPL in their systems.

The sad truth is only about 10 percent of adult college students participate in CPL. CAEL wants to increase usage because research shows that CPL drives completion for all student demographics. CAEL wants to bring more structure to CPL because it knows the benefits of CPL for adult learners.

The Connection Between Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) and Competency-Based Education (CBE)[15:53] – What’s the connection between CPL and competency-based education (CBE)?

CPL and CBE complement each other, but they’re distinct. Both approaches prioritize positive learning outcomes over seat time and can save students time and money.

CPL values student experiences by awarding credit for those that demonstrate adequate college-level learning.

CBE focuses on student learning and the application of that learning—what they know and what they can do. A key component of CBE is understanding what the learner already knows in order to provide the most valuable skills and create a personalized path to a credential.

CBE also focuses on prior learning, allowing students to fit it into their personalized path.

CPL is embedded in a trusted methodology of how to translate knowledge and skills.

The combination of recognizing what someone already knows and can do along with a more flexible, personalized learning journey allows learners to gain value immediately and then progress towards a credential. This increases completion and can also increase employability rates because learners can then meet certain skill sets required by employers.

Both CPL and CBE are critical to individual mobility and the health of our economy.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE) and Credit for Prior Learning (CPL)[18:23] – CPL diversity, equity, and inclusion. Saving time and money broadens the pool of who can participate in a particular experience. What else would you say about the relationship between DEI and CPL?

Increasing CPL usage among underserved students represents a big opportunity. In one of CAEL’s research studies, adult Pell Grant recipients demonstrated greater than average completion boosts from using PLA/CPL programs, particularly Black adult Pell recipients.

Unfortunately, Black and lower-income adult students were least likely to receive CPL credit.

We have the research. We know that we can use this in a DEI role to lift barriers for lower-income students. We collectively have to do a better job of providing this upfront as an opportunity.

Christine Carpenter

The Role of Microcredentialing in Supporting Adult Learners[20:21] – How can microcredentialing support adult learners and potentially further DEI goals?

Microcredentialing is a great opportunity for learners to dip their toe in the education. Adult learners have growing concerns about the value of education.

They are concerned not only about the cost of a traditional degree program but also misalignment with the realities of work. It’s not surprising that adult learners favor flexibility and multiple access points.

Stackable credentials offer solutions in several ways:

Stackable credentials can be aligned with employer needs.
They don’t lock learners into a linear all-or-nothing trajectory.
Learners can complete courses and earn a digital badge that indicates their mastery of a specific skill.

CAEL has worked with employers who have embedded certain competencies and skills into the definition of the badge; then, when an individual who has that badge wants to work, the employer knows what she brings to the table.

Learners might focus on earning a certificate that then can be applied to finishing a bachelor’s degree—they look to stack credentials.

Microcredentialing works well with stackable credential and paves a way forward. Microcredentials give adult learner/workers educational on- and off-ramps. Employers will look for microcredentials that showcase a skill set because sometimes the skill sets underlying a full degrees aren’t as obvious.

Check out our related episode “Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech.”

ALLIES Framework[23:22] – What would you recommend to a learning business that wants to really support adult learners?

CAEL has research called the “Adult Learner Leaders for Institutional Effectiveness” (ALLIES) framework.

There are five primary themes inherent in maintaining a learning environment in which adult learners can flourish:

Affordability
Career connections and relevance
Academic empowerment
Student support
Diversity, equity, and inclusion

CAEL’s “Adult Learner Leaders for Institutional Effectiveness” (ALLIES) frameworkOpportunities and Challenges on the Horizon[26:47] – When thinking about CAEL’s work, what major opportunities and what major challenges do you see on the horizon?

Moving from this either/or to a both/and mindset, it’s a challenge, but yet it’s an opportunity. This can relate to a formal degree program versus the microcredential we talked about, STEM versus soft skills, workplace learning versus classroom learning. It really goes back to understanding that our collective success is ultimately determined by the individual adult learner’s success.

Christine Carpenter

There are huge opportunities for industry to engage more closely with post-secondary education providers and create credentials that today’s adult learners and employers need and desire. There’s a growing need for training that’s attractive to learners because of the likelihood of a future career payoff and flexible enough to let them complete their programs of study while balancing other life responsibilities.

Christine feels honored to work at the crossroads where stakeholders intersect and cooperate to support today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.

Lifelong Learning Habits[28:56] – What are some of habits, sources, and practices for your own lifelong learning?

One of the reasons Christine enjoys her work at CAEL is the organization operates on a philosophy that lifelong learning is important. Learning doesn’t end with one’s formal education. Learning is the core of what CAEL does and part of its DNA.

Christine embraces being a lifelong learner. She wants to improve her knowledge but also wants to improve her quality of life and sense of self-worth. The world is changing so rapidly that you have to consistently upskill to keep up with the latest knowledge.

It’s important to have a practice of learning, but Christine believes it’s most important to know why learning is important.

[34:12] – Wrap-up

Christine Carpenter is senior vice president of engagement at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. CAEL offers a variety of resources relevant to learning businesses, including a free newsletter and the ALLIES framework.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

The Future Is Learning with Heather McGowan
Walking the Path to Learning with Tiffany Crosby
The Future of Work with Michelle Weise
Curate, Create, Commission with Veronica Diaz

The post Centering the Learner/Worker with CAEL’s Christine Carpenter appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Regardless of your position, if you work in a learning business, you need to care about finding opportunities to grow revenue—AKA business development.

According to Sean Soth, chair of the Leadership Advisory Board for Professionals for Association Revenue (PAR), we are all in business development.

PAR is a professional member organization that works to support and connect association teams to the ideas and applications needed to grow revenue. PAR’s mission is to inspire revenue growth for association professionals through knowledge, resources, and community.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Sean about PAR’s origins and mission, revenue generation, revenue diversification, and the growing importance and relevance of the business development role in associations and other learning businesses.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

Professionals for Association Revenue (PAR)[01:30] – How did Professionals for Association Revenue get its start?

Sean and some like-minded association professionals created PAR in 2019 with the goal of helping association staff connect with others that build revenue and do business development, as Sean didn’t know of place to find those kinds of folks. PAR wants to move the needle on revenue and align business competencies with mission.

The Evolving Role of Business Development[02:21] – Do you feel like business development plays a more important role now in the association world than it has in the past? If yes, why?

If you think of a bell curve, the role of the association business developer is still on the starting point of the curve. The reason is the traditional association model. Associations typically prioritize and focus on the ongoing, sustainable revenue streams that have always existed. But the idea that there could be other enterprise-wide impact for associations is being recognized more.

The pandemic shook many associations. Some haven’t yet recovered, and some may not recover. There is a wonderful opportunity now to understand what corporations and other industries are doing to become sustainable.

There are opportunities for corporations, sponsors, and partners to engage with associations, and associations can provide workforce support to help move the needled in the industry they serve.

If you got 10 percent more out of your revenue programs moving into next year, what would that mean for your organization? What would that mean for bonuses to current staff, new programs, new ideas for membership, maybe giving scholarships? There are so many opportunities that prioritizing the strategy behind business development really allows. And those are some of the things that we’re seeing beginning to take shape. I’d say we’re just at the start.

Sean Soth

A Hunger for Revenue Diversification[05:21] – Are you seeing a hunger for revenue diversification?

PAR launched in January 2020, and its goal was to hold a meeting to bring people together that year. By March, COVID forced PAR to rethink.

A lot of associations have long searched for new ways to generate revenue. What PAR hopes to do is begin to understand not just what could be diversified but how and why to diverse revenue streams. How do organizations make sure that they’re supporting a business development function?

Business development isn’t purview of one or two people or even a team; the entire organization should be thinking about revenue.

Those are things that you’re going to see a big shift in over the next five to ten years in the association space. Associations need to stay competitive because there’s increased competition from the corporate side.

Challenges in Adding New Models of Revenue[08:09] – We don’t see a lot of people in charge of business development in associations. Why is that?

Associations have had the good fortune of recurring revenue streams from membership and attendance at events for many years. So it makes complete sense to invest energy in those areas…until they’re interrupted (thanks, COVID) or until organizations begin to understand new revenue options instead of doing the same thing over and over again.

Thinking about what new revenue options could mean for margin and mission is beginning to become more common in associations. There are business competencies to wrap around the things that associations are already doing well, which is bringing like-minded professionals interested in moving the needle on a mission-oriented objective.

Leading Learning Newsletter[10:47] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

Why PAR Uses a Membership Model[11:47] – Why did you create PAR as a membership organization?

In Sean’s career, he’s had the fortune of having some great education experiences that have helped form his approach as a professional. The most impactful of those involve engaging and talking with other people who do what he does.

PAR has a lot of members who work on non-dues revenue, and hearing them talk about the challenges they face, externally in the market and internally, is informative and helpful.

A lot of that comes down to how we’re sharing and learning with each other, and the community aspect of PAR is really what we wanted to do because we just felt like training seminars—anyone could do a training seminar, anyone could do a Webcast. And, of course, there are varying degrees. Some people do them amazingly well, but we wanted to be able to pull together people who were thought leaders in the market, thought leaders on business development competency, but also people who are living in the association world every single day. How can we all tie it together and help each other?

Sean Soth

A Business Development Mindset[14:05] – As PAR has grown, are there specific things you’ve tried from a business development standpoint to reflect what you think the best practices should be for a membership organization wanting to cultivate business development mindset?

Everyone on PAR’s Leadership Advisory Board has either led or currently leads a team that does business development. PAR has worked to create value as an association by looking at what its members are doing. Who’s doing the best job at membership sign-up? How can we reduce the friction needed for someone to join? PAR is focused on how to equip association workforces with business competencies and short- and long-term ideas that they can build into their organization.

The Role of Educational Programming in Business Development[15:57] – Educational events have experienced a lot of disruption. What’s your perspective on how educational programming potentially fits with the need for a greater emphasis on business development?

From a professional development standpoint, associations are uniquely positioned to not only educate members but also the industry at large as well. Sean is seeing more industry-facing programs that are meant to highlight member work in a way that invites industry audiences to be involved.

If you have high-performing members and corporate partners and you’re looking to attract similar members and sponsors, what better way than to introduce programming in that direction? Sean is seeing non-member-driven investment in market expansion, similar to what corporations do.

Some corporate partners have larger audiences than the associations they support, and they do that primarily through education for their customers.

[17:52] – Trade associations are getting into education, and individual member organizations are thinking about business-to-business relationships around their education. Business development is a challenge because you need somebody who can create relationships and then structure a deal that’s beneficial for everybody involved.

Customized learning has a bright future. Small, incremental changes in an organization’s learning and development strategy may allow them to reach new markets.

Sean is also seeing organizations develop pathways for experienced professionals.

Check out our related episode about developing pathways “Curate, Create, Commission with Veronica Diaz.”

The Value in Creating Pathways[20:33] – Forward-thinking organizations have been offering pathways for years. If you’re able to define pathways and then offer the education and learning experiences that help people walk down one of those paths, that’s incredibly valuable to the individual learner and the employer, particularly if you attach a credential to it.

There are so many different angles to develop your team, but you need to meet your individual talent where they are.

Sean believes boards will require more from staff from a revenue innovation standpoint, and it’s important to be ready with ideas.

RevUP Summit[23:05] – You launched the RevUP Summit at the end of 2022. What was it like getting a face-to-face event up and running in this emerging-from-the-pandemic world?

You have to take some risks, and this is where strategy should guide you.

From the start, PAR’s Leadership Advisory Board wanted to host a business-focused event to bring people together. And it was a lot of fun.

I think the one thing I can share is a lesson for anyone out there: it is hard to find some of the business-facing folks at an association because a lot of us don’t really think that we’re in business development. I would say that we all are in business development. The way we’re positioning our information and our message may just be what’s different. Putting together something that you believe in is worth the risk.

Sean Soth

Sometimes in associations, there are opportunities to incubate great ideas into something substantial that makes a difference. RevUP brought thought leaders together to have conversations, network, and meet, and PAR is excited to do it again in December 2023.

Lifelong Learning Habits[26:23] – What learning experiences, habits, and practices do you engage in to continue your own development, professionally and personally?

Sean admits he took his learning for granted for a long time. It wasn’t until he started working with the Association for Talent Development, which exposed him to some new ideas, that he started to stretch himself through learning.

PAR is the offshoot of an idea that it would be awesome to create business development leaders and leaders who understand business development. And what better way than to share with each other?

One thing that Sean’s done with his team since the pandemic is to read books together. They’ve read Good to Great, Made to Stick, The Power of Regret, and The Tipping Point. Each week Sean and his team tackle two chapters and share what they learned.

Check out our related episode on professional development books “Four Essential Career Books with Jerel Bonner.”

[30:04] – Wrap-up

Sean Soth is president of Hi-Fidelity Group and chairman of the Leadership Advisory Board for Professionals for Association Revenue.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts at https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

The Irresistible Episode—Now with Financial Modeling!
Reach, Revenue, and Impact
Growing Non-Dues Revenue with Sheri Jacobs

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All too often learning businesses focus solely on traditional educational offerings. But, by narrowly focusing on courses and conferences, learning businesses miss an opportunity to better understand their learners’ needs and to deliver more value.

One of the best ways to understand those needs and to provide additional value is through a learning community.

In this episode, we explore the concept of community, including what one is (and isn’t), the value one can offer, how to create or reinvigorate one, and approaches to pricing.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

[00:48] – It can be easy for learning businesses to focus on traditional offerings like courses and conferences. But there problems with that narrow focus:

There’s more competition than ever on the content side. Learners have more choices than ever about where to go to find information and a course.
People don’t always know what they don’t know, so sometimes they can’t identify appropriate content. But if they can see that your learning business focuses on their field, profession, or industry and that you can connect them with others, that signals that you can help them get savvier and smarter even if they don’t yet know what specific topics and knowledge they need.
They’re likely to move on after completing a course if you don’t have a way to provide ongoing connection and value. A learning community can be a way to provide that continued connection and value.

Defining Community[02:19] – To define community, we’ll start with what it isn’t.

Community isn’t simply having members.

Community isn’t just having discussion forums or listservs.

Community isn’t having followers on social media.

Community isn’t having a good e-mail list, even one with a great open rate and great click rates.

All of these can be part of what goes into building a vibrant community, but they, in and of themselves, are not community.

Community isn’t usually centralized, not even a two-way street. It’s really all sorts of one-to-one connections…different learners going to different learners, and it’s much more of a network rather than that broadcast and central hub sort of design.

Celisa Steele

To talk about what community is, let’s use a definition from Merriam-Webster, which describes community as being a “unified body of individuals.” There are multiple sub-definitions, which get into what it is that unifies that body of individuals. It could be shared geography, shared identity, shared interest, or a shared profession.

Communities need a unifying element, a thing that everybody is focused on.

A community needs to be more than transactional. Membership organizations sometimes talk about people who are “checkbook members,” people who write a check every year so they can be on the membership roster. But these people aren’t actually participating in a community.

In a real community, people feel it and know they’re a part. There’s an emotional connection and a sense of fellowship.

We want to focus on one specific kind of community: a learning community. In a learning community, one of the things that unite the individuals in that community is the desire to learn and to help others learn.

Why Learning Communities Are Valuable to Learning Businesses[06:38] – There are multiple reasons learning businesses should try to build and grow a vibrant community. Here are a few of the ways they can provide high value:

Communities are hard to replicate. If you have a strong community with a unifying principle, people feel an emotional attachment to it. It’s gone way beyond the transactional to being about relationships in that community, which is very hard for anybody else to replicate. So a community can be a huge strategic differentiator.
Learning communities tap into the human need for connection and interaction with others. We’ve talked recent on the podcast about the fact that the pandemic heightened our desire for social connection. But this hunger for social connection has been since before COVID. If you can provide a learning community, that’s going to help satisfy an innate desire that all humans have.

[10:01] –

If you’re leveraging community effectively, you’re tapping into an effective way to support learning. We talk a lot about learning not being an event.

In a community, you can put mechanisms in place that support accountability. Sometimes community members will do this for themselves, but a learning business can also build it into a community. Accountability can be a significant help in making sure that learners apply what they’ve learned to life or work.

Community is also a cheap form of personalization. You don’t have to have artificial intelligence because you have people supporting each other and getting and giving feedback through the interaction that naturally occurs in human community.

Learning is a process. It happens over time. It requires engagement and reengagement, repeatedly. And if you have a community where people can come in and get the support that they need at the times that they need it, where they’re going to be reminded of what their goals were and what they were trying to achieve, where they’re going to be able to get answers to questions, that’s going to support that learning on an ongoing basis and support learning as a process.

Jeff Cobb

Leading Learning Newsletter[12:30] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

[13:30] –

A community can fit nicely with the demands and realities of modern life and work. Again, COVID ramped up the upheaval, but we’ve been in a time of upheaval even before the pandemic. We’re living longer and changing jobs and careers more often. That means it’s much harder to know what we need to know. Even if we can figure out what we need to know, it can still be hard to find very specific content.

This brings to mind our recent conversation with Jen Lewi of School Nutrition Association (SNA). During COVID, SNAD had to stop what they’d been doing and pivot. SNA turned to its community and listened to their members to learn what was most important and helpful to them. * A community can provide invaluable market insight. You can use that insight to improve existing courses, events, and other products and to create new products and services. You can also use the insight to help improve the community itself.

Jeff’s book Leading the Learning Revolution mentions the example of Ned Campbell (at the Florida Institute of CPAs at that time), who had success by tuning into what getting traction and interest on the listservs.

Seth Godin says, “It’s harder to find people for your products than products for your people.” You don’t want to build it and hope learners come. It’s much better if they’ve come first, you hear what they have to say, and then you build something for them. And communities can be very powerful for the kind of market insight that will tell you what to build.

How to Create or Reinvigorate a Learning Community[17:50] – Many learning businesses, especially those embedded in trade and professional associations, have discussion forums already. Your organization may think it already has a learning community. But do you really? Again, having members, listservs, or discussion forums alone are not going to make a community.

One of the key characteristics of a true community is intentionality. You, as a learning business, need to be clear internally and with those in the community about why this community exists. That is you need to be clear on the community’s identity.

You’ll need to balance being broad enough to appeal to a critical mass with being specific enough for individuals to believe that your community offers something unique and valuable. Your intentionality will be reflected in the community’s identity.

The tension between being broad enough to reach a critical volume of people to participate in a community and being specific enough to get them engaged lies at the heart of many of the challenges that people creating communities face.

Think about the segments in your community, the sub-communities, that you may need. Consider a few things:

Where is the specificity that’s going to drive demand and pull people deeper into the community?
What can you reasonably support?
What can you provide value around?

All of this boils down to relevance. How are you being as relevant as possible for your community members?

We know that relevance is just fundamental. It’s so important for adult learners in general. It’s one of those core principles of andragogy that Malcolm Knowles pointed to. And that relevance applies to communities in spades.

Jeff Cobb

It can require a certain amount of trial and error to learn what’s truly relevant to your audience broadly and what’s going to be relevant more narrowly with specific sub-groups of your audience.

Relevance is not one-and-done—it takes repetition. You have to continually engage, listen, watch, and respond. It takes repeated exposure for the people in the community to realize that you have relevant content and resources. You need to continually put what you have in front of them.

[22:28] – Facilitation is another important aspect of community. You can’t simply put content out and expect people to come. You have to highlight different pieces of content and the value that you’re providing in the community.

On top of that, you also need to connect specific people with specific content.

Hopefully, you have facilitators who know something about the people who in the community and can help point them to what they’re going to value and what they need that exists in the community. Also, hopefully, you’re going to connect individuals with one another.

Facilitation is not one-and-done. You can’t do it once and have it too rote. We’re going to post a question every day and just expect that to suffice as facilitation. It really is going to have to be much more natural and customized and personalized to that community, so that you really are helping people to notice and take advantage of the value that exists in the community and then to add to that value that exists in the community.

Celisa Steele

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell writes about different types of people, connectors being one type. You need good connectors in your community who help individuals develop relationships that are deeper than what they had when they entered the community.

Also keep in mind that you’ll usually find relevant, valuable content that you highlight for the community in the community itself. You can highlight individuals’ successes and point out questions they’re asking. In general, content about the community is valuable content.

Check out our related episode “The Indispensable Community with Richard Millington.”

Facilitators should reward the behavior that you want. When individuals in your community post and share and connect with others, use your spotlight to point out those behaviors so that you can get others in the community to act similarly.

The goal is an organic community. Up front, you’ll probably have to provide a lot of facilitation and content. But you want to get to a self-sustaining community where most of the resources to keep it going exist in the community.

The Revenue Question and Business Models[25:32] – A natural question is whether you should charge for your community.

It depends on your mission as an organization and what your goals are for the learning community itself. There are multiple ways to charge:

Bake the cost of the community into something you already offer. In the case of membership organizations, access to the community could be part of what membership gets you.
Bundle access to the community with some another product. For example, learners might purchase a three-month-long course and, with it, get access to a community of peers.
Charge directly and separately. Being in the community costs individuals a certain amount for a certain period of time.

The “bundling with a course” option points out that a community doesn’t necessarily have to last forever. There can be short-term communities that are powerful and serve a time-limited purpose. Everything we’ve mentioned about relevance, connection, facilitation, and identity still applies.

The community could be a free offering that you treat as part of your content marketing. You let anyone into the community who fits whatever criteria you establish. Hopefully, they’ll see the value and expertise that you and others in the community have and, when they need education, they’ll look to you.

It may be that you start the community as a free offering and then convert into a paid community. If you already have a community now and don’t charge directly for it, that’s something you may want to consider. It can be a difficult transition to make, but we’ve seen groups make it.

When people pay something to be a part of a community, they tend to be more invested and engaged.

We believe in charging appropriately for the value you create. If you create a significant amount of value through your community, make sure that’s showing up somewhere in the streams of revenue for your learning business.

[29:44] – Wrap-up

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Tool Talk: Social Learning Mixer
Product Development and Learning Communities with James Young
The Indispensable Community with Richard Millington
Cultivating Communities with Rachel Happe of Community Roundtable

The post How and Why to Make a Learning Community appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming how we all live, work, and learn. It will undoubtedly impact every industry, redefining how leaders in the business of lifelong learning need to think and act. One company helping organizations, particularly marketers, do this is Marketing AI Institute.

Marketing AI Institute’s mission is to make artificial intelligence approachable and actionable. And leading that mission is founder and CEO, Paul Roetzer. Paul is co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business as well as the creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON) and the AI Academy for Marketers.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Paul about his definition of artificial intelligence, why he thinks we’re at a tipping point with AI, the 5Ps of marketing AI, and use cases where a learning business looking to leverage AI for marketing might focus first.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

Curiosity About Artificial Intelligence[01:21] – Tell us about Marketing AI Institute and your role.

Paul’s educational background isn’t related to artificial intelligence, but he was curious and felt he had an opportunity to help other people make sense of AI and its implications. That was the origin of Marketing AI Institute.

Today it’s a media event and education company that makes AI approachable and actionable to marketers, primarily, but more and more its businesses as a whole.

[02:43] – What first got you interested in AI in 2011?

IBM Watson won on Jeopardy in February 2011. That intrigued Paul, and he wanted to figure out how it worked.

He had a very specific use case in mind—whether you could use AI to build smarter marketing strategies.

Defining Artificial Intelligence[04:18] – How do you define “artificial intelligence”?

Many don’t understand what AI is or agree on a definition. Paul spent years trying to find a definition that he thought made sense and that could be explained to non-technical people. He came across a definition from Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, an AI research lab that Google purchased in 2014:

AI is the science of making machines smart.

Think of the software you use to do your job. It never gets better unless new features are released in the software, and then you have to learn how to use the new features. The software never does anything that you don’t tell it to do. Most software we use in marketing, sales, business, and learning is human-powered. Humans write the rules to tell the software what to do.

AI is the science of making machines (or software) smart, so that the software learns on its own. It adapts and evolves what it does and what you’re capable of doing based on information it gathers. Rather than telling the software what to do, AI can learn from new information, and it can improve its recommendations, predictions, and output based on that information.

A Tipping Point in AI[07:00] – You’ve talked about it as being a tipping point in AI (this interview was recorded in February 2023). Explain what you mean by that and why you think we are at a tipping point.

Paul thought we reached an inflection point in the middle of 2022 when OpenAI released DALL-E 2, an image generation technology. It was free initially, and then it was $15 a month. You could give a text prompt, and it would generate an image. That was an important turning point because DALL-E 2made AI tangible.

We use AI dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day with Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Google, etc., but we don’t think of it as using an AI tool.

DALL-E was the first moment where anyone could use an AI tool and be in awe.

Then, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT came out, and it blew DALL-E out of the water. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer technology in history. It was the right tool at the right moment with the right interface.

But it changed everything. The average person now knows what ChatGPT is, and people from all walks of life and all business backgrounds have tried it. I get the texts from family and friends that I didn’t even know knew I worked in AI about like “I used this tool, and, oh, my gosh, do I have a job in six months?” It changed everything. It made AI accessible and, to some degree, understandable.

Paul Roetzer

Marketing AI[10:04] – How would you characterize the current state of marketing AI, and where you see marketing AI headed?

For a few years, Paul has said that in three to five years at least 80 percent of the things marketers do every day would be intelligently automated to some degree. Recently, he’s changed that prediction to the next two to three years.

And Paul thinks even that revised estimate might be conservative. It’s not unrealistic to think that in one to two years, 90+ percent of what we do will be assisted by AI.

ChatGPT changed the urgency for other major companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon to release the AI that they have sitting in their research labs.

In the very near future, AI is going to be baked into every customer relationship management (CRM) system and will assist writing. We’re going to see an accelerated adoption curve for AI in a lot of technology.

Sponsor: WBT Systems[12:35] – We’re grateful to WBT Systems for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast.

TopClass LMS provides the tools for you to become the preferred provider in your market, delivering value to learners at every stage of their working life. WBT Systems’ award-winning learning system enables delivery of impactful continuing education, professional development, and certification programs.

The TopClass LMS team supports learning businesses in using integrated learning technology to gain greater understanding of learners’ needs and behaviors, to enhance engagement, to aid recruitment and retention, and to create and grow non-dues revenue streams.

WBT Systems will work with you to truly understand your preferences, needs, and challenges to ensure that your experience with TopClass LMS is as easy and problem-free as possible. Visit leadinglearning.com/topclass to learn how to generate value and growth for your learning business and to request a demo.

Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business[13:37] – You co-authored a book published June 2022 called Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business. What prompted you to write it, and what do you hope to achieve with it?

Paul initially tried to write the book in 2018. He was clear on the beginning of the book (how we had arrived at where we were with this 70-plus-year-old technology that is AI).

But he realized he didn’t know the middle part of the story—how AI was being used in the moment. Looking for examples and talking to software companies, marketers, chief marketing officers (CMOs), and other marketers, Paul had a “Fermi paradox” moment. Fermi looked out at the universe and said, “Where’s all the intelligent life? We have all these stars, all these galaxies, and yet nothing.” That’s how Paul felt about AI. It seemed like it should be everywhere, yet everywhere he looked, it wasn’t.

This made Paul think he couldn’t write the book yet because he wasn’t sure if the story was there yet. Then in 2021, he read Genius Makers by Cade Metz, which made clear why the Fermi paradox moment was happening for him in 2018, and why the tech wasn’t there yet. The breakthroughs hadn’t happened yet that have enabled what we’re now seeing today.

By late 2021, Paul was ready to take a shot at telling the story because he thought it was critical for the industry and the business world at large that a more approachable, non-technical text existed that was written for marketers and business leaders. The challenge was how to write something knowing the technology was going to make parts of the text obsolete almost immediately. He made a strategic and intentional effort to write a book that would stand the test of time.

AI Limitations and Opportunities [16:54] – What are some of the primary hurdles, obstacles, and risks to AI? What are some of the biggest advantages and opportunities if organizations embrace and use AI to develop, promote, and sell their learning products and services?

Limitations and ObstaclesThere are limitations in the technology itself because AI doesn’t know facts. Currently, ChatGPT has no idea of facts. It’s not connected to the Internet, and it doesn’t have knowledge of anything new since the end of 2021. The models work by predicting words, so they have no idea of facts and no context in which to process information.

There’s both an unrealistic expectation and underestimation of what AI is capable of doing. People don’t understand the breadth of the impact AI is going to have on learning, marketing, sales, services, product development, learning management systems, etc. Some of the limitations are that people just haven’t built it yet.

Then there are more macro-level limitations. Some of the big organizations have more advanced technology but won’t release it because of fears of misuse, bias, and ethical concerns about the responsible use of AI.

There’s also the internal issue of very few people truly understanding AI. There’s a massive lack of understanding and education in all industries. This is a fundamental problem because nobody on the business side really understands it, and that makes it heard to build business strategies around.

Advantages and Opportunities[21:03] – Right now, there’s a first-mover advantage to figure AI out before everybody else because this will produce not incremental but magnitude gains. In May 2022, Paul wrote a thesis that said “the future of business is AI or obsolete.” The basic premise is that every business in every industry will either on of these three:

AI-native
These are new companies built from the beginning with AI in mind to be smarter.
AI-emergent
These are established organizations that move quickly to infuse AI into the marketing, sales, services, products, and other aspects of their business to make it smarter.
Obsolete
These organizations are irrelevant. It won’t happen overnight, but over time their ability to remain competitive will crumble.

Paul sees the opportunity for those that become AI-emergent:

[Y]ou don’t have to flip a switch and become all AI overnight. You don’t have to solve all of this right away. But you can learn the fundamentals of this stuff applied to business in your industry, in your focus, in weeks. You don’t have to go back to school. You don’t need a degree in this stuff. It’s just learning to look at problems differently, learning to look at how to run your business in a smarter way.

Paul Roetzer

The 5Ps of Marketing AI[23:16] – Can you explain the 5Ps of marketing AI?

Planning
Production
Personalization
Promotion
Performance

Back in 2016 and 2017 when Marketing AI Institute was getting started, they were trying to categorize vendors of AI technology. They started seeing five buckets where the technology fit.

Paul has never felt those five buckets were always going to be the way to categorize everything, but it helped him in the early days develop clarity around the different macro-level ways AI could be applied in business. They’ve continued to reference the 5Ps, but they aren’t fundamental today to how they position AI.

Getting Started with Marketing AI[26:26] – If a learning business is looking to get started with leveraging AI to help it market its educational products and services, what would you recommend? Are there obvious places or use cases to start with?

Paul recommends starting with smarter, more intelligent, automated versions of what you’re already doing. The best way to look at it is using a use case model. In a spreadsheet, list the technical things you do to create or market your courses. Look at how many hours a month you spend doing those things, the tech you’re using, and how much you’d value having AI help with it. If you’re investing a bunch of time in something, that might be a good place to start.

So start with what you already do. The easiest way to understand the impact of AI is to look at a current workflow or process. Pick very tangible things where you can be clear on whether it worked or not. Don’t get a bunch of AI tools just to say you’re using AI.

[29:28] – Is picking use cases where you’re spending a lot of time and thinking about an AI tool that might help you reduce that effort how you get to be an AI-emergent business?

That’s how you start, but there are two parallel paths.

One is the use case model, which Paul thinks about as quick wins with very narrow specific use cases. He recommends you do them in four-month sprints. Give yourself 30 days to assess the use case, evaluate a few different technologies, pick the tech to use, and get onboarded. Then allow 90 days to run it and see if it worked or not.

Then you either keep the AI tech or get rid of it at the end of 90 days.

Maybe you’ll build to having two or three of these use-case projects going on simultaneously. You’re constantly testing, not committing long term.

The second path is a problem-based model. This is where you look at larger-scale issues in your organization. Look at problems, and then figure out if there’s a smarter way to solve them using AI.

You want to walk both paths. You want to have quick wins with the use cases, and you want to work on bigger problems. Paul generally advises one to two bigger-problem projects per year per business function.

[31:47] – How would a learning business help its team understand what they need to know to start leveraging AI for marketing?

This is the problem they’ve been trying to solve at Marketing AI Institute. They’ve thought through the learning journey of someone being asked to figure out AI for the company. They’ve tried to devise step-by-step learning journeys for those people.

You’re going to need (particularly if you’re a bigger team) some dedicated AI internal training program. That could be a collection of existing paid and/or free online resources.

When piloting the “AI for Marketers” course (which Marketing AI Institute created as a step-by-step journey and launched in December 2022), they had a lot of individual learners trying to figure AI out for themselves because they saw an opportunity. Then they start to see organizations looking at leveling up everyone.

Again, we’re talking about online learning and learning professionals here. We all get it. You can go after the individuals and try and create change agents, or sometimes you get lucky and you get the people who have the vision to transform organizations and teams. I think we’re at the stage with how quickly this is all going to move. People have to have a vision to transform and upskill teams. It’s going to be essential. You can’t hire these people. You have to upskill people.

Paul Roetzer

Lifelong Learning Habits[34:33] – Do you have habits, practices, or resources that you draw on for your own lifelong learning? And what role does AI play in your learning?

Paul is a huge believer in the importance of ongoing learning. After college, once he found a purpose, he became intentional about he learned. He reads a lot, and his learning includes a heavy mix of audio books and podcasts. Audio books force him to learn in downtime. Then, if the book is good, Paul buys the digital version, rereads it, highlights and makes notes, and then exports the notes to synthesize them and uses that for inspiration.

Twitter is Paul’s primary learning vehicle for AI because many of the leading AI researchers and scientists are active there. He connects a lot of dots about the state of AI and where it’s going by listening to what they’re saying and then trying to understand why they’re saying it.

[37:21] – Anything else before we wrap up?

We’re talking to people who teach for a living and help other people learn. To me, curiosity is the key to learning, and it is absolutely the key to understanding AI. If you have some level of curiosity—maybe this is the first time you’re really sitting down and listening to something about AI—just pick the part of it that seems fascinating to you and pursue that thread. You don’t have to learn all this stuff. You don’t have to be able to give a talk like this or anything. Just find the part that’s relevant to your domain and pursue it. Pick one thing, and I think you’ll find that it probably holds a world of potential for you in your business.

Paul Roetzer

[38:12] – Wrap-up

Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Chatting about ChatGPT and Learning Businesses
AI, Data, and Optimism with Donald Clark
Learntech: The Next Generation
Putting Foresight – and Artificial Intelligence – First with Jeff De Cagna – Part I

The post Marketing AI with Paul Roetzer appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Content alone is usually not enough to stand out and make your learning business as useful and as successful as it can be. You usually need something else to supplement or enhance your content.

That’s why we’ve identified five areas—what we’re calling the 5 Cs—to strategically build on the content that a learning business already has.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, we share those 5 Cs to help you enhance or repackage your existing products and services: coaching, cohorts, community, chunking, and credentials. We also explain how to power up your portfolio in each of those areas to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your content.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

[01:43] – Let’s talk about each of the five Cs in more detail. (Note there’s no particular order to these.)

CoachingCoaching is one of those approaches that we’ve seen a lot of over the past year or two. In the corporate world, there’s a lot of talk about it. If you follow somebody like Josh Bersin, he’s been posting about coaching and talking about it as something to be layered onto corporate learning and development. He suggests that coaching should really cascade to most levels of the corporate environment, not only to executives.

So, your average person in the company who is getting other types of training should also get some coaching to help them really understand their learning challenges. And then how to rise to those challenges with a plan or to develop personally with the aid of traditional learning, but with this coaching as part of it.

There are a couple of advantages that are, almost by definition, baked into coaching:

Personalization. Often, but not always, coaching is one-on-one, so you have that personalization baked right in that’s going to help that coaching be as useful to the coachee as possible.

The doing aspect of learning. If coaching is coupled with a training course, you’re learning certain concepts, but then with the help of a coach, you can dig into how to apply it to your specific situation. The coach is also there as a resource to help hold that learner accountable for doing some of the doing that we know is central to learning, resulting in behavior change.

I think that’s so important because people just very often need the support, they need the accountability, they need the kind of guardrails that are going to help them along. It’s all fine and well to sit through a webinar or go through a course—you acquire some new information. But…if you’re not actually applying that information, if you’re not actually practicing those new skills, putting that knowledge into action, you’re not going to absorb it; you’re not going to integrate it; you’re not really going to learn it.

Jeff Cobb

[05:01] – Personalization has been a buzzword for a long time. Many people hear that and immediately think of machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc.

But traditional coaching—low-tech where you have an actual human being interacting with another human being, helping move the learner towards those goals—that’s within the reach of any organization that can handle the logistics around making it happen.

This can be a premium offering. If you’re offering traditional events or classroom or online-based learning, you could layer a coaching component onto that. Adding that coaching component can be an additional source of revenue and a new way to form and grow relationships with your subject matter experts.

In a recent podcast episode, we were joined by learning business leader and executive coach, Jen Lewi of School Nutrition Association to discuss the various ways that learning businesses can add coaching to their portfolio. She also wrote an article about this published on our site, Six Ways to Add Coaching to Your Learning Mix.

Coaching doesn’t have to be a standalone offering; it can also be coupled with a specific training course or program. This approach to coaching would fall under the mentorship umbrella, and there are a lot of learning businesses that have embraced that and tried to figure out how to do it.

Some other advantages of coaching are that it really connects people and there’s a fundamental human-to-human component to it, which people perceive as a benefit.

We’ll note there is a kind of corollary in the different worlds of learning that we serve through Tagoras. On the Leading Learning side, our audience would probably look at adding coaching into what they’ve traditionally done.

But with our Learning Revolution audience, primarily entrepreneurial experts, many of them have been coaches for years and now they’re adding in the educational, more traditional course component.

This points to the fact that education courses are a natural fit with coaching. So if you offer one, you probably want to think about offering the other because they do have ways of supporting each other and deepening the learning experience.

Sponsor: WBT Systems[09:13] – We’re grateful to WBT Systems for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast.

WBT Systems will work with you to truly understand your preferences, needs, and challenges to ensure that your experience with TopClass LMS is as easy and problem-free as possible. Visit the TopClass We site to learn how to generate value and growth for your learning business and to request a demo.

Cohorts[10:15] – Cohorts are again, about the people part of learning. In this case, there may be a type of coaching or at least a facilitation-type element of this, coming from an expert. But it’s also about peers learning together, supporting each other, and generating a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts by going through a learning experience as a cohort of learners.

Cohorts provide that same human-to-human benefit that we mentioned with coaching. This is a chance for a learner to interact with peers and hear how they’re applying the knowledge or skills that are being taught, and then make the leap to see how to apply it in their own work.

There are a lot of parallels between coaching and cohorts and the benefits that we see. But with coaching, the person doesn’t necessarily have any expertise or knowledge in whatever domain or subject matter is being taught.

With cohorts, you do have the idea that you’re all in it together, grounded in the same content, and that you’re going to help hold each other accountable.

I think that there can be a lot that’s attractive about that accountability, about helping to keep one another on course, that can be appealing to individuals in the current day and age where, yes, there’s a lot of convenience that goes with self-paced learning, but there’s also a lot that you can feel like you’re missing. You can sort of feel like you’re off on your own—learning—and that no one else is really aware of it, paying attention, or helping to keep you going. With a cohort, you have those resources in your peers to help drive your own learning.

Celisa Steele

Cohorts are obviously not anything new. It’s been going on forever in traditional classroom-based learning and even in online learning. But cohort-based approaches started getting a new breath of life back probably around 2021 when we were in the midst of the pandemic with everybody moving online.

People started realizing we can structure some really meaningful learning experiences by taking people through them in a cohort. It’s no accident that probably one of the bigger platform splashes to happen in the last year is the founders of Udemy spun out into a platform called Maven, specifically built for cohort-based courses.

They have a training and onboarding program to help people with expertise who want to create cohort-based courses, to be able to create highly interactive, human-centered courses. Again, this is a personalized-type experience because you’ve got this group of peers interacting with each other, and each of them is able to get out of it what they need for their particular place in their career, for their particular experience, while also helping the others get out of it what they need.

We expect to see a lot more of this, and it’s probably less a matter of how to do it. Most people intuitively understand how to do a cohort-based offering, but it’s about how to become an expert as a learning business in running them.

Just as with coaching, there are a lot of different types and flavors of cohorts. They can be shorter, longer, and they can be a mix of different online and/or in-person options.

Check out our recent interview with Shelley Osborne of Modal Learning (and former CLO at Udemy) about cohort-based learning.

Community[16:11] – This also ties to the social aspect that we’ve highlighted around coaching and cohorts. We’re already seeing signs of this being a very important one out there, mostly because the platform companies are starting to tune into it.

For example, in Thinkific’s annual digital learning report, one of the biggest current trends that they identified was “community-first learning.” This is the idea that the learning community is the basis of whatever else you might be doing with them in terms of offering courses or other types of learning opportunities.

One of the more recent mergers/acquisitions that we saw in the association world, was between the more traditional learning management system platform, Web Courseworks and Forj, an AI-driven community platform.

There’s a lot of buzz in the broader world about user experience within the association world about member experience. At the core of that is about how to create opportunities and value from people being connected to each other in a community. We’re seeing platform companies look at that to see where they can create learning-driven community and community-driven learning.

We’ve seen this interest in the connection between community and learning, which has existed for many years. But we are getting to the point with it where we’re figuring out how to make it less clunky.

I think we’ve seen the cordoned-off discussion area for people enrolled in a course, but it could sort of feel like an area people wouldn’t necessarily go to, naturally. So I think there’s this idea of—how can we make that community that is tied to a learning course also just feel like it’s a more organic and a more natural part of an exchange that people might be having with others around a particular topic?

Celisa Steele

The platforms are getting better at how to connect these two pieces that were traditionally handled in two different platforms to provide a better user experience. The more cohesion we can see there, the easier that gets to manage and to be better as an end-user experience.

Check out our related episodes “Cultivating Communities with Rachel Happe of Community Roundtable” and “The Indispensable Community with Richard Millington.”

Chunking[20:04] – Primarily, the trend/buzz around something like microlearning, is driving this fourth C of chunking and getting things into smaller, bite-sized learning objects to work with. But it’s more than that.

It’s also because, regardless of whether you’re doing microlearning, we know from learning science and what the data tells us, that getting things down into meaningful, concise chunks is so important. It might be an hour learning experience, but if you can pivot every 10 minutes to some degree to keep the learner’s attention, to bring a point home just in terms of design, that chunking is so important.

It’s something that organizations can go back to content they already have and think: Are there some opportunities for re-engineering this? Are there some opportunities for carving out some chunks from things, maybe making some microlearning opportunities? But then, also going forward: How do we work with our subject matter experts? How do we design ourselves in ways that our content is more chunked, is more digestible, is going to be more in line with what we know works from a learning science standpoint and, also, just what learners increasingly seem to want and expect?

Jeff Cobb

This also ties to personalization because if we have smaller chunks, whether they are freestanding microlearning units or if they are clearly labeled and segmented sections of a larger learning program, that enables the learner to skip straight to the content they need. This also then ties to motivation because learners are going to be more interested if it’s something that they know they want or need to learn about.

If you haven’t gotten serious about chunking yet, now is definitely the time. It can open up new business model opportunities to small bites of content put into a subscription package, potentially instead of, or in addition to your traditional course experience. You could also use it as a form of content marketing.

Check out our related episodes and resources about learning science and chunking:

Designing Content Scientifically with Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra Roldan
Revisiting Adult Learning Theory
7 “Must Dos” for Maximizing Webinar Value
Brain Rules by John Medina (popularized the idea of chunking in 10-minute segments)
Presenting for Impact – A free training we developed that includes this concept of chunking for subject matter experts who want to create more educationally impactful presentations.

Get review access to our free training for presenters.Credentials[24:56] – We’ll clarify that for us, “credentials” is the umbrella term. Certifications, digital badges, or even a PDF certificate of completion would fall under the credentialing umbrella.

What we want to talk about around credentials is this idea that, for the most part, learners, and other stakeholders, such as employers, want a learning experience to clearly signal certain accomplishments, skills, and knowledge. A credential is a way to sort of package that up.

Credentials have always been important, one of the main ones in the past being various types of degrees that people have earned at colleges and universities, and various types of certifications that they’ve earned in different industries.

But the need for newer, alternative types of credentials is growing pretty rapidly as we’ve seen disruption in the workforce and the employment market over the last few years. Also, the last few decades, as people are switching jobs, even entire careers more often, what they have to do is changing rapidly. They’re having to reskill and upskill.

The learners generally appreciate having some form of proof of learning and validation that they have gotten this new skill. This also provides value in the employment market. Employers like to see proof of a specific skill if they’re going to consider a person for a job and a credential is one of the most logical ways to do that.

Check out our related episode “Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech.”

There’s also an overlap between chunking and credentials because in large part, where we’ve seen the most demand is for smaller credentials. It’s about how to get the skills and knowledge you need to be able to do something specific in the near term. This relates to the need for upskilling and reskilling and to make sure that you are able to do your job and do it well in the current economy. Or if your job ends, being able to pivot and move into a different position.

These smaller credentials really help with that because as a learner you can invest a relatively small amount of time and money compared to say going back to school to get a graduate degree in a different field.

Like everything we’ve been talking about here, there are business model implications that credentials bring with them. They are a way to potentially make your learning experiences more valuable and help with demand generation.

We know from our many years of research that having some sort of a credential is going to drive the need for CE and learning enrollments, both online and off. If you don’t have that, you don’t necessarily have a great demand driver there for the learning that you’re offering, even if there isn’t a requirement in your market right now.

If you can figure out some potential credentials to offer around specific knowledge or skill sets that you can possibly bundle together and then maybe layer some coaching or do it as a cohort, that’s how to power up your portfolio.

These can just be good solid assessment-based credentials with some coursework, rather than full-blown certifications. Often, you already have the courses or the content that could form the core of the credential. You just need to build a few other components around it and then actually name the credential and make it issuable, and suddenly, you’ve really added to your potential for demand generation around the learning content that you’re offering.

This is a great way to power up your portfolios to get some credentialing in there that’s meaningful. Attaching that to your learning and then being able to charge for that, you’re going to be able to drive more demand.

[30:21] – Wrap-Up

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

At the Intersection of Coaching and Learning with Jen Lewi
Cohort-Based Learning with Shelley Osborne
Cultivating Communities with Rachel Happe of Community Roundtable
The Indispensable Community with Richard Millington
Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech

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It’s critical that learning business professionals pay careful attention to the research they create and the research they rely on for making decisions. This means asking questions, knowing the research methods used, and understanding the limitations of the data. But, because most of us aren’t trained in research, this can be a challenge.

That’s why Elizabeth Engel, chief strategist at Spark Consulting, and Polly Karpowicz, a seasoned association consultant, co-authored “Caveat Emptor: Becoming a Responsible Consumer of Research.” Their goal in writing the white paper was to help associations and others to be better informed about the research they use and to remain trusted, unbiased sources of information for the audiences they serve.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Elizabeth and Polly about primary versus secondary research, qualitative and quantitative research, mixed research methods, the ethics of using people in research, and bias. They also discuss data validity, reliability, and statistical significance, and they share valuable tips for the responsible consumption and production of research.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

[01:54] – How do you engage with organizations, and what does working with you entail?

Polly and Elizabeth both worked for the American Political Science Association in the past.

With over 25 years of experience, Polly is skilled in understanding how all the pieces fit together because she was spread between many different departments. Polly helps associations that need insight related to research.

Elizabeth spent the first 15 years of her career as an association executive working for professional and trade associations of different sizes. During that time, she wore a wide variety of hats, often at the same time. But the thread through all her positions was always membership.

Elizabeth launched Spark Consulting to provide soup-to-nuts membership work for associations, from big-picture strategy to member-value proposition work, structure work, recruitment and retention campaigns, and membership audits.

“Caveat Emptor: Becoming a Responsible Consumer of Research”[04:26] – You co-authored the white paper “Caveat Emptor: Becoming a Responsible Consumer of Research.” What compelled you to write this, and why does it matter?

At Spark Consulting, Elizabeth has been writing white papers, so this one in a series. “Caveat Emptor” is number 14, and all the white papers have been collaborative efforts.

We interviewed Elizabeth along with Shelly Alcorn in episode 44 and discussed their white paper “The Association Role in the New Education Paradigm.”

Elizabeth decided to provide a white paper on research because executives, broadly speaking, are tasked with using existing research and generating original research every day for their organizations. The issue is that most lack formal training in research methods, and so there’s a lot of not-great research out there.

To quote the white paper, “Good research does not guarantee good decisions,” but it certainly helps, “and bad research, barring getting lucky and guessing right, almost inevitably leads to bad decisions.”

When we think about associations, we are viewed by our audiences as trusted, unbiased sources of information for those audiences that we serve. And providing quality research products is critical to remaining worthy of that trust.

Elizabeth Engel

Elizabeth and Polly took on this white paper because they want to help executives and professionals be more informed about what constitutes sound research. This can then help those individuals better evaluate the research and make better decisions in service to their members, customers, stakeholders, and constituents. They can also make better decisions in service to their organization’s mission and remain worthy of those constituents’ trust.

An Information Literacy Problem[07:15] – What are your theories on why we have an information literacy problem? Is this an intractable problem, or are we making progress?

Elizabeth agrees that there is an information literacy problem worldwide. She’s written a white paper on content curation with Hilary Marsh of Content Company, “Cut Through the Clutter: Content Curation, Associations’ Secret Weapon Against Information Overload.”

In that white paper, they cite research undertaken by a team at Stanford University on information literacy. No one did well assessing the validity of information sources. The Stanford team looked at everyone from middle school students to college students and trained researchers. Of all the various groups they looked at, the only group that did well in information literacy was professional fact-checkers.

There’s declining trust in institutions and in gatekeepers of information.

We’re also presented with a huge volume of information, which makes it difficult to take the time to assess quality.

We also have a fragmented media landscape with some intentionally bad actors blurring the lines between journalism and propaganda.

Social media has been a pernicious influence.

There’s a lot going that people have to deal with to ensure they get good information from good sources.

[10:21] – Polly shares that they want to help readers understand that applying information literacy skills is an essential part of becoming more responsible consumers and producers of research.

As organizations producing research, learning businesses need to ensure they conduct research appropriate and talk about it appropriately so that they can help those who consume their research understand what they’re looking at.

The ability to discern reliable research is essential for all works today. Being able to talk about that research is also essential.

It really touches on both sides of understanding what you’re reading, but also being able to tell a story about the research that you’ve found somewhere else or that your organization is creating. It really is something we all need to know. It’s no longer the case we can say, “It’s not my job. It’s someone else’s.” It’s just now an essential part of being a professional today.

Polly Karpowicz

Sponsor: WBT Systems[12:26] – We’re grateful to WBT Systems for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast.

Key Methods of Research[13:26] – What are some of the key research methods that responsible consumers need to be aware of? How are they different, particularly in terms of the types of results that we can reasonably be expected to get from them?

The white paper goes into this in more detail, but two of the major category distinctions are the following:

Quantitative and qualitative researchSurveys yield quantitative data while interviews and focus groups can provide qualitative research.
Primary or secondary researchPrimary research involves an original, formal study that you create yourself. Secondary research makes use of studies and information that someone else conducted or collected.

All methods have pros and cons.

Pros of quantitative research include the fact that you can have a high degree of confidence in the results if you’ve constructed and administered your survey well. Surveys are relatively cost-effective and quick, so they can get you definite answers in a resource-friendly way.

Cons of quantitative research (e.g., surveys) including their inflexibility, the risk of a number of types of bias, and a lack of explanation about why things are the way they are or why people chose the answers they chose.

Pros of qualitative research including the ability to get at people’s “why.”

Cons of qualitative research include the lack of numerical certainty and its resource-intensiveness.

Conversations are subject to two particular types of bias:

Hawthorne effect
Social desirability

[16:56] – When you consider whether to pursue primary or secondary choice for research, there are also pros and cons.

The main pro of primary research is that you design the study. You get to ask the specific, exact questions you want answered.

Cons of primary research include its resource-intensive nature. There are also some ethical considerations involved in doing research that involves people (detailed in the white paper).

Pros of secondary research include being able to leverage existing effort and resources. Secondary research is often a good fit for background research and familiarizing yourself, in broad strokes, with what’s going on in a particular field of study or area.

Cons of secondary research include the fact that it may not answer your specific questions and the fact that it may not be trustworthy, which brings us back to the problem of information literacy. You have to vet the quality of sources if you’re going to use secondary research.

The secret sauce is to mix your methods. All methods have pros and cons, but they can often offset one other.

Mixed Data for Meta-Analyses[18:47] – Are you seeing greater use of meta-analyses, where people take many different secondary research studies and rolling them up?

Elizabeth says yes, and one of drivers is the increasing number of publicly available data sets. There are all kinds of governmental and non-governmental data you can access.

We also have more computing power to help us interpret large data sets.

Even if you haven’t been trained as a data analyst, there are user-friendly tools that allow you to bring in data from different sources and combine those sources into one whole. But then you don’t have to worry just about trusting one source—you have to trust multiple sources.

Potential Roadblocks to Reliable Research[20:26] – What tends to go wrong when conducting research and when interpreting research (for example? It’s easy to access publicly available data sets, but using it reliably is another matter entirely.

It’s easy to become excited about finding a data point you’re looking for and to want to jump ahead in applying it. Or you’re under pressure to rush ahead and start planning or designing research right away.

Polly recently left a position where she had the privilege of being the person in between the researchers and clients on research projects.

Resist the urge to jump ahead. It’s better to first understand the research you’re looking at. Look at the methods if you’re looking at something that’s already produced. If you’re doing original (primary) research, then carefully lay the groundwork before you start doing any research.

Common areas that can go wrong include bias, and you can have problems with validity and significance.

ValidityValidity helps us understand whether we can stand behind our research or not. Validity signals whether the data that we’re looking at is real and accurate.

Problems with validity can arise essentially anywhere in the research, including the design of research and the data collection. If there is a validity issue (whether we are asking the wrong people or certain questions are flawed), it can cause issues with the results, making the data potentially untrustworthy, outdated, unclear, or prematurely collected.

The most egregious kind of validity issues are related to fabricated or falsified data.

Reliability[24:09] – When we choose a research method or approach that can provide consistent results, it’s replicable and therefore reliable. If we take that same instrument and ask the same kinds of people originally asked, we should get the same general results. That’s reliability.

When you put validity and reliability together, you can understand the degree to which you can safely use and rely on those results. It’s a range, and not 100-percent cut and dry.

If some things are a little off on the validity or reliability scale, you may want to do further exploration or analysis of the research to clear up what might be unclear. If it’s inconclusive, you can’t draw valid takeaways from the research, and you should start again to determine what went wrong.

Statistical significance boils down to the level of confidence we have that the findings can be generalized. This is where researchers will use techniques like p-value andmargin of error.

Bias[26:10] – Bias is as an error. It’s a gap between the truth and the data that we have. Bias threatens the validity of the data and hinders good decisions based on that data.

The good news is we know where bias can show up. The bad news is we can’t get rid of bias completely. But we can look for it and try to mitigate it.

You can see bias in who responds to research and how, and it can be categorized into three buckets:

Response bias or recall bias means that a respondent can’t respond to a question for one of a variety of reasons.
Instrument bias or measurement bias is an error in how the research is designed and executed.
Reporting or analysis bias is an error in how the results are analyzed and reported.

We should all be mindful of reporting bias. We are honor-bound as researchers to make sure we’re open and honest about how we report results.

Tips for Reliable, Valid DataLook for and talk about any concerns you might have about the data.

As you’re designing research, follow standard practices with sampling. Have someone else look at your questionnaire from that sample group.

Be aware of when it might be best to have a third party do the research.

Use validated instruments and perhaps mixed methods.

Plan well in advance how you’re going to handle analysis and reporting and what you will report on.

Make sure that you take the time to develop a strong instrument, whether it’s a focus group protocol or an interview script.

And for consumers of research…make sure you check your predetermined perspective at the door when you’re looking at results. You may want to find something that supports the argument. You may want to make your decision that you want to make. Try to notice where you may be biased in your own interpretation of what you’re looking at.

Polly Karpowicz

Case Studies[33:11] – Would you share a little about one of case studies in the white paper that might help to bring to life some of what we’re focusing on with responsible research?

Elizabeth briefly highlights a number of case studies. The Association of American Medical Colleges is a great example of engaging volunteers in designing your study.

The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy is an example of responding to an unusual circumstance.

The Casualty Actuarial Society is an example of taking on a really big problem (the under-representation of historically marginalized groups in the actuary profession) and involving multiple organizations.

IEEE is an great example of being creative in how you collect your data and that creativity leading to insights that otherwise would have been unavailable to the research team.

Research Consumption Habits[35:32] – What habits of your own can you share to help listeners consume research more responsibly?

Polly suggests listeners read the white paper, which includes a list of free online and in-person education sources to learn more. Also, notice research methods, and note particular concerns related to research in your organization. In short, keep learning, keep asking questions, be persistent, and find help where you can.

[37:33] – Elizabeth recommends, when looking at existing research, read the methods section. Good-quality research will tell you what they did and how they got to the conclusions that they got to.=

When conducting your own original research, Elizabeth says be aware of all the types of bias that can creep in and take affirmative steps to mitigate those biases. Most of all, be skeptical, and ask questions.

Ask questions of “Who’s funding this research?” “Who’s sponsoring this research?” “What are their perspectives, if they have any?” “Who was or wasn’t included?”

Elizabeth Engel

[39:15] – Wrap-up

Elizabeth Engel is chief strategist at Spark Consulting, and Polly Karpowicz is an association consultant. Check out Spark Consultings’s series of free white papers.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

The New Education Paradigm with Shelly Alcorn and Elizabeth Engel
Content Strategy with Hilary Marsh
Learning Engineering and Data Analytics with Dr. Ellen Wagner
Tapping Into Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics with Ryan Baker

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Dr. Bror Saxberg is passionate about learning engineering and focuses on applying what’s known about learning science and learning measurement at scale to the practical business of making effective, efficient, usable, and graceful learning environments that get learners the outcomes they need to be successful.

Bror is richly and wonderfully experienced in the world of learning, having served as the chief learning officer and co-founder of K12 Inc., the chief learning officer of Kaplan, and the head of learning sciences for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Most recently, he’s the founder of LearningForge, a learning engineering consultancy that helps organizations think creatively about applying learning, development, and motivation science to their products, services, and strategies.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Bror about the components of expertise, why and when to perform a cognitive task analysis, and motivation’s impact on learning. They also discuss learning engineering, effective iteration, and the importance of evidence-centered design.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

An MD PhD[01:50] – I was struck by the fact that you’re a doctor doctor—an MD and a PhD.****

Bror did human and machine vision research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1980s. He’s an engineer, who, over time, got interested in how to use what we know about human minds and human learning to act at scale.

Medicine is an engineering branch of human biological sciences, and it looks to create practical solutions at scale. There are decades-long series of research articles in journals that report on bedside research, not laboratory petri dish research. Medicine wants to see if insights from the sciences lead to something valuable at the bedside.

We don’t have enough of that kind of practical, real-world research going on in learning. We aren’t doing enough evidence-gathering to see what really works in learning. How do you help adults learn? How do you give them the skills and attitudes to become top performers—not simply average performers—in their fields?

Defining Expertise[04:11] – How do you define expertise, and what are the components of expertise?

Cognitive science research over the last 50 years or so has given us more insight into how expert minds are organized—it’s not the way most of us think, and it’s a real problem for learners and developers.

Experts don’t have a very good verbal understanding of how they make decisions. They have a huge number of patterns, processes, etc., hardwired into their long-term memory, but those disappear in verbal awareness. This is because human verbal capacities tend to be in working memory, which is quite slow.

Long-term memory, where expertise gets stashed as you do repeated practice and feedback, is very fast and can do multiple things in parallel, but it’s not very verbally accessible.

This means that we have to do real work to unpack how top performers decide and do what they do. Many teaching and training materials and environments trust that all we need are experts. Cognitive scientists figured out we need to do some careful interviewing and observation of experts making decisions and thinking aloud to unpack more of what a top-performing mind does.

[07:29] – Cognitive task analysis can help us uncover about 75 percent of what a top performer’s mind is doing.

If you’re trying to help your learners accelerate in their careers after your learning programs, don’t restrict yourself to textbooks and standardized curricula because those weren’t built by deeply understanding what top performers decide and do.

Top performers often have a range of time management and communication skills that are not well articulated in domain-centric training manuals and materials. Yet that ability to manage time and to communicate with different professionals in the workforce can be just as important to professional success as anything those top performers have in long-term memory about their domain expertise.

This points to the value in doing a cognitive task analysis, or, at least, getting well-trained instructional designers to engage with top performers to understand more, as opposed to trusting the experts to share what’s important about what they do.

If we don’t identify the outcomes we want for any learning experience, we’ll miss the target, even if we do good design for the rest of it.

Expertise is changing faster and faster.

These days you go a couple of years, and there are new tools, new technologies, and new pieces of software that top performers actually need and are using to do even better work, which means you can’t just train in your 20s to be good at something and then rely on that for 40 years and retire. You’ve got to be in a continuous improvement model.

Bror Saxberg

We need to figure out what top performers are doing and then build that into continuous training environments.

When to Do Cognitive Task Analysis[11:18] – When does it make sense to do cognitive task analysis, and when might a lighter, more agile approach to understanding expertise in a particular domain make sense?

Learning engineering is a design exercise. There is a certain amount of art and intuition that we bring to bear when trying to solve real-world problems and decide which are the right techniques and how many resources to apply.

Find out what’s not going well in a particular situation. In the case of workplace training, you might talk to employees to find out what was hardest in their first year on the job. It’s a way of unpacking, at least at a high level, what there are issues.

Identify the hardest, most important things that seem to be missing in training materials. Those are areas to go deeper on to see how top performers handle them. Use learning science and the best methods you can come up with to create practice, feedback, work examples, etc.

For areas that are easier to learn, you can use lighter-weight approaches.

Lastly, iterate. Instrument your learning environment so that you can identify where it’s not going well and why. Get information about what the learner experience was like in those areas that didn’t go well. Then you can bring in more learning science and invest more in doing this as well as you possibly can once you discover what’s broken.

Check out our related series “Learning Science for Learning Businesses.”

Sponsor: WBT Systems[15:33] – We’re grateful to WBT Systems for sponsoring the Leading Learning Podcast.

Motivation’s Impact on Learning[16:33] – What do we know about how motivation impacts learning?

Richard Clark, a cognitive scientist, surveyed a wide range of research literature to uncover what causes people to not be motivated.

The way motivation was defined was do people start, persist, and put in mental effort? And it’s important to highlight the word “like” does not appear in that set of things, right? Often, people think motivating somebody is about getting them to like what they’re doing. In fact, no, that’s actually not connected to learning.

Bror Saxberg

If you’re using a well-designed program and you start, persist, and put in mental effort, you don’t have to like every single part of it. Liking is one reason to learn, but it’s not the only reason.

Clark also looked at behavioral, motivational, and cognitive psychology; behavioral economics; and other areas. He landed on a four-part model of what makes a difference in people’s willingness to start, persist, and put in mental effort.

There are four traps that can cause people to lose motivation:

Values mismatch (“I don’t care enough to do this.”)
Lack of self-efficacy (“I don’t think I’m able to do this.”)
Disruptive emotions (“I’m too upset to do this.”)
Attribution errors (“I don’t know what went wrong with this.”)

To learn more about these traps, see the video below. We also recommend the Harvard Business Review article “4 Reasons Good Employees Lose Their Motivation” by Richard E. Clark and Bror Saxberg.

[21:02] – Learning designers and providers should diagnose which of those four traps are happening and then intervene in the learning environment, including teachers, trainers, software, etc.

When designing learning environments, we need pay equal attention to two kinds of design:

Cognitive design uses learning sciences and research. (We highly recommend the book e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer for a good synthesis of research that can guide effective cognitive design for learning. We also recommend our podcast interview with Ruth Colvin Clark.)
Motivation design involves how to detect that someone is having trouble not because of a cognitive issue but because of a motivation issue. Motivation design is just as important as cognitive design, but it’s often underappreciated.

For the most part, if a learner can start, persist, and put mental effort into a well-designed learning program that starts from where you are and heads to important outcomes, then significant learning can happen.

[25:01] – Cognition and motivation intersect. For example, if you’re getting a learner to start something that’s new and complicated, such as learning to write persuasively, it’s important to draw on contexts that are highly familiar to and highly valued by the learner.

On the motivation side, the learner would write persuasively because they care a lot about the subject. On the cognition side, if it’s an area the learner knows a lot about, then they have a lot of information about the situation already in long-term memory, and using things that are in long-term memory doesn’t feel like effort. What’s effortful is when working memory is trying to create or learn something new.

So match the context to the learners as much as possible. Technology may play a role in helping to understand different learners’ contexts and interests and then use these as springboards for mastering more complex cognitive skills.

Once a learner starts to master complex cognitive skills, they can use those to probe new contexts. Learners go back and forth between these two different points—familiar contexts and unfamiliar skills—and use their familiar skills to explore unfamiliar contexts.

Learning Engineering[27:23] – You wrote the preface to the *Learning Engineering Toolkit*, and there you assert that learning engineering should be “guided by (but not limited to) research and practice.” What, beyond research and practice, should be guiding our use of learning engineering and how we’re designing experiences?

The best engineering always stands on the shoulders of prior practice and research. But, to get the best kind of solution, you have to take into account the exact context you’re dealing with and what’s going on right now in this particular environment. Sometimes you have to make a bit of a leap.

This is true in all kinds of design and engineering work. To design inclusively, work with the people who are going to be the most affected by the learning solutions you’re putting together. Hear from them about what does and doesn’t work, what excites them, and what they hate about learning experiences. In that conversation, you should share learning science and motivation science so all the pieces are on the table.

Look at what practical solutions you could implement. Pilot and iterate in agile ways so you’re not copying and pasting from a previous exercise.

Too much work around learning and learning engineering has drawn on a software engineering model where the goal is to make a great training program, a great textbook, etc., and then copy it and get everyone to use it. That may work for software tools, but, for learning, we also need to consider the civil engineering tradition, which incorporates context.

Check out our related episode “Learning Engineering with Jim Goodell.”

Effective Iteration [32:51] – Iteration is important in the learning engineering process. What are the effective parts of iterating well?

First, focus your desired outcomes on what students should be able to decide and do. This naturally leads you to evidence-gathering. You need to instrument for failure so you can learn from what doesn’t work and what goes wrong along the way.

You need multiple sources of evidence connected to your outcomes and motivation to see for whom this learning experience is going well. In the learning world, we tend to group everyone together and ask if it worked. Instead, we need to look at whom it worked for and when. That is we need to pay attention to context.

You don’t want to lose sight of the fact that an intervention did work for a subset of users. But you want to look at the ones who did not succeed and try to figure out why—is it their experience, background, or their motivation?

This is where you can start to do interventions and iterate on a subset because you’ve already identified the people who are doing fine, and you don’t need to mess with that success. Look at the context in which learning is happening, gather good enough evidence, and then make evidence-based changes to see if that helps on the cognitive and/or motivation side.

[35:35] – This reminds me of The Success Case Method by Rob Brinkerhoff, who has been on the podcast.

It’s too easy to focus on the learner as if the learner is the only important thing in this whole situation.

In fact, context can be way more than the learner. It’s like, where is this learner learning? Who else is there? What are the trainers like? What are their peers like? What are those interactions like? There could be things that are outside the learner that are just as powerful to help the learner if you make changes to them as things that are, somehow, targeting directly to the learner. So you actually want to think about this context as more than just variables from the learner.

Bror Saxberg

The Current State of Learning Ecosystems[36:51] – How would you describe the current state of learning ecosystems? What is and isn’t working well? What is still misunderstood at this point?

A Need for Evidence-Based PracticeAll the learning and training ecosystems worldwide, from pre-K up, have the same problem: Those designing and delivering learning don’t have evidence-based groundings in how learning and motivation work.

Bror compares and contrasts this with the situation in medicine, particularly related to the COVID pandemic. Everyone got kicked off the cliff. But, on the healthcare side, almost all of the solution-making efforts were inside the guardrails of evidence-based practice.

On the education and training side, everyone got forced into virtual learning, but there were no evidence-based guardrails. Motivation was a huge failure point for education during the pandemic. One of the biggest issues with our ecosystem right now is that we don’t have a shared story of learning that is optimistic and suggests that, if you want to get there, you probably can.

A Need for Multiple Lines of Evidence[42:02] – Something else missing in ecosystems as a whole is multiple lines of evidence. People are beginning to understand this, but there has too much emphasis on trying to build the one perfect solution (assessment, training course, e-learning offering). But that’s not how this works.

Bob Mislevy from Educational Testing Service (ETS) and some colleagues created a way to think about measuring learning called evidence-centered design. If you have an invisible, complex cognitive structure that you’re trying to probe, you need to use multiple lines of evidence to see if the brain is actually different in the way you hoped it would be.

A single line of evidence is very likely to lead you astray because people will manipulate that one line of evidence. When you put together multiple lines of evidence, you can begin to get information relevant to that construct, and you’re less likely to make the mistake of pushing on just one line of evidence and not realizing you missed some of the most important things.

A Need to Better Understand Motivation [43:45] – We have underinvested in understanding motivation. Motivation ties into issues of identity, long-term memory, context, and other things that connect to cognition.

We need to get all our citizens around the globe, at all ages, to get excited about starting, persisting, and putting in mental effort into new things that they want to do, as opposed to feeling like, “I can’t do that.” “I’m too old.” “I’m not smart enough.” Or “I wish I could, but I can’t.” We need that fuel as well as better learning environments to actually power us forward as humanity, especially as things like artificial intelligence and various technologies begin to snap up what used to be simple, still complex, but relatively simple cognitive tasks, which we should no longer have people doing.

Bror Saxberg

Research suggests it takes about 10 years of intense, deliberate practice to become world-class. If we start at age 20, that means every person could build six or seven world-class competencies. You could spend the time all on one, but what’s interesting to Bror is the combination. This gives every human a unique fingerprint of expertise that’s not replaceable by AI.

We need to get better at being able to change our competencies. We need to have the motivation to do that throughout life. Then we can each start to create interesting career paths and progressions over the long term.

[47:39] – Wrap-up

Bror Saxberg is the founder of LearningForge, a learning engineering consultancy.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Learning Engineering with Jim Goodell
Evidence-Based Evaluation with Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter
Designing Content Scientifically with Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra Roldan

The post Forging Effective Learning with Bror Saxberg appeared first on Leading Learning.

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1EdTech has been instrumental in the creation and ongoing management of important standards in the world of online learning. Formerly known as IMS Global, 1EdTech is a member-based community dedicated to powering learner potential. Its members include institutions and tech providers that work together to make learning technology better, safer, and more interoperable.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Mark Leuba, vice president of product management at 1EdTech and Kelly Hoyland, director for higher education programs at 1EdTech. They focus on 1EdTech’s work with digital credentials. They look at the current digital credentials landscape, the growing adoption, and potential challenges. They also discuss Open Badges and the Comprehensive Learner Record, two key standards developed by 1EdTech that are aimed at addressing some of the challenges that exist in the evolving market for digital credentials.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

Current Digital Credential Landscape[01:46] – How you would describe the current landscape for digital credentials?

Kelly believes now is an exciting time. People are looking at how to best help learners through a new lens that considers many perspectives:

Where does education go in the future?
What do our adult learners need?
How do we make sure that we’re giving them value in the experiences?
How do we make sure that the outcomes are obvious and clear?
How do we make sure credentialing and work align?

Digital credentials allow institutions and learning providers to share the value of the outcomes (the competencies and skills that come from training), and they also allow learners to self-advocate and put what they’ve learned front and center.

There are a number of organizations collaborating in the space to ensure they work together and not against each other in the area of digital credentials and send consistent, rather than competing, messages.

That kind of collaboration and consistent messaging will be crucial in help employers understand the value and meaning of digital credentials. If different digital credential providers use different language, employers will be confused, and that will hamper adoption.

[04:06] – Mark shares that the digital credentials movement is strong in traditional education, training organizations, and corporate employers that are dealing with upskilling.

Learners and workers want to be recognized for their achievements and capabilities—and traditional means don’t work well. Whether it’s a transcript, a PDF, etc., traditional credentials don’t communicate what a learner actually knows and can do. But digital credentials do that, and they’re verifiable on the Web. They are the new currency for personal and professional achievement.

[04:51] – We’ve seen a proliferation in credentials over the past several years. Does that jibe with what you’re seeing, and do you have any idea what the growth rate has been?

Mark points out that we should distinguish between credentials generally and digital credentials. There are up to 800,000 unique credentials that are possible to be earned in the U.S. if we include certifications, degrees, certificates, and badges.

In the case of Open Badges, for example, we do know that there have been 75 million badges that have been issued in the U.S. alone by 15,000 organizations. So that’s a tribute to the strength of the movement. It’s very, very significant.

Mark Leuba

The SUNY system in New York offers over 500 different types of microcredentials in 60 different areas. That’s a single system producing that many microcredentials on its own.

Mark ties the uptake of competency-based education in traditional academics to the growth of credentials. It has become increasingly important to correlate a course with learning outcomes and align those to skills that are relevant in the industry.

Across the academic spectrum, institutions are laser-focused on their industry partners, and they’re starting new strategic programs to understand what the employer needs are. They’re embracing a more active role for employers and industry in the development of their curriculum and associated assessments so that, when a credential is being produced, it has more value for and can be trusted by all.

Leading Learning Newsletter[07:39] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

Subscribe for free. Or, if you’re already subscribed, point a colleague to leadinglearning.com/inbox.

Open Badges and the Comprehensive Learner Record [08:28] – 1EdTech has developed two key standards aimed at addressing some of the challenges in the evolving market for digital credentials: Open Badges and the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR). Would you tell us about those standards and what each one is designed to address?

Open Badges[08:53] – The Open Badges standard has been around for several years and has a rich community and culture around it.

Open Badges allow users to capture their achievements in a digital wallet or some other format so they can take them with them. The Open Badge standard means those achievements can be posted to social media, but more importantly it’s tied to a rich set of data behind that provide details about what it means to have earned that badge, when it expires, who issued it, and whether it’s from a trusted source.

Check out our related episode “Leading the Open Badging Movement with Wayne Skipper of Badgr.”

Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR)The Comprehensive Learner Record allows learners to create a full picture of their learning. They can capture multiple achievements and link them together in a context.

It can be badges; it can be courses; it can be experiences. All of that stuff rolled together provides that holistic background for an individual, whether it’s education, whether it’s work, all of that together.

Kelly Hoyland

The CLR is machine-readable, so it can be reviewed and mined by artificial intelligence and other tools now processing resumes, for example.

[10:29] – If an organization has a credential that they want to be able to issue digitally, how do they then know how to get it into the Open Badges standard and make use of the CLR?

The most common approach is to look for a vendor partner that knows and has embraced these standards. 1EdTech has a directory that lists vendor partners that have been certified, meaning they’ve gone through conformance testing to ensure that they are ready and able to share credentials in the market.

Even with a vendor partner, there is a lot of work for an organization to do with program planning, definitions, and governance. The technology piece is sometimes the easier part.

There are a few organizations that have built their own technology solutions, and 1EdTech has resources available to help. But most organizations use a technology partner.

[11:38] – Do you have resources that organizations can take advantage to help with the design, planning, and governance of digital credentials?

1EdTech has a number of resources that its community has curated. Organizations are working together to offer guidance pulled from different stakeholders and create a playbook with what you need to think about and key questions you need to answer to get started with digital credentials.

Credential Value in the Employment Market[12:17] – How are you working to build the bridge between credentials, the credential issuer, and employment? What standards apply in that area?

If digital badges aren’t valued and in demand in the educational-work ecosystem, their value is almost zero. 1EdTech has been focusing on employer engagement for the last several years.

1EdTech recognized there was a lot it didn’t know about employers’ needs related to digital credentials and skills. It also knew that the corporations and employers were often unaware of the digital badges and digital credentials emerging.

So 1EdTech started Wellspring, an initiative to help it learn about employer readiness. The initiative allows 1EdTech can see how employers react to the concept of digital credentials and to discover regulatory, cultural, and/or legal barriers to adoption.

1EdTech built an applicant tracking system that can search the Virtual Talent Network, a collection of digital wallets and achievement portals that are hosted by simulated organizations.

Even though this is demonstration software currently (i.e., not yet in a production status), it allows 1EdTech to show employers the value of using open standards to improve hiring and make it lower bias. The system allows candidates to be screened in an anonymized fashion and focus exclusively on knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Employer Adoption of Credentials[15:26] – Are employers receptive to digital credentials? How have you found employer update?

Employers are using digital credentials for their own purposes. For example, Grow with Google and Amazon are acting as educators. Some employers are issuing digital credentials to their employees as signals of learning and achievement they can share and to advance their careers along defined pathways.

Industries on the Leading Edge of Credentials[16:49] – Does it tend to be tech-oriented companies (like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) that are leading adoption of digital credentials? Are you seeing less tech-heavy companies embracing them too?

While tech companies are leading, there’s no reason that needs to be the case. Digital credentials can be relevant and valuable outside the tech industry too.

1EdTech is doing a project as part of Wellspring with the HR Open Standards organization to help develop a resume standard that will incorporate digital credentials. This will lead to the ability to present a resume in a standards-based way with verifiable digital credentials included.

1EdTech’s Engagement with Associations and Other Learning Businesses[18:44] – Is 1EdTech engaged with players besides higher education and academic institutions in the credentialing world, such as trade and professional associations? To what extent have you seen examples of these other players embracing and implementing the standards?

1EdTech was born in formal education, but it has developed solid relationships with organizations that serve the adult learning market and professional and continuing education.

But Mark sees an opportunity for growth and outreach, and he looks forward to 1EdTech establishing more relationships assisting other like-thinking organizations.

Digital Credentials Summit[20:05] – Why might listeners want to consider attending the Digital Credentials Summit?

The Digital Credentials Summit is completely focused on digital credential, making it unique. The summit involves K-12, higher ed, and employers. Some attendees are new to digital credentials, and others are leaders and experts in the space.

The event is a mix of strategy and implementation, general and breakout sessions (about 60 in all).. There’s a lot of opportunity to connect with others who are working with digital credentials. There are typically about 400 attendees.

1EdTech is focused on helping the education and employment communities come closer together and building bridges between learning and work.

Lifelong Learning Habits[23:20] – What kinds of learning experiences do you engage in? Do you find different forms of credentialing valuable to you personally?

Kelly realizes she has done a lot of training and professional development that provides no outcome other than that she’s completed it. Going forward, she wants to prioritize looking for learning experiences that issue digital credentials and start collecting those more intentionally.

Mark is an avid reader of current events and history. He’s not currently pursuing a credential, but, as a hiring official, he’s changed hiring requirements to be more intentional, now focusing on what is necessary to do the job and not falling back on a degree requirement as a baseline.

For hiring, Mark’s focusing more and more on certifications because he is finding those tend to an effective way to target the right skills he’s hiring for.

[26:42] – Wrap-up

Mark Leuba is vice president of product management at 1EdTech, formerly known as IMS Global. Kelly Hoyland is director for higher education programs at 1EdTech.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Diving into Digital Badges with Dr. Ginger Malin
Leading the Open Badging Movement with Wayne Skipper of Badgr
Forging Open Pathways with Wayne Skipper
Digital Credentials with Jonathan Finkelstein of Credly
The Value of Credentials Now

The post Talking Digital Credentials with 1EdTech appeared first on Leading Learning.

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You’ve probably noted the remarkable rise of ChatGPT. In a short time, it’s become a game-changer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and has the potential to revolutionize the way we work and learn.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, we explain what ChatGPT is, how it works, and its implications for both learners and providers of learning. We also discuss concerns about and limitations of ChatGPT and what learning businesses need to consider when using it.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio. (Note that content generated by ChatGPT is highlighted in the transcript.)

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

What ChatGPT Is and How It Works[01:03] – ChatGPT is a large language model trained by OpenAI. It uses machine-learning techniques to generate human-like text based on a given prompt or conversation. Essentially, it can hold a natural conversation with a human.

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, and ChatGPT, which was launched on November 30, 2022, is built on GPT-3. The addition of a familiar chat interface to GPT-3 was intended to make it much more user-friendly for the average person who may still feel pretty daunted by the prospect of using AI.

In the five days following the launch of ChatGPT, more than a million users signed up. ChatGPT was up to 2 million users in ten days, which is truly astonishing. Below is a chart showing the time it’s taken for other well-known platforms to get to 1 million users.

Source: Exponential View by Azeem AzharIf you haven’t already, we encourage you to sign up for a ChatGPT account at https://chat.openai.com/chat. There are times it’s not accessible because so many people are using it, but wait to get in if you have to. ChatGPT is free during what OpenAI is calling the “research preview,” but that will change.

You access ChatGPT online, type in a prompt (a question or a request), and ChatGPT responds almost immediately. You can then respond to its response, and a conversation can happen.

To support the conversational feel, ChatGPT remembers what you typed earlier in the chat, and that allows you to provide additional information and corrections that can then inform future responses from ChatGPT.

Can’t get into ChatGPT? Try Jasper Chat for free. (It’s ChatGPT-based.)How ChatGPT Is Being Used and Might Be Used by Learning Businesses[03:36] – ChatGPT is already used in a number of educational settings. Some universities are using it to create personalized study plans for students based on their goals and learning styles. Others are using it as a tutor, providing students with instant feedback and support as they work through online course materials.

There are also companies that are using ChatGPT to create personalized learning experiences for professional development and continuing education. These programs can be tailored to the specific needs and goals of the individual learner, and they can be accessed anytime, anywhere.

The ability to create personalized learning experiences that are tailored to the needs and goals of the individual learner has the potential to significantly improve the effectiveness of continuing education and professional development programs.

ChatGPT also has the potential to democratize access to education and training. By providing instant feedback and support, ChatGPT can help learners overcome roadblocks and stay motivated as they work towards their goals.

ChatGPT could serve as an AI-driven coach Something like ChatGPT could make coaching more affordable and accessible, so not just for the high-paid executives anymore. There are already a number of AI-based coaching platforms out there, like Cultivate and Edthena.

Check out our related episode “At the Intersection of Coaching and Learning with Jen Lewi.”

ChatGPT has the potential to improve the quality of lifelong learning and professional development and make it more accessible to a wider range of people.

When it comes to some of the other applications of ChatGPT, there are two clear areas where this technology has implications—for learners and for those providing the learning.

Implications of ChatGPT for LearnersChatGPT can help learners solve problems and complete assignments. Learners can type in math-based word problems for ChatGPT to solve. ChatGPT can troubleshoot computer code.

This means the value of assignments like “Write 500 words about effective leadership” or word-based math problems could radically change.

A learner could simply copy and paste a ChatGPT response and use it as a short essay, making only a few minor edits. Or a learner could take the answer that ChatGPT gives to a word problem and use that without understanding the operations that went into solving the problem.

There’s the potential for cheating or misuse, but this brings back memories of the hubbub about calculators in math class long ago.

Calculators were banned for a while; then instructors came to embrace them and, instead of forbidding them, started teaching how to use them effectively. I think that ChatGPT and other conversational AI tools have the chance to become a new and accepted tool—like calculators, like the Internet.

Jeff Cobb

Leading Learning Newsletter[07:39] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

Subscribe for free. Or, if you’re already subscribed, point a colleague to leadinglearning.com/inbox.

Implications of ChatGPT for Learning Businesses[08:37] – ChatGPT clearly can serve learners, and a lot comes down currently to the learners’ ethics in terms of whether that purpose is getting out of work or actually supporting learning.

On the learning business side, ChatGPT also has clear uses.

ChatGPT could radically change how learning businesses make use of and interact with subject matter experts (SMEs).

An instructional designer, for example, could use ChatGPT to come up with an initial list of essential things learners need to know about recognizing signs of dementia or about effective written communication. Then that list could be turned over to an SME for validation and refinement. Or vice versa. Or both.

Something similar could be done with assessments. You could use ChatGPT to generate questions to ask learners or ideas for assignments.

Before recording this podcast episode, ChatGPT readily gave us ten questions about diabetes when asked. It returned questions including those below:

“What are the complications of diabetes?”
“How is diabetes treated?”
“Can diabetes be prevented?”
“What new technologies are available for diabetes management?”

When we asked, “What would be a good assignment to give someone who needs to learn more about how to prevent diabetes?,” ChatGPT readily gave us six ideas, including those below.

“Research the risk factors for type 2 diabetes and create a list of lifestyle changes that can help reduce the risk of developing the disease.”
“Write an informational leaflet about the link between diet and diabetes prevention. This could include information about the role of different types of food, such as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, in blood sugar control, as well as tips for healthy eating and meal planning.”
“Create a plan for increasing physical activity in order to prevent diabetes. This could include finding fun ways to be more active, setting goals, and tracking progress.”

Those questions and assignment ideas aren’t earth-shattering. If you’re already an expert in this domain, you know that stuff. But, still, it’s impressive for AI generate this content based on basic prompts and simple directions.

E-learning authoring tools that are AI-based (e.g., (Nolej) are emerging, and they will almost certainly automate and improve on the kinds of scenarios we just shared.

Educational content is not all that ChatGPT will be used for. Learning businesses also have marketing needs, and ChatGPT can help there too.

ChatGPT can, for example, write drafts of course descriptions or conference session descriptions, or it can help with titles for blog posts, e-mail subject lines, and social media posts.

Again, we tried out these kinds of activities with ChatGPT using the prompt “Give me some title ideas for a blog post about using ChatGPT to support lifelong learning.” It returned the following:

“ChatGPT: A Lifelong Learning Companion”
“Revolutionizing Education with ChatGPT”
“Leveraging ChatGPT for Self-Directed Learning”
“Continuous Learning with ChatGPT”
“Using ChatGPT to Enhance Your Learning Journey”

For learning businesses that need to feed the content machine to attract users to their site, AI-generated content can be a game-changer.

[12:57] – We have a license to Jasper.ai, a platform that leverages GPT and now ChatGPT to create both short-form and long-form content.

For access to ChatGPT-based chat and other powerful AI writing tools, try Jasper.ai for free.We operate in a specialized enough area (as do many of our listeners) that we don’t expect Jasper or ChatGPT to turn out exactly what we need, but it can turn out material that works well as a starting point. ChatGPT and similar tools can also be used to help you clarify your thoughts and produce content that you can build from, accelerating the pace at which you’re able to produce content.

As long as you provide your own lens and bring your own perspective and expertise to the content, content that starts from an AI tool can still be authoritative, expert-driven, trustworthy content. The AI tools allow you to produce content much faster and in a more targeted way.

I feel like this is the tipping point on AI that we’ve been waiting for. We’ve been talking about this for years, but I think it’s just been out of the reach of the ordinary person up until now. And I think that this can and will radically change how we learn and how we live.

Jeff Cobb

Concerns About and Limitations of ChatGPT[14:37] – But it’s not 100-percent clear that ChatGPT will only lead to good things. There are some serious concerns about ChatGPT, which we want to touch on as well.

One concern is the potential for ChatGPT to perpetuate existing biases. If the data used to train the model contains biased language or information, ChatGPT may reproduce and amplify those biases in its responses. This could have negative consequences for marginalized groups, who may be disadvantaged or discriminated against as a result.

In a similar vein, ChatGPT can be used—or rather misused—for creating and spreading misinformation or information that’s simply wrong. And, unfortunately, ChatGPT can do that with even greater scale and speed than what we’ve already seen happening with misinformation. That could lead to what we would call mislearning.

Ezra Klein talked about ChatGPT in a recent episode of his podcast, which we recommend.

GPT, and really AI in general, is not yet very competent at determining the truth of content. To the extent that learning business and their SMEs do leverage something like ChatGPT to generate content, there will be an ethical obligation to assess the validity of that content.

Celisa Steele

Another concern is around cost and therefore accessibility down the road. Currently, ChatGPT is free, but it won’t remain free. Earlier, we mentioned that ChatGPT also has the potential to democratize access to education, but that democratizing potential will be undercut depending on the cost of accessing and using the tool.

Another ethical consideration is the potential for ChatGPT to replace human instructors or tutors. This could have implications for the employment of educators and raises questions about the appropriate role of AI in education.

Now is a good time to come clean and share that part of the content for this episode was produced by GPT. We asked it to produce a podcast script for a show about the implications of ChatGPT on the creation and consumption of lifelong learning, professional development, and continuing education, and we’ve incorporated some of what it generated.

We didn’t include anything that we don’t feel is true or accurate, and it’s only been a small percentage of our overall conversation.

If you’re curious to know exactly which parts of this episode were generated by ChatGPT, check out the transcript.

In using ChatGPT to generate a podcast script, it was interesting to see that it could do a reasonable job doing the work that two humans (Celisa and Jeff) usually do.

[18:49] – Finally, we’ll mention something that’s less of a concern and more of a limitation. ChatGPT has “limited knowledge of world and events after 2021,” according to its makers. ChatGPT wouldn’t be good to use for late-breaking news or much help to your learners or your learning business around current events or new discoveries.

Because of that limited knowledge of the world after 2021, ChatGPT could return incorrect information. Again, the makers acknowledge this, but it’s something to be aware of, particularly if you offer high-stakes learning or operate in a field or industry where things change often.

Despite those concerns and limitations, we are quite bullish on the possibilities, and we’re fascinated to see what this easy-to-use, competent, helpful, quick-to-respond artificial intelligence will mean for how we all learn, work, and live.

Celisa Steele

GTP-4 is on the horizon, and it will open up post-2021 information and the Internet more broadly. The next generation will take AI to new levels.

Our message is simple. Go try ChatGPT, and think about how you can apply it. What could ChatGPT or a similar technology do to improve the reach, the revenue, and the impact of your learning business?

[20:29] – Wrap-up

Sign up for a ChatGPT account at https://chat.openai.com/chat. (Accounts are currently free.)

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence
Three Big Technologies Changing the Learning Landscape
Putting Foresight – and Artificial Intelligence – First with Jeff De Cagna – Part I

See also:

ChatGPT Guide For Creators | Should You Be Scared Of AI Content?

The post Chatting about ChatGPT and Learning Businesses appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Jen Lewi is an executive and career development coach, working at the intersection of coaching and learning. As vice president of career development and conferences at the School Nutrition Association (SNA), Jen helps SNA’s diverse members get the training they need to succeed.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Jen about the opportunities and benefits of coaching for learning businesses. They also discuss pandemic-driven portfolio changes, the power of peer sharing, cohort-based learning, and the importance of truly understanding your learners and how you can best serve them.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

School Nutrition Association’s Learning Portfolio[01:25] – What does the School Nutrition Association (SNA) do, and what’s your role there?

The School Nutrition Association has over 50,000 members who work in school nutrition programs across the country. They are a robust group of people with different education levels, which makes it challenging to create a learning portfolio with the appropriate mix of different training options.

Jen is responsible for giving SNA’s members the training they need to succeed on the job and grow professionally.

[02:41] – What does SNA’s portfolio of learning offerings look like?

SNA’s learning portfolio is built around the professional standards and core competencies required to operate a successful school nutrition program. SNA mixes formal instruction with opportunities for learners to share practical ideas with one another. The portfolio contains in-person and self-paced learning and virtual conferences, as well as in-person conferences that continue to do well and grow post-pandemic.

SNA also has been successful with Webinars and a flagship program called Lead to Succeed, a training program on leadership and communication built in partnership with Georgetown University business school professors.

Pandemic-Driven Changes to the Learning Portfolio[04:44] – What pandemic-driven changes SNA is rolling back and which ones is SNA making a part of its portfolio going forward? Have you seen new from learners as we’re emerging from the pandemic?

Pre-pandemic, SNA had a definite education strategy. But COVID-19 rocked SNA’s world.

When schools closed during the pandemic, kids still had to eat, so SNA’s members had to adapt to serving kids food outside schools. They had to find new ways to package and deliver food that allowed for social distancing and minimal touching. The pandemic changed their entire operations.

SNA put a pause on some of big-picture, strategic initiatives when COVID hit, and, from an advocacy and professional development perspective, focused on supporting their members.

SNA learned during the pandemic that there wasn’t a roadmap or a single solution. They couldn’t offer a training course on how to get through a pandemic. So they brought people together to learn from one other.

SNA is preserving the importance of learners and members sharing with one another. Now they’re dealing with supply chain and staffing challenges, and there’s no roadmap for that either.

I think what the pandemic did is a couple of things that were incredible for us. Pre-pandemic, we had a hard time getting a lot of members to virtual training. If you think about it, the people who are serving kids in the cafeteria are not necessarily at a computer all day, but the pandemic forced everyone to embrace virtual learning and virtual meeting. So we were able to do so much more in the virtual space and reach so many more people within our membership.

Jen Lewi

A Coaching Credential[08:32] – What prompted you to pursue the Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential?

During the pandemic, a lot of people reevaluated their mission and purpose. Jen always wanted to be a coach and finally had the time to take some classes.

In addition to helping her become a coach, the coaching classes she took also helped her become a better manager, learning expert, and parent.

She’s been a manager and leader for a very long time. She finds it very rewarding to watch people identify and maximize their strengths and to give them feedback so they can progress.

Leading Learning Newsletter[10:08] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

Subscribe for free. Or, if you’re already subscribed, point a colleague to leadinglearning.com/inbox.

Defining Coaching[11:06] – How do you define coaching? How do you distinguish coaching from teaching and facilitation?

Jen says there’s overlap between teaching, facilitation, and coaching.

Coaching is about helping people articulate their values, uncover new awareness, address limiting beliefs, or get a better understanding of themselves. It’s also about helping them create a path toward to their goals and be accountable to themselves for achieving those goals. Coaching is a long-term process built around asking powerful questions to drive awareness.

With teaching, you often have an expert who helps transfer knowledge, based on their expertise. Coaches don’t necessarily have the domain expertise the coachee has. The coach’s expertise is in helping that person become more self-aware.

Facilitation often happens in groups and has a very targeted goal. There’s usually a clear beginning and end to facilitation.

Coaching helps learning. It helps fill the gap between the training and the action that’s needed to take on that training.

Jen Lewi

Opportunities for Coaching in a Learning Business’s Portfolio[13:45] – What possibilities do you see for coaching to be part of a learning business’s portfolio?

There are many opportunities for coaching and learning businesses. The most obvious place to start is to offer coaching classes. Another simple approach is offering your customers access to coaches or even certifying your own coaches.

Two areas that Jen finds particularly interesting for learning businesses are mixing coaching and instruction (coach-struction) and mixing coaching and consulting (coach-sulting).

In the coach-sulting model, you use an expert’s deep knowledge to help drive new awareness and as powerful questions of the people who are learning, is a very effective strategy.

In the coach-struction model you might combine self-paced courses and independent coursework with access to a coach who asks learners questions about where they’re having issues, and they problem-solve together.

Benefits of Adding Coaching for Learning Businesses[17:05] – What do you see as the net positive effect for learners and learning businesses that might come from adding coaching?

The net positive is accountability. Instead of a learner taking a class and the training fizzling right after, coaching can help the training last.

Coaching can have a more powerful impact, especially in soft-skill areas. Coaching can also add depth and personalization to learning, even when it’s not one-on-one but group-based. SNA has found cohort-based learning to be very effective in helping learners share ideas and come up with solutions.

Lifelong Learning Habits[20:52] – What specific habits, sources, or practices do you use to continue to grow and develop professionally? What role does coaching play in your own lifelong learning?

Jen is a huge fan of the Leading Learning Podcast, and this is her favorite question.

She reads a lot, listens to podcasts, and also learns through writing. For example, she recently wrote a post about the intersection of coaching and learning on the Leading Learning blog. She jumped on the opportunity to write this piece because writing helps her think through a topic and research it.

Through her coaching endeavors, she’s found some great books that she returns to regularly for her own personal development and that she recommends to clients:

Atomic Habits by James Clear
The Long Game by Dorie Clark
Check out our related interview, “Standing Out with Dorie Clark.”
Chatter by Ethan Kross

What Learners Want, Post-Pandemic[23:15] – Is there anything we haven’t yet had a chance to talk about that comes to mind?

Something that comes to mind for Jen is what their learners are looking for now, post-pandemic. SNA rebranded its Professional Development department to Career Development because that emphasizes the fact that members come to them for growth in their careers and for training that will help them on the job.

SNA next plans to dig into better understanding its target audiences and to look at career pathways. SNA has seen many more new people coming into the profession, so they are offering more introductory and basic training.

For their members, a focus on mental health has become a priority both for themselves and when they’re leading teams. With staffing challenges now and all the uncertainty in the world, SNA is seeing that mental health needs to be a focus at most conferences they offer.

[24:46] – How did the need to rebrand from professional development to career development surface?

The need surfaced during SNA’s strategic planning process. Career paths these days are not linear. People come into careers at different points on their journeys, so helping people understand what they need is really important.

[26:35] – Wrap-up

Jen Lewi is vice president of career development and conferences at the School Nutrition Association and an executive and career development coach. Connect with Jen on LinkedIn.

Also, check out the article Jen wrote for the Leading Learning blog, “Six Ways to Add Coaching to Your Learning Mix,” and take time to reflect on whether adding coaching to your portfolio might provide value for your learners and your learning business.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Walking the Path to Learning with Tiffany Crosby
A Why-To and How-To on Hot Seats, AKA Collaborative Coaching™
The Adaptation Advantage with Heather McGowan

The post At the Intersection of Coaching and Learning with Jen Lewi appeared first on Leading Learning.

The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World

Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It

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image by Keith Johnston from Pixabayby Jen Lewi of the School Nutrition Association**

Everywhere I look, it seems like someone is working with an executive coach, considering hiring a coach, or is a professional coach. There has been an explosion in coaching: executive, career, and wellness, to name a few. A 2020 research study from the International Coaching Federation (ICF) shows that globally there were about 71,000 coach practitioners in 2019, an increase of 33 percent since the previous estimate in 2015. The ICF study estimates total global revenue from coaching in 2019 was $2.849 billion, an increase of over 21 percent since 2015.

This is an area I find fascinating because I’ve moved into coaching. During the early days of the pandemic, I earned my ICF Associate Certified Coach credential, and I specialize in career strategy and executive coaching. While I do work as a coach, my primary focus is as a learning professional in a learning business—I oversee professional development and conferences at the School Nutrition Association.

I believe learning businesses can capitalize on the popularity and effectiveness of coaching by integrating coaching options into their learning portfolios to deepen learning, better serve the needs of customers, and expand professional development offerings.

Many organizations offer coaching benefits for their employees. A human resource team might hire professional coaches to enhance teamwork or coach employees in specific areas like communication, conflict management, delegation, and developing a career plan. What interests me particularly, though, is the possibility of shifting the focus of coaching from the employees of an organization to the constituents the organization serves, including the members of an association and the clients of a learning business.

Before diving into this business opportunity, let’s review the key concepts.

What Is a Learning Business?As defined by Leading Learning, a learning business must meet two criteria:

A learning business has to generate revenue through selling learning and education experiences to a target audience. In most cases, this means net positive revenue or profit.
A learning business has to self-identify as a business. Most people working in the learning business must recognize that revenue generation is a fundamental reason for the organization’s existence.

What Is Coaching?The ICFdefines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity, and leadership.” I would add that coaching includes a process of reflection, application, and planning—three fundamental tenets in the learning process.

What Are the Differences Between a Professional Coach, a Mentor, and a Trainer?A coach can help bring clients awareness, a new way of seeing a situation, motivation, behavior change, reflection, and developing solutions to challenges. According to the World Coach Institute and other experts, a coach doesn’t tell a client what to do. Typically, a coach enables clients to find their own right answers.

A mentor is an expert in a field and typically provides personal guidance, encouragement, and insight to help a mentee grow.

A trainer teaches skills, concepts, or new processes that often require practice so the learner can move from novice to expert.

While there are distinctions, coaching, mentoring, and training can all enhance the learning process. Each of them focuses on helping someone learn a new concept, skill, habit, or behavior change.

With those key concepts in mind let’s now look at six ways to add coaching for learning.

Offer Coaching Courses.Given the boom and interest in coaching, consider offering a coaching course or series. The American Bankers Association and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) are examples of learning businesses offering coaching courses.

Coaching courses can support a person’s larger learning plan by helping them assess how they want to improve on the job and further their career goals.

The advantage of this approach is that the coaching courses a learning business offers fit into the big picture of what a learner wants to achieve. Then learners may be more aware of the importance of taking future training from the learning business and make efforts to retain their learning.

Tap into Credentialed Coaches to Coach Your Learners.A successful model for some learning businesses includes tapping into an outside network of coaches that learners can access for a fee. The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) takes this approach by listing recommended credentialed coaches on their Web site and offering coaching sessions with vetted coaches at their annual conferences for a fee.

Similarly, executive recruiting agencies like Korn Ferry offer coaching for a fee to their clients, and some universities like the University of Oklahoma provide career coaching for students and alums. AARP and Capital One employ ICF-credentialed external coaches for their clients.

This approach is strategic because the learning business taps into existing experts without diluting its core goals for education.

Develop Post-Training Coaching.Integrating coaching with certified coaches after the main training event has been offered can personalize the learning. This type of coaching add-on is especially relevant when teaching soft skills like communication, conflict management, providing feedback, executive presence, and ethical decision-making.

Coaching apps can also boost reflection, practice, and learning. As Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool discuss in their book Peak, using coaching questions after a learner is exposed to new material can help them recall critical concepts, reflect and playback key ideas, and relate them to what they already know. Asking “What did you do well?” and “What could you have done differently” after a student puts learning into practice helps students improve and gain mastery. Over time, students learn to ask themselves these questions and apply coaching principles to their work.

Create Peer-Led, Cohort-Based Coaching.Peer learning in small groups (also known as cohort-based learning) is becoming a popular way to learn and share ideas. ASAE’s drivers of change research unveiled growing public skepticism toward credentialed experts and institutions, and learning from peers rather than “outside experts” is a way to swap real-world ideas and practical solutions.

Chief is a private network that connects and supports women executive leaders. A crucial part of Chief’s success is their virtual peer gatherings, or “core groups.” Each member of Chief has a core group with eight to 10 members who meet monthly and are guided by an executive coach. Each core group provides a confidential way to learn from one another and share ideas. Chief is highly relevant in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), where leaders don’t have a clear path or one “right” way to address challenges, especially during the pandemic.

“There was this moment in time when nobody had a playbook,” says Chief co-founder Lindsay Kaplan. “We’re all leaders trying to navigate our teams through a pandemic and social unrest and everything that was hitting us over the last few years, and it was a community that leaders really needed to turn to.”

VUCA is here to stay, and having access to a peer group that can navigate together, coach one another, and problem-solve is incredibly valuable.

Coach-sult to Co-Create.Tracy King, CEO and chief learning strategist at InspirED, employs a coach-sulting model to co-create an education strategy with clients. “I learned early on that even if I created the most elegant solution for a client, chances are they would not get the outcomes they had hoped for because they don’t apply the plan, or a different stakeholder gets involved creating another appendage to the strategy or implementation plan,” says King. “This addition can shift the dependencies within the plan (like scope, capacity, measurement, competing priorities, etc.) causing breakdowns and skewing results. That frustrated me because I wanted my clients to get the results they were looking for.”

With this model, the client is in charge of the agenda and what they want to learn, and King coaches them through defining their goals while also tapping into her expertise—hence coach-sulting rather than pure coaching. “I bring expertise, but I also coach them in their thinking and challenge them to consider what their resources are,” explains King. “This empowers learning leaders to own the process and outcomes. Once we get to the end of the project, they have a strategy they have crafted and feel confident.”

Tagoras, the parent company of Leading Learning, uses a similar approach with its Retained Advisory Services. Whether as a standalone offering or as the extension of a consulting project, clients have access to Tagoras consultants on an as-needed basis to provide guidance during key decision points in formulating or implementing strategy.

“The coaching we provide through our advisory services can be especially powerful as a follow on to an in-depth consulting project,” says Tagoras managing director Jeff Cobb. “At that point, we’ve usually spent months working with the client and are in a great position to give well informed guidance as the organization’s staff take the reins and do the work of implementing the strategy we’ve developed together.”

Coach-struct to Support Understanding, Learning Retention, and Practice.As cognitive scientists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel note in Make It Stick, the book they co-wrote with Peter C. Brown, we humans forget about 70 percent of what we read or hear, and “a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.” Coaching following training sessions can effectively interrupt forgetting and facilitate reflection, practice, and learning retention.

Joel Welch and the professional development team at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) do this when developing courses for busy adult learners in the media and entertainment industry. They use a flipped virtual classroom model where learners complete online coursework and assignments prior to attending weekly live online coaching sessions. During these live coaching sessions, learners identify areas in which they need help and ask questions that arise after going through the course material. The coach-instructors are subject matter experts but also practitioners.

The goal of the live SMPTE sessions is not to regurgitate the content but to encourage participants to raise questions and areas of confusion, ultimately providing everyone an opportunity to help solve the issue. Even before the coaching sessions, course-specific online discussion forums allow participants to post questions. These questions are e-mailed automatically to the coach-instructor and the other course participants. It’s not unusual for other learners to help answer questions. The coaching sessions are recorded for on-demand playback to accommodate every time zone.

Tagoras takes a similar approach with its Maturity Accelerator Program (MAP), combining a multi-week structured curriculum with opportunities for learners to engage with each other and the facilitator to shape the program to their specific situation. Through the experience, participants learn about the key components of learning business maturity but also arrive at a plan for pursuing maturity that aligns with their organizational goals and needs.

The coach-struction model combines coaching with instruction. Grounded in adult learning theory, the model helps people play a more active role in their learning, ask questions when they are stuck, and try to solve issues by applying what they’ve learned. A Gartner study titled “Boosting the Impact of Virtual Learning” found that learners were 1.5 times more likely to apply what they learned when they received instruction and coaching on the skill rather than virtual instruction alone.

As Celisa Steele and others here at Leading Learning are fond of reminding us, “Learning is not an event; it’s a process.” Adding coaching to the process can help learners practice, apply, and deepen their knowledge.

About the AuthorJen Lewi, MBA, CAE, ACC, is the vice president of career development and conferences at the School Nutrition Association. She also specializes in career strategy and executive coaching.

See also:

A Why-To and How-To on Hot Seats, AKA Collaborative Coaching™
Walking the Path to Learning with Tiffany Crosby
The Adaptation Advantage with Heather McGowan
Learning to Lead with Christie Berger
The Future of Learning with Clar Rosso of AICPA
Make It Stick with Peter C. Brown

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James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the Product Community, a product development learning community designed specifically for associations. Jim has decades of experience working in learning businesses that have embraced innovation in learning communities, gamification, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), cohort-based learning, and competency-based learning.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with return guest Jim about the connection between higher education and lifelong learning and creating indispensable learning environments. They also discuss the Product Community that Jim founded, the problem it’s trying to solve, tips for sustaining a community over time, and how to foster a culture of innovation.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

The Path to Chief Learning Officer[01:53] – Would you tell us about your history as a chief learning officer (CLO) and the other roles you’ve held in learning businesses?

Jim is a trained librarian and started his career in distance learning some 30 years ago, teaching students how to find information and essentially running a research service. He was at George Mason in the mid ’90s, when there was a flurry of innovation around learning communities. He was part of a college within a college, New Century College, which was at the forefront of experiential learning. All faculty were required to teach outside of their domain, which created a deep learning experience not just for the students but the faculty as well.

Jim was the founding chief information officer at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, a truly integrative, unique experience. He shifted much of what he learned there to the world of associations.

He’s been chief learning officer at two associations: the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) and the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST). He had the same charge at both: to develop an inclusive learning strategy to tap into an already healthy community and invest deeply in learning as a vehicle for longitudinal engagement.

[05:20] – CHEST has been heavily invested in simulations.

CHEST has an intensive care unit where they do their simulation training. They were on the cutting edge of simulations and of experiential learning.

CHEST also pushed the envelope with gaming, getting into more high-agency games that could measure meaningful impact and outcomes in physician learning.

Academia Versus Associations on Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning[07:16] – What’s your perspective on how the academic world approaches continuing education and lifelong learning versus associations? Do they approach it differently?

There are parallels and complements in the two approaches. In Jim’s experience, continuing education is a cash cow for academic institutions because it takes a market-first view. If a learning program is designed properly from the beginning, and it’s not solely an in-person, semester-based, GPA-based offering, academic institutions can actually reach new markets.

Jim sees a connection between associations, higher ed, and the other content that’s available freely or through subscription. There are many different ways professionals can sharpen their saws as they move through their career, and they can dip in and out of the various options.

A phrase Jim is starting to use in the world of associations is to create the 50-year learner journey. Organizations tend to focus on current needs, but we need to create longitudinal engagement. We need to think about not just the needs of a physician when she starts to engage with an association but even earlier, when she chooses med school and moves through that experience.

If you look at how to create an indispensable learning environment, then it isn’t simply a matter of membership. Membership becomes an outcome because it’s so necessary. This view puts the traditional model of associations on the back burner. And this view, this focus on creating an indispensable learning environment doesn’t apply only to associations; it applies to all types of learning businesses.

And then ultimately you start to think of not just what am I going to learn over 50 years but what problems I’m going to solve with whom, and then how am I going to shape the world. Putting learning at the heart of that, not as something solely credential-based.

James Young

Check out our related episode “The 60-Year Curriculum with Dr. Chris Dede.”

Leading Learning Newsletter[13:19] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

Subscribe for free. Or, if you’re already subscribed, point a colleague to leadinglearning.com/inbox.

The Product Community[14:18] – What problem was the Product Community created to solve?

The Product Community is a product development learning community designed specifically for associations.

So, if you take those four words—product development and learning community—what I basically have been focused on almost my entire career is to really say how can we, from the product development part, think about the learning model, think about a business model, think about ways that we can monetize engagement and then link that up with a pure learning community in which it’s been designed for people over time to work together, work with peers.

James Young

The Product Community marries community and product development. It exists to solve a couple of key problems:

Associations tend to operate withing a traditional, prescribed business model. The assumptions, cultural and otherwise, that drives the services and offerings are often grounded by past thinking and tradition.
There’s stagnant revenue industry-wide in the world of associations, where revenues are typically driven by joinership. People aren’t joining membership organizations as much as they have in the past.
The value proposition conversation needs to evolve because associations undersell their value. From the learning perspective, you’re always fighting to get to the table.

Those are problems, but there’s something timeless about associations and their appeal. People love engagement and connection, and associations can tap into that.

The Product Community explores how to understand who our customers are, how to design interesting value propositions for them, and how to start engaging them in new, non-traditional ways.

[17:27] – Over time, associations need to shift from what Jim calls a hamster wheel of single-use, one-off content and programs into learning that drives longitudinal engagement among a community of peers.

My ideal description of a well-humming association is it’s an ecosystem of ideas. And that ecosystem of ideas…has this indispensable draw and this indispensable value, that ultimately it’s something that you want to give your time to, and you want to pay money because you’re going to benefit from it, not just from what you learn but who you meet and what problems you’re going to solve.

James Young

Another really important consideration is how to get to higher-order measurement of outcomes and evolving beyond what satisfaction levels to how learners apply what they learn and what kind of impact that leads to.

Check out our related episode “One Word: Impact.”

Without clear direction and sufficient capacity and capability, it’s hard to build and sustain a culture of innovation. The Product Community exists to help associations understand the value they have and how to create pathways that connect learners with that value.

How a Product Development Community Works[21:02] – What kinds of activities go on in a product development community? What are the mechanics?

The Product Community is a competency-based and cohort-based program. It aims to be interdisciplinary, so it engages people with different lenses on the learning enterprise.

In its purest form as a learning community, coming together to solve problems across boundaries is vital. People will learn in unexpected ways and further the community while enhancing culture simply because people interact and share.

In Product Community, participants learn to create real products. It’s not only theoretical. It’s not the Big-Bang, breakthrough type of innovation. It’s based on what associations do best and leveraging that.

Sustaining a Community Over Time[24:34] – It’s often hard to keep people engaged in a community over time. If you’ve found that to be a challenge, what tips might you offer for how to sustain a community?

The Product Community offers year-long cohort for people to wrestle with how to create products in a community. These are products that they learn how to get to market.

The Product Community is focused on offering is a repeatable product framework. The framework is something participants can take back to rethink the value that they create through the lens of the product.

This view is member- or customer-based. It’s about the value you produce and how to create a longitudinal vehicle around that value to attract and engage the member or the customer.

Change doesn’t happen in a two-day workshop or in a quarter. The market is responding to the year-long program. To help with sustaining interest, Jim recommends keeping a community small initially.

The Product Community’s ideal customer is a frustrated innovator—someone who wants to see evolution and innovation but is frustrated by tired approaches and stagnant revenue.

Participants build outcomes throughout as they’re on the journey, prototyping, testing, and scaling. It’s a model that borrows from software, but it’s community-based.

Making Innovation Happen[27:07] – Breakthrough innovation can be tough to find. Learning business may have more work to do around the edges and getting clearer about what the customer or member really needs. What’s your perspective on that? How does innovation happen?

Jim recommends creating a division or department of innovation. Innovation needs to be integrated throughout the lifeblood of the organization and become part of the culture. Innovation should be framed less as finding the new million-dollar idea and more as incremental and evolutionary.

Associations do great work but find that it’s often underutilized or doesn’t have a follow-up. The same holds true for other learning businesses.

Single-use one-offs happen in almost every association in Jim’s experience. For example, the annual conference ends, and it’s over until the next year. There’s a huge opportunity to look at how to continue that conversation.

Innovation is about leveraging what we do well.

Most associations, no matter the size, have tight budgets, capacity limitations, and pressures from the board. So innovation needs to be distributed. Product development is required, and we need to think substantially more creatively about who our customers are, what they want, and how to effectively deliver it.

When I say it’s not high-stakes, some products are going to fail. The trick here is that associations have always been in this world, but they don’t view it through the lens of productization, which I think is a breakthrough here. In some ways, it’s nothing new. It’s just new to the space of associations.

James Young

Lifelong Learning Habits [30:16] – What types of things do you as a learner value? What role do communities play for you as part of your learning journey?

Jim belongs to the Association of Managers of Innovation (AMI), a small, boutique learning community of innovators from all different disciplines where he feels he can be honest and vulnerable.

He reads a lot and always has at least one or two books going. He recommends several podcasts—2Bobs, Ditching Hourly, Clever, and Lenny’s Podcast—that are related to learning and becoming innovative.

[32:50] – Wrap-up

James Young is founder and CLO of the Product Community. If your work focuses on the association world, the Product Community’s Association Design Circle may be of particular interest. You can connect with Jim on Linked.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Strategizing for Learning with CLO James Young of SCUP
The 60-Year Curriculum with Dr. Chris Dede
A Learner’s Journey with Connie Malamed
The Indispensable Community with Richard Millington

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When we said goodbye to 2022, we took time to reflect on milestones, trends, and potential implications for learning businesses in the previous episode. Now it’s time to prepare for the new year and look ahead to the areas that are likely to impact learning businesses most in 2023.

In this first episode of the new year, we share data from a recent survey to uncover the top areas of focus for learning businesses in the coming year. We also share our key takeaways from the data and the related implications for the learning business landscape.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

Areas of Focus for Learning Businesses in 2023[01:05] – To help us look at the year ahead we draw on data we collected via an online survey in October and November 2022. We received qualifying responses from 155 learning businesses of all types. Respondents included charitable or philanthropic organizations, educational institutions, for-profit businesses, and associations (the largest segment of respondents, about 41 percent).

We asked survey respondents which of 15 areas of activities they’re already pursuing, planning to pursue in 2023, or not planning to pursue.

Creation of learning experiences that combine online elements with face-to-face elements
Implementation of technologies that leverage artificial intelligence to support or enhance learning
Microlearning opportunities
Providing a personalized learning experience
Creation of social, peer-to-peer, or cohort-based learning experiences
Use of virtual reality or augmented reality to provide new learning experiences or enhance existing experiences
Use of blockchain as an approach to managing records related to learning or certification/credentialing
Use of virtual conferences (and we defined a virtual conference as an online event similar to a traditional face-to-face conference, not just a single Webinar)
New or alternative approaches to credentialing, including certificate programs, microcredentials, and digital badges
Aligning offerings with specific career or job paths relevant to learners—e.g., through a competency model, learning pathways, or targeted curricula
Integration of educational offerings into the learning and development programs of employers in a field or industry or into general workforce development needs
Development of strategies or tactics to help combat declining enrollments, downward price pressure, or “commoditization” of educational offerings
Increased efforts to gather and analyze data to inform new product decisions or improve existing products
Increased efforts to gather and analyze data that demonstrates the impact or effectiveness of the learning experiences offered
Implementation of methods to ensure that learning is retained and applied over time

We asked about these areas in an end-of-year survey we ran in 2020 and 2021, and we developed the original list in 2018. To develop the list, we used a modified crowdsourcing approach, soliciting the insights of those working in and with learning businesses, and then we folded in our own observations and thoughts to arrive at the list of 15.

We recommend you take a moment to think about your own priorities and which of these 15 areas, if any, you’re likely to act on in the coming year.

And, in addition to asking yourself about your priorities, also ask if your priorities are clear throughout your learning business? Is everyone on the team aware of and crystal-clear on your priorities for the year ahead?

Celisa Steele

Leading Learning Newsletter[06:01] – As someone who listens to the Leading Learning Podcast, you should know about the Leading Learning newsletter.

Subscribe for free. Or, if you’re already subscribed, point a colleague to leadinglearning.com/inbox.

Top Areas of Focus for Learning Businesses in the Coming Year[07:02] – Here are the top six areas either being pursued or planning to be pursued in 2023.

Increased efforts to gather and analyze data to inform new product decisions or improve existing products (93 percent).
Increased efforts to gather and analyze data that demonstrates the impact or effectiveness of the learning experiences we offer (89 percent). This area came in seventh last year.
Creation of learning experiences that combine online elements with face-to-face elements (82 percent). The focus on this area isn’t surprising given we’re emerging from the COVID and gathering face-to-face again seems reasonable. During the pandemic, learners also saw firsthand the convenience and effectiveness of online learning, so combining online and face-to-face seems natural.
Providing a personalized learning experience (82 percent). Personalization has long been a Holy Grail of learning, and adult learners seem increasingly intolerant of experiences that waste their time and money by covering ground they already know.
Creation of social, peer-to-peer, or cohort-based learning experiences (79 percent).This area fits with the hunger for social connection that the pandemic deepened.
Microlearning opportunities (79 percent).Microlearning respects learners’ time, and, because of its tight focus, it can allow learners to pick relevant topics and skip irrelevant ones.

The top two areas overall—data for product decisions and data to show impact—are also areas where more than half of respondents plan to begin work in 2023. The other top six areas have larger segments already doing the work. The two data areas represent the highest new activity among respondents.

But, obviously, data has been a buzz area for years now, data and analytics, particularly around being able to demonstrate impact. But we know from our experience that, in a lot of cases, learning is being put out there without really any thoughtful, intentional way of measuring impact, getting the data that shows that we actually move the dial with the learning experiences.

Jeff Cobb

Data should also inform how products are designed and which products are offered in the first place. Often a committee or just a few people will create a product, and it’s a shot in the dark because there isn’t broader data informing the product decisions.

In these top areas, there’s an emphasis on rich data that can provide insight and help determine future direction and a focus on data that gives you a fuller picture of what the market needs and a better understanding of how learners are responding and interacting with your offerings.

Three Takeaways and Implications for the Year Ahead[11:44] – Based on the survey data and our own observations, we’ll offer three takeaways and some implications of each.

Innovation at the Edges For the foreseeable future, product innovation for learning businesses is likely to be more about meaningful but incremental changes to well-established models than about bold leaps or blue oceans.

The range of what most learning businesses offer has been the same for quite some time. The shift online was a disruptor once upon a time, but, even before COVID, online learning was an established fact.

So the question is: How do you get better at what you’re already offering and generate more value?

Trying to answer that question may explain the focus we see in the survey results on data to inform product decisions. We need data to know where and how we can make meaningful changes that meet learner, employer, and other stakeholder needs.

The interest in social and cohort-based learning is arguably also evidence of a shift toward innovation at the edges. These are hardly new approaches, but figuring out how to do them better and showing the impact may give a learning business the edge it needs in its market.

The economy is also a factor in this takeaway.

In shaky, uncertain economic times, there is often less of an appetite for bold moves, and there’s more of a desire to make what we have work. And there’s this pressure to make sure that any new initiatives, that we get those right the first time. And, again, that brings us back to having the data necessary to make well-informed decisions.

Celisa Steele

Because innovation at the edges is likely to be highly data-dependent, it’s worth nothing that it’s harder and harder to get prospects and existing customers and learners to provide data through traditional means like surveys (something we touched on in episode 335). Identifying baked-in ways to collect data will be increasingly important—as will be making good use of that data as the basis for small innovations.

Blended Learning’s Rebirth [15:44] – We’re betting on a renewed interest in and use of blended learning in 2023 and beyond.

Our definition of “blended learning” draws on the work of the Christensen Institute and its Blended Learning Universe, which describes blended learning as a formal education program which meets three criteria:

Students learn in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.
Students learn in part in a brick-and-mortar location, where instruction is facilitated.
The online and offline modalities are connected to provide an integrated learning experience.

This takeaway about blended learning is supported by two of the top six areas we saw in the survey data: combining online and face-to-face elements in learning experiences and social, peer-to-peer, and cohort-based learning experiences.

The in-person component of blended learning fits well with the pent-up hunger for social connection that’s come from the pandemic.

The online piece speaks to learner convenience and the ability to have more flexibility about when and/or where to learn—a convenience that many people got used to during the pandemic and work-from-home situations. The online piece also helps lessen the environmental impact of in-person learning that requires travel, and we think there will be increasing scrutiny of the environmental impact of learning.

Each mode has advantages on its own, and combining in-person and online creates the opportunity for greater effectiveness than either mode alone and leverages the compelling, appealing benefits of each mode.

For a deeper discussion of the benefits of blended learning, we recommend our executive briefing “Why and How to Build Your Blended Learning Playbook.”

And check out our related episode about blended learning, “The New Blended Learning.”

Blended learning can help create loyal customers, learners, and members, and that speaks to that dwindling trust issue we raised in episode 335. As humans, we tend to trust and like people we’re in relationships with, and blended learning puts learners in relationships with each other, and the learning business, as the organizer, will benefit from the trust created in those relationships as well.

Business (Re)models[18:51] – We put the R-E in parentheses, so this can be read as “business models” or “business remodels.”

Organizations that may not have ever had to give too much thought to their business model will need to start. And even those that have given a lot of thought to their business models may have some rethinking to do. They may need to remodel those business models.

Jeff Cobb

In an uncertain economy and in times of high inflation, spending can be tight, which impacts what individuals and organizations are able and willing to spend on learning.

The good news is that currently in the U.S. we have a lot of job vacancies, so reskilling, upskilling, and onboarding are needed even more now (we touched on this in episode 335).

All of this points to the need to find those small innovations that increase the real and perceived value of our offerings and to the need to find new and improved approaches for generating revenue from those offerings.

Part of the attraction of approaches like blended learning, cohort-based learning, and microlearning is that they may provide ways to create monetizable add-ons to or variations or extensions of traditional offerings like conferences or seminars, which can change what and how we charge for those offerings.

Microlearning, for example, can make sense as part of a subscription or membership model. We believe we’ll see more offerings where education is sold not as single event or unit of content but as a part of a fuller pathway or journey.

One of the areas we asked about in the survey that just missed being in the top six was around aligning offerings with specific career or job paths relevant to learners—just under 75 percent of respondents said they are already doing that or plan to pursue starting in 2023.

We also anticipate more learning businesses that sell primarily to individuals evolve into selling business-to-business or finding new ways to distribute their offerings through partners.

All this suggests more sophisticated models than the traditional fee-for-registration model, and these models will require greater business development acumen.

Reflection Questions[22:45] – Reflect individually and with your team.

Which of our three takeaways—innovation at the edges, blended learning’s rebirth, and business (re)models—resonates the most with you?
What takeaway might you add from the data we shared and/or your own observations of the learning landscape?

[23:19] – Wrap-up

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Reflections on 2022
The New Blended Learning
15 Changes in 15 Years

The post Preparing for 2023 appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Understanding the science behind human behavior can be extremely powerful for learning businesses. Daniel H. Pink is the author of six provocative, bestselling books that uncover the truth about complex behaviors, including Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, and, most recently, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward.

Dan Pink is also the creator of the Pinkcast, a series of short videos that feature science-based tools and tips for working smarter and living better, and his TED Talk on the science of motivation is one of the 25 most popular, with more than 29 million views.

In this redux episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Dan about themes he explores in his books that have implications for learning businesses, including motivation 3.0, learning goals versus performance goals, persuasion, and the importance of timing when it comes to learning.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

[02:04] – Dan and Celisa talk more about Dan’s background.

Motivation 3.0[03:32] – Drive discusses motivation 3.0. What is motivation 3.0?

When it comes to what motivates human beings, it’s not a singular thing because human beings are a mix of drives.

Motivation 1.0 is our biological drive to satisfy our biological needs.
Motivation 2.0 deals with rewards and punishments in our environment.
Motivation 3.0 reflects the reality that human beings do things for all types of reasons—because they like doing them, because it’s the right thing to do, because they can get better at it, because it’s challenging, etc.

It’s important to look at all three types of motivation to get a three-dimensional view of human beings. And, until recently, many organizations were only taking a two-dimensional view of human beings—meeting biological needs and using a system of rewards and punishments.

[06:07] – What are the implications or applications of motivation 3.0 for how learning businesses might better support the learners they serve?

There are huge implications. And, it’s important to note, what Dan writes about isn’t an opinion; it’s based on 50 years of science around motivation.

There’s a kind of motivator used in organizations called a “controlling contingent motivator,” or an“if, then” reward. The research shows these are very effective for simple tasks with short time horizons. This is because human beings like rewards, and they get us to focus narrowly.

However, the same body of research tells us that “if, then” rewards are far less effective for more complex tasks with longer time horizons. This is because rewards focus our attention in such a narrow way.

Complicated tasks, on the other hand, often require a more expansive focus. When the finish line is far away, you need something else to sustain you over the long haul.

When it comes to what this means for learning, it depends on your learning objectives, and you need to understand the difference between learning goals and performance goals.

Performance goal is passing the test. Learning goal is, “Do I know something about safety, and can I apply it in my life in a way that makes the workplace safer?” And our mistake that we make in organizations is that we think that, if people have achieved the performance goal (passing the test), then they have achieved the learning goal. And that’s not true.

Dan Pink

[10:38] – Dan shares a personal example to of performance goals versus learning goals. He took French for six years, got straight As, and can’t speak French. He was narrowly focused entirely on the performance goal (getting a good grade).

When we focus too much on performance goals, it can actually inhibit learning. This is paradoxical, but, if you think about your own experiences, you’ll likely have an example like Dan’s about high school French.

Learning objectives aren’t bad. What matters is what you do to achieve those objectives. For example, there’s nothing inherently wrong with grades, but how they’re used makes them more or less helpful in learning. Humans learn from feedback. When grades serve a feedback purpose, they’re useful. But, when grades are the entire point of the exercise, that can risk learning because a passing grade doesn’t necessarily mean you learned something.

[13:54] – Dan and Celisa discuss how to use learning objectives while ensuring the focus is on learning goals as opposed to performance goals.

See two earier episodes on motivation:Exploring Motivation and Learning and Getting Contagious – and Curious – with Jonah Berger.

Partner with Tagoras[15:28] – At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Persuasion and Listening[15:58] – In To Sell Is Human, Dan writes, “Today, both sales and non-sales selling depend more on the creative, heuristic, problem-finding skills of artists than on the reductive, algorithmic, problem-solving skills of technicians.” How can those working in learning businesses cultivate those creative, heuristic, problem-finding skills?

One of the most fundamental skills in any kind of influence and persuasion is perspective-taking. Can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else’s point of view? Most of us aren’t very good at this, so one of the first things to do is recognize that, and then take small steps to get better at it.

Most people don’t do a good job of is listening. Listening isn’t taught in school because the expectation is that, if you have ears, you can listen—and that’s just not true.

To get better at listening, Dan recommends:

When someone else is talking, don’t think about what you’re going to say next.
Before you respond, pause and make sure what they said has settled in.
Before you respond, pause, and then repeat what they said in your own words. Then you speak.

Listening better can help you get better at influence and persuasion. Listening better can also help us understand our market better and know what our learners need.

See our related episode Pre-suaded to Learn with Robert Cialdini.

Leveraging Timing of Learning Experiences[21:19] – Drawing on what you learned when researching and writing When, how might learning businesses leverage timing to achieve the best learning results and outcomes?

Timing is multifaceted, and the research about time is complicated. Timing covers things like how performance and mood changes throughout the course of a day, how breaks affect our performance and learning, and how beginnings, midpoints, and endings affect us. All of these yield lessons for learning businesses.

Our brain power and cognitive ability is different at different times of the day, which has huge implications for learning businesses. The premise for so much of what goes on in organizations is that it doesn’t matter what time we schedule meetings, courses, seminars, etc.

But it does matter. There’s a mountain range of evidence showing that brain power changes throughout the course of a day. (Dan references a couple specific research studies, which show this). This is important for learning businesses because, when scheduling in-person trainings or seminars, the time of day makes a difference.

If you get the why correct, you have people who will be more motivated learners. If you get the when correct, you’re going to have their brains functioning better. And, again, these are all strategic questions. They’re not simply logistical questions.

Dan Pink

On the Horizon for Humans and How We Learn[27:25] – When you think about what’s on the horizon for humans and how we live in the next five years or so, what most excites you, and what implications do you see for learning?

Something that came out in the research for When is the importance of breaks in learning. We’ve absorbed the ethic that the way to get things done and the way to achieve or learn is to power through, and that’s fundamentally flawed. There’s massive evidence showing breaks are part of our learning.

Pinkcast 2.21: These are the 5 ways to make your breaks more replenishing.

We’re also having a re-reckoning in the U.S. regarding the importance of sleep, not only for well-being in general but also related to learning.

We need a more three-dimensional view of what learning is. It’s not simply sitting and grinding away; it’s also about how to prepare your mind and body for the possibilities of learning.

Self-directed learning is another area to look at. Can learning businesses support more self-directed learning? One of the most potent learning technologies and platforms that exists is YouTube because people go there when they want to learn how to do something. Better understanding YouTube’s appeal and how individuals use it to learn can offer lessons for learning businesses.

See our related episode Celebrating the Self-Directed Learner.

The social side of learning will also be a factor in the near future. We need to look at ways to facilitate and accelerate learning in social ways that don’t rely soley on the traditional classroom setting.

See our related episodes on social learning:

Defining and Designing Social Learning
The Re-Trending of Social Learning
Learning in the Social Age with Julian Stodd
Tool Talk: Social Learning Mixer

Danrecommends that learning businesses look for the bright spots—what’s happening in learning that’s successful—and then try to better understand how and why those bright spots are bright.

[33:22] – What is one of the most powerful learning experiences you’ve been involved in, as an adult, since finishing your formal education?

Dan talks about his experience completing a media fellowship in Japan and how powerful it was to experience everyday life in another country for several months.

[37:43] – Wrap-up

Dan Pink is a bestselling author and speaker. You can learn more about Dan and his work on his Web site at https://www.danpink.com. We also recommend the Pinkcast, a series of short, free videos featuring science-based tools and tips for working smarter and living better.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Exploring Motivation and Learning
Getting Contagious – and Curious – with Jonah Berger
The Re-Trending of Social Learning
Pre-suaded to Learn with Robert Cialdini

The post Redux: The Surprising Truth About Human Behaviors and Learning with Dan Pink appeared first on Leading Learning.

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The topic of mindfulness is likely one you’ve heard a lot about in recent years. But what does it mean to be mindful? And what is the connection between mindfulness and learning?

Dr. Ellen Langer is a social psychologist and a Harvard professor. She’s also a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards and honors for her work on mindfulness that spans more than 40 years. She’s written 11 books and more than 200 research articles for general and academic readers on mindfulness. Her best-selling books include Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity, and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

In this redux episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Ellen about what it really means to be mindful, the benefits that come with mindfulness, and ways you can encourage mindfulness in your own life and in the design of learning experiences.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

What Is Mindfulness?[02:38] – You’re known by many as the “mother of mindfulness” because of the valuable work you’ve done on the topic. How did you come to focus on mindfulness as an area of study?

In the 1970s, Ellen started studying mindlessness, which seemed to be pervasive—40 years of research has shown that virtually all of us are mindless almost all of the time.

Mindfulness isn’t meditation. Meditation is a tool to that may lead you to post-meditative mindfulness.

Mindfulness, as we study it, is a simple process of noticing new things, and, as you notice new things, that puts you in the present, that makes you sensitive to context and perspective, and it’s a process of engagement. So it feels good. And, as you’re noticing new things, you come to see, gee, you didn’t know it as well as you thought you did, and so then your attention naturally goes to it. So it’s very easy, and it’s the essence of what we’re doing when we’re having fun.

Ellen Langer

When it comes to mindfulness and learning, people have the mistaken notion of “no pain, no gain,” but, by being mindful, one can gain without pain. Ellen says she should have called what she studies creativity instead of mindfulness, but she didn’t because most people have a mindless notion of creativity. With creativity, too often the emphasis is on the final product. Mindfulness is a process, not a product. When you’re mindful, the product is usually better.

See Ellen Langer’s talk “Mindfulness over Matter,” in which she highlights many of the key points from her book, Mindfulness.

[06:18] – You’ve said that to be mindful is “to be confident and uncertain simultaneously.” What do you mean?

Everything is always changing. It looks different from different perspectives. When we think we know, we are being mindless and letting the past determine the present, rather than being in the present.

Mindfulness can lead to being less judgmental, and that leads us to be less concerned about other people judging us. After 40 years of research, Ellen has found that the simple act of noticing helps people live longer and feel good because they are engaged. People see you as more attractive and charismatic when you’re mindful, and the products you produce are better when you’re mindful.

If mindfulness leads to an understanding that knowledge is contextual or relative, and you can’t be certain about anything, that can be scary for some. People often pretend when they know they don’t know something that they think you might know. They hope they can get away with not knowing by pretending.

This is a personal attribution for uncertainty. What people need to do is make a universal attribution for uncertainty acknowledging that nobody knows. You can be confident and uncertain.

Partner with Tagoras[10:43] – At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Mindfulness and Learning[11:17] – It seems there’s a mindfulness problem now with people not being open to learning. Do you feel that way?

When Ellen started her work over 40 years ago, nobody had heard about mindfulness. Today it’s hard to open a magazine or listen to a newscast without seeing or hearing the word mindful—even if they’re using the work incorrectly. So Ellen thinks the world is more and more open to mindfulness.

Mindlessness is certainly prevalent in many quarters. When you become mindful, you can take advantage of opportunities you otherwise wouldn’t notice and you can also avert bad outcomes.

Stress and Becoming More Mindful[13:21] – If an individual wants to become a more mindful learner, are there practices you recommend?

There aren’t really “practices” for mindfulness (there are with meditation). Mindfulness is about being out in the world.

If you do nothing else, simply establishing a mindset for uncertainty will help you be more mindful.

When life is going well, mindfulness often doesn’t come up. When life isn’t working for us, people naturally seek solutions without being trained.

Stress, for instance, is a major problem for people all over the world. I get this question about how can people not be stressed when there’s so much to know? And the fact of the matter is there’s not much more to know than there was in the past. The difference is that people think that the more they know, the better they’ll do. And there’s no evidence for that. When you’re stressed, stress is mindless.

Ellen Langer

Stress relies on two things:

The belief that something is going to happen.
The belief that, when that something happens, it’s going to be awful.

To combat this stress, Ellen recommends you give yourself three reasons why this thing might not happen. Next, assume that it is going to happen. How might its happening actually be a good thing?

It all depends on how you choose to view the situation.

[15:43] – Ellen offers some exercises people can do to be more mindful.

Every time you assume something is obvious, remember that it isn’t because everything looks different from different perspectives.
Every time you negatively judge someone’s action, think how that behavior may have made sense from that person’s perspective.
Walk out your door, and notice three things you didn’t see before. If you’re living with somebody, come back in the door and notice three new things about that person.

Keep taking the thing that you think you know and turn it inside out. Over time you’ll see that you didn’t know what you thought you knew. Then you’ll be naturally mindful, and you don’t have to work at it.

Mindfulness and Learning Experiences[17:05] – What can people do to deliver or facilitate learning experiences that are more conducive to mindful learning? Can learning businesses help architect more mindful learning experiences?

Start with the choice of speakers at conferences. If you have a conference on X, having a leading authority on Y present would be interesting because people would wonder how X and Y are related. Thinking about that relationship would help them be more mindful.

When it comes to learning, people have the mistaken notion that there’s “no pain, no gain” and that one should be gaining all the time.

But learning is fun, so everything done at conferences should be fun—if it’s not, do it differently. When designing an event, rather than solely focusing on the transmission of information from one person to a group of people, make it fun for everybody.

[19:02] – Many organizations have a recognized body of knowledge or set of competencies that individuals need to master to get certified. How does mindfulness jibe with certification,competency, and bodies of knowledge?

How the certification process is designed will determine whether it works well or not. You can have a rigid set of rules and teach people to follow rules just as they’re laid out; that tends to be mindless. However, if you find a way to make each rule a little more tentative, you can encourage mindfulness.

When something is mindless, it tends to be rigid, and people follow it regardless of whether it makes sense in a particular context—the past dictates the present. Mindfulness is a looser, more conditional structure.

All learning should be fun. All learning should be conditional. And I think that the lifelong learners themselves probably would benefit from some of the research that people like myself do. We have a lot of research with older folk where we make them mindful. They live longer, they’re happier, and they’re healthier.

Ellen Langer

[21:48] – Ellen references the dramatic effects she found in her Counterclockwise study, which demonstrates how important context is and how so much about health, aging, and our negative views of those are learned behaviors.

She believes people should focus on adding more life to their years, rather than more years to their life.

Lifelong Learning Habits[23:51] – What are your own lifelong learning habits and practices?

Other than following the advice for learning that was shared here, Ellen doesn’t really do much else.

As you get older, life gets easier because you see things differently. She suggests asking yourself, “Is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?” Often, when we’re younger, we react to things as if they’re tragedies when in fact they’re only inconveniences.

[25:45] – Wrap-up

Dr. Ellen Langer is a leading expert and pioneer in the field of mindfulness. She is the author of eleven books including Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

You can learn more about Ellen Langer’s work at https://langermindfulnessinstitute.com and https://ellenlanger.com.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

Maximizing Learning with Mindset
Make It Stick with Peter C. Brown
Learning How to Learn with Dr. Barbara Oakley
Effective Learning with Dr. Megan Sumeracki

The post Redux: Mindfulness and Learning with Ellen Langer appeared first on Leading Learning.

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With the end of the year quickly approaching, it’s a natural time to pause and reflect. Even though it can be easy to put reflection low on the priority list since it doesn’t necessarily lead to concrete outcomes, it’s an important practice and can have tremendous value for learning businesses.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, we reflect on 2022, our biggest milestones as a company, and bigger-picture trends impacting society more broadly. We also discuss the related challenges and opportunities these trends represent for learning businesses in the new year.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

Our 2022 Milestones[01:21] – We look at some of the major milestones for Tagoras (the parent company of Leading Learning) in 2022.

15 Years in Business as TagorasWe hit 15 years in business as Tagoras in 2022, and that was a significant achievement. (See our related episode, “15 Changes in 15 Years.”)

The number of startup businesses that makes to 15 years is quite small. We’re really grateful for all the organizations that have worked with us and for everyone who listens to the podcast, attends our Webinars, and reads our newsletter.

We didn’t have the podcast or the Leading Learning brand when we started 15 years ago. Initially, we focused on offering consulting services to learning businesses. Consulting is still core to what we do at Tagoras, but we have evolved since our start and have other lines of business now.

For example, many listeners may not be aware of our LearningRevolution.net site where we help experts who want to share their expertise with the world.

Addition of Staff[03:41] – Another milestone we see when we look in our rearview mirror is the fact that we added more staff.

It was just Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele at the start but several years ago Jackie Harman joined part-time, working with us on projects like the Leading Learning Podcast and in-person events. She joined us full-time at the beginning of 2022 and she’s been instrumental in the growth of LearningRevolution.net.

Josh Goldman, director of consulting services, joined in 2021, and in 2022 Tagoras welcomed another consultant, Krispin Nelson, to the team.

A Focus on Predictability and Clarity[05:02] – Another big milestone in 2022 for Tagoras is we’ve started putting time and effort into getting more buttoned-up.

We’ve been focusing on systems, procedures, and structure and getting everything well aligned. These efforts will allow us to be clear on how we do things, who’s accountable for what, and what our goals are.

Bigger-Picture 2022 Moments[06:25] – We also want to look broadly at society and highlight some bigger-picture moments from 2022.

Emerging from COVIDWe’re now emerging from the pandemic. COVID’s not so fully center stage, though it’s still clearly a factor in many decisions. For example, people are more likely to make decisions about whether they’re going to travel to a place-based conference much closer to the time. That may continue because people aren’t sure how big a star COVID still is. People will also likely be more thoughtful about about whether it makes sense to gather in person.

COVID aside, we saw during the pandemic that you can do very important, good work online together. And so there’s just this question of is this something I really do need to be there in person for? And I think people will be asking that question of themselves and maybe of their team members, those that they manage, and that may impact what people choose to do going forward.

Celisa Steele

COVID will also continue to impact how employers think about office space and where employees physically work.

A Shaky Economy[08:27] – The state of the economy is on people’s minds. There’s a lot of uncertainty and shakiness—inflation, rising interest rates, etc. This directly impacts what people are able and willing to spend on things, including travel and learning.

There are also continued supply chain issues and renewed speculations about a recession in the U.S. in 2023.

Distrust 0f Expertise and Large Institutions[10:29] – Another thing we’ve seen this year, and even before, is a distrust of expertise and large institutions. One data point around this is from Pew Research Center in June of 2022, which found that “[o]nly two-in-ten Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (2%) or ‘most of the time’ (19%).”

We have distrust surrounding elections and the pandemic. There were early stumbles in the pandemic around masking, for example, so people question what to believe from experts. There’s also a huge issue with misinformation and algorithms and bots helping to spread misinformation.

And, in a lot of cases, those people [doctors, economists, and other experts] are being called into question…. It’s kind of a mess out there. It’s getting harder to distinguish fact from fiction, really.

Jeff Cobb

ASAE ForesightWorks includes “rejection of expertise” and “declining trust” among the drivers of change identified. ASAE Annual, held in the summer of 2022, included a session around the decline of expertise because it’s such a relevant topic for associations. Trade and professional associations are often seen as a source of expertise, so, if there’s a general distrust of expetise, that can be an issue.

There are a number of books, such as The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols, that look at society’s declining faith in expertise.

Partner with Tagoras[10:48] – At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses.

Looking at the Implications[14:22] – We started with a more personal look at 2022 from the Tagoras lens, then we talked about broader societal issues. Now let’s look at what we see when we put the two together.

Emerging from COVIDWe, as representatives of Tagoras, went back to attending some face-to-face conferences for our own learning and networking in 2022, including Learning Solutions, CEX, ASAE Annual, and others.

Jeff came down with COVID on the eve of a face-to-face event in Washington, DC, we’d planned to hold. It was to be our first-since-COVID in-person gathering, and it was going to be a small gathering for informal learning. But we ended up having to cancel. This speaks to the fact that COVID is an ongoing concern and consideration.

But, despite the potential risks, many people still really want to gather in person, particularly after time away from it earlier on in the pandemic. There is potentially real value in gathering together if you can do it in a way that takes advantage of being together versus just being on Zoom.

Organizations becoming more virtual, some deciding to go completely virtual, during the pandemic. It happened that we had to leave our old office space earlier this year when our lease was up. We had to decide what to do, and we ultimately made the decision to take on another office space.

Even in a world where so much is remote and where work from home is possible, there is value in the physical—both in gathering together and in the actual space.

[E]ven in work-from-home situations, people often find value in making sure that, to the extent that they can, their workspace is somewhat separate from their living space. And so I think just remembering that, even as so much is virtual, the physical spaces and people, that’s important as well.

Celisa Steele

A Shaky Economy[18:08] – Related to the shaky economy, inflation means greater scrutiny of costs. Both in our personal and business lives, we’re becoming more cost-conscious. People are going to be asking if what they’re buying provides something relevant, valuable, and useful. Being able to make that relevancy case and demonstrate your value clearly to pull people into your offerings is going to be more important than ever.

That’s on the bad-news side of the equation, but, on the better-news side, there are a lot of job vacancies in the U.S., which can translate to increased demand for onboarding, upskilling, and reskilling. If onboarding, upskilling, or reskilling is something your learning business offers, you have the potential to serve an important role in helping to fill job vacancies and ensure people get the right knowledge and skills to do their job.

Distrust of Expertise and Large Institutions[20:19] – Getting good data is becoming even harder, but good data is so important to have to help make good product and marketing decisions. There’s a lot of noise, but now there’s distrust too. Consumers want to know why you’re asking them questions, and they’re wondering if you’ll keep their personal data safe, private, and protected. This environment makes it hard to get good market insight.

Having the relationship just counts more than ever now. And it’s part of what we’re doing strategically as a company going forward is really evaluating that and figuring out, okay, where have we just been assuming and counting on the fact that people know, like, and trust us, that they know that we’re experts, they know that we have authority, that they can trust us to have that? Where have we been assuming that where it may not necessarily be true?

Jeff Cobb

We need to invest time in building new relationships and reinforcing existing relationships so that when we do reach out with an ask, people are more likely to respond because they trust us.

This relates to the acronym EAT: expertise, authority, and trust. In general, it’s a good thing for your audience to feel like you have or can provide access to expertise, that you have authority, and that you’re trustworthy. It’s also extremely important now in the digital world. Google mysteriously factors this into how it decides to rank Web sites. If you don’t have expertise, authority, and trust, eventually it will hurt you.

Reflection[24:03] – There isn’t necessarily any concrete or preordained outcome from reflection, but it often plays a role in informing future actions and activities.

Take some time to reflect on your own and then with your team. We strongly encourage everyone to do it on their own first to form some opinions and thoughts, and then come together as a group to discuss.

You should also take some time to think about what your reflections suggest about priorities for the new year. It might give you ideas of what to double-down on or what to sunset.

[25:30] – Wrap-up

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

15 Changes in 15 Years
Now’s the Time: The Year That Was
Now’s the Time: The Year That Is

The post Reflections on 2022 appeared first on Leading Learning.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

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Diana Howles is an award-winning speaker, global virtual facilitator, and master trainer with 25 years of experience in the talent development field. Diana is CEO and co-owner of Howles Associates and author of Next Level Virtual Training: Advance Your Facilitation.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Diana about Next Level Virtual Training, the capability model she developed for virtual facilitators, and the pros and cons of hybrid or, as she prefers to call it, “live mixed” learning. Diana also shares practical tips and strategies for anyone looking to improve their virtual facilitation.

Listen to the ShowAccess the TranscriptDownload a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes[00:00] – Intro

Next Level Virtual Training: Advance Your Facilitation[01:49] – Would you tell us about the origins of Next Level Virtual Training: Advance Your Facilitation, which came out in 2022?

The pandemic threw the whole world into virtual training, and Diana had lots of experience working in virtual training. She wanted to share her experience and help equip facilitators for the new more virtual world.

Diana noticed a lack of professional development offerings for virtual facilitators. For example, there wasn’t a dedicated resource on hybrid learning that engages on-site and online learners together. So Diana thought it would be a great time to write a book to help people be more effective online.

Jon Aleckson of Web Courseworks has written a blog post on Next Level Virtual Training. The post is part review and part reflection on the application of key concepts and serves as a good introduction to key topics Diana covers in her book.

Virtual Training Capability Model[03:16] – What’s the difference between a competency model and a capability model? How did you arrive at the eight areas of expertise covered by the capability model that’s at the core of Next Level Virtual Training?

Diana looks at competence as the destination and capability as the journey. The goal is to be fully competent, but capabilities speak to our growth as we try to reach that ultimate destination. Capabilities are a blend of knowledge and skills, which grow over time.

Diana wanted to focus on capabilities and helping people with knowledge and skills in key areas. The capability model for virtual facilitators has eight core areas of expertise. It took a lot of iteration to narrow the model down to these eight.

The State of Online Learning[06:27] –Because of the pandemic, the majority of people have experienced live online learning. What’s your assessment of where we are in terms of not just delivering live online learning opportunities but in designing and facilitating them to be effective?

We’re at a place where everyone has been introduced to these platforms or had experience using them, but we haven’t yet reached the point of effective design. This is why Diana wanted to create the book Next Level Virtual Training.

We’re challenging people not just to use the platform but to do it in a very thoughtful way that’s designing for being able to have outcomes and change the way people, after the learning, change the way they perform at work or even in their fields of work.

Diana Howles

There are many things we can do to leverage more the tools. It’s more than just going through the motions; it’s about being more thoughtful.

Effectiveness of Single-Session Learning[08:34] – When you think about designing live synchronous learning, you think about ways to prepare learners for the live sessions and/or to follow up with them after. Do you believe that single-session learning can be effective, or do you always look to add pre- or post-content to live online sessions?

Diana has seen single sessions be effective. But the research is clear that, when we have blended learning solutions, we have much better retention and application. She always tries to include some prep work because learners then tend to come to class better prepared to have a good discussion.

Post-work offers the possibility for spaced repetition over time and reinforces learning. Diana sometimes uses a one-by-one-by-one approach. She has learners do something one day after a session, one week after, and then one month after. Spreading out the learning and using the live synchronous class as part of a larger solution creates more effective learning long term.

Pros and Cons of Hybrid Learning[11:18] – What are the pros and cons of hybrid approaches to learning, where some learners engage in person and others engage online at the same time?

Diana likes prefers the term “live mixed” because she feels the term to “hybrid learning” has been overused and is used in non-learning contexts (e.g., hybrid cars). You have a mix of on-site and online learners together, and it’s live (i.e., happening in real-time), so she calls it “live mixed.”

There are inherent challenges because you have double the technology. The facilitator is taxed with many things to manage at once, which places a high cognitive load on them. There are ways that we can have effective live mixed learning, but it requires strategies, like those that follow.

Partner with a co-facilitator. One is the lead. The lead can be either the virtual or the on-site facilitator, but, either way, you have a facilitator in each space. This helps the learners as well as lightening the load for the facilitators.
Have IT support available. If something goes wrong, you want it to be remedied right away. Sometimes IT can just be there for the opening piece.
Give learners choice. This leverages learner agency and autonomy and also adds to their investment in the learning.
Make sure the learners are committed to how they will participate. They can choose to participate online or in-person, but they have to commit to which upfront and honor that choice to allow the facilitators to plan appropriately.
Keep instructional practices equitable. For example, when doing a debrief, alternate between calling on someone participating virtually and someone else participating in person.

The Use of Video Cameras During Live Online Sessions[16:13] – What guidance do you have on when and why to use video cameras during live online sessions?

Diana recommends using video cameras for purposeful connection moments. There are many benefits of using a Web cam, though the research shows that Web cams being on or off doesn’t make a difference in learning outcomes. A Stanford study done in 2015 found that learners felt an increased sense of social presence, as well as an improved experience, when Web cams were used.

Though the use of cameras doesn’t improve learning outcomes, it does make a difference in the learner experience and their perception of the facilitator’s presence, and those are valuable benefits.

Florida State University did a Web cam study in 2021 and found that there was an increased sense of closeness and that people listened better when cameras were on.

But we don’t need the cameras on all the time. Instead, we should use them for purposeful connection moments, such as during an introduction, a closing, a role-play, or a teach-back. When facilitating a large-group discussion, Diana usually stops showing other visuals and asks everybody to come on camera (she encourages them to be camera-ready before the event).

To avoid cognitive overload, if she’s showing a complex diagram, she’ll turn off her Web cam, as she wants learners to direct their focus to the diagram. If the facilitator or other learners are on camera, those are competing visuals that create extraneous cognitive load, which we want to reduce if possible.

Diana tells people that she’s going off camera to allow them to better focus on the complicated diagram. It’s about being thoughtful in how we instruct and learn and then leveraging the camera when it’s most optimal.

Tips for Improving Virtual Facilitation[20:00] – What other advice you would offer listeners looking to improve their virtual facilitation?

We can go through the motions and facilitate on a platform virtually with remote learners. But I always try to challenge and push people to be more excellent, and how can we do that?

Diana Howles

Diana offers are two specific strategies.

Make the invisible audible. Make the invisible audible by talking about your task. For example, if in person and a facilitator is getting their slides ready and needs to switch to a different monitor, they don’t need to make any commentary about what they’re doing because learners can see in person what is happening in the room. But when facilitating virtually you need to explain what you’re doing to avoid confusion after long pauses, for example.
Use announced silence. Offer learners quiet time to process and reflect, and call their attention to why you, as the facilitator, are being quiet. When there are long pauses in a virtual facilitation environment, learners can wonder if there’s something wrong with the tech. Announcing silence lets learners know you’re going to be quiet and why you’re being quiet.

Approach to Lifelong Learning[23:19] – How do you approach your own lifelong learning? Do you have specific habits, practices, or sources that you like to use in order to continue to grow professionally and personally?

Diana finds conferences to be a great source of inspiration and chance to see what’s happening in the field and where we’re headed in the future. Conferences are great places to be challenged, and pushed beyond our comfort zones.

Diana also has favorite books and resources to help her continue to improve.

She believes it’s helpful to understand the learner’s perspective because that can inform what we do as educators and facilitators. When she was doing a lot of public speaking, Diana used to sit in the back row of the auditorium or ballroom before the event to try to envision the perspective of the audience. Diana feels the same about virtual facilitation and attends virtual classes as a learner to help her be a better virtual facilitator.

So you really walk in the shoes of the learner, and you’ll observe all sorts of things that then help you be more effective when you yourself are facilitating them.

Diana Howles

[25:58] – Wrap-up

Diana Howles is CEO of Next Level Virtual Training: Advance Your Facilitation. You can connect with Diana on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Episodes on Related Topics:

The New Blended Learning
Beyond Content: Improving Your Presenters
A Learner’s Journey with Connie Malamed

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As CEO of Vista Cova and a Certified Professional Facilitator, Lowell Aplebaum collaborates with organizations to create transformative dialogue around vision, strategic planning, community, and value. He’s passionate about building a better future and his inclusive, learning mindset carries through in his work helping others recognize their potential for lasting impact. In this episode of …

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As professor emeritus and senior fellow at the University of Illinois Springfield and senior fellow at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA), Ray Schroeder is a leading expert in higher education and online learning. With decades of experience teaching, leading, curating, and writing, Ray brings unmatched knowledge and passion to the conversation around …

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The turning of a calendar from one year to the next is a natural time for reflection and preparation. In the previous episode, we looked back at the year that was for learning businesses. In this episode we turn forward to focus on the year that is. Drawing on data collected at the end of …

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Year end is a natural time to pause for reflection. And that’s just what we did in a recent Leading Learning Webinar focus on the learning business landscape. In this article, we recap some key points from that session. You can also watch the recording of that Webinar below. Our wish is that the points …

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As we just said goodbye to 2021 and rang in a new year, it feels only natural to pause and take a moment—or, in this case, an episode—to reflect. And, as learning business leaders, we know what a profound impact reflection can have on learning. That’s why in this first new episode of 2022, we’re …

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When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

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by Kyriaki Raouna of LearnWorlds According to Global Market Insights, in 2020 the e-learning market surpassed $250 billion, and that number is expected to grow fast. As the Global Market Insights report shows, within six years the e-learning market will reach $1 trillion. By 2027, many universities and colleges, companies, training organizations, and learning businesses …

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by Jeb Banner of Boardable Whether your association is committed to workforce development, upholding professionalism in your industry, or providing opportunities for young professionals entering the workforce, education should be a part of your mission. Plus, offering members learning opportunities can help boost your association’s revenue. Of course, before you can grow your learning business, …

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We’ve covered a lot of ground in the first six “courses” in the series for our mythical learning business MBA, and we’ve mostly focused on what—identifying the key skills and knowledge learning businesses need to survive and thrive. The what is important, but so too is the who—finding people with the key skills and knowledge and cultivating those skills and knowledge in your team. This includes people (the human resources), but it also extends to how to support those people in doing their work. In other words, this is about capacity.

In this final installment in our seven-part series before winter break, we dig into the key ideas related to capacity for learning businesses. We discuss the importance of investing in the training and development of your internal team and common barriers preventing this. We also offer a simple but effective tool to help you uncover, track, and achieve your capacity goals.

Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes [00:29] – Intro

What Do We Mean When We Say “Capacity”? [02:23] – When we use the term capacity, we mean the ability to execute. Once you have a strategy, you also have to have the knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviors, and culture to execute. Capacity is a dimension that is really important in the context of our Learning Business Maturity Model™, which we often talk about on the Leading Learning Podcast, and a capacity-related question we pose as part of that model is “Does the learning business have sufficient capacity in terms of human resources and technology to pursue the vision and strategy effectively?”

Tagoras Learning Business Maturity Model Stage 4 learning businesses are characterized as innovative in the maturity model innovative—it’s the most mature stage a learning business can achieve. A Stage 4 learning business has the necessary resources (human, technological, and financial) to address current needs as well as the resources to support ongoing innovation and growth. Processes are well defined, they are continuously evaluated and improved, and the business consistently invests in staff and volunteer development.

When we talk about human resources, we include staff and contract help. We include the internal team and any consultants or volunteers involved in the learning business. But capacity is broader than just people. You need the people—the human resources—but you also need the tools, technologies, training, and learning to support those people in doing their work.

Creating, building, and maintaining capacity takes money, but we like to think of it as an investment rather than a cost because money spent on capacity should provide a good return. It’s always important to invest in your people, invest in building and maintaining capacity, but it’s especially important in the current moment, as we’re experiencing what’s being called the “Great Resignation.”

To help with attracting and retaining good talent, a learning business should make sure to continually invest in its people in a thoughtful, intentional way and give that effort the dedicated time and money that it requires.

Sponsor: Cadmium [05:25] – If you’re looking for a technology partner to help you grow your capacity, check out our sponsor for this series.

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the merging of events and education for organizations across the globe. Organizations have realized that synergizing their education and events strategies produces immeasurable benefits, but they need a technology solution that facilitates that merge.

Cadmium is focused on providing a full suite of technology solutions enabling organizations to meet the changing environment head on. From a host of event technologies to integrated learning management and content creation tools, Cadmium offers everything an organization needs to generate revenue and drive engagement.

Learn more, and request a demo to see how Cadmium can help your learning business at gocadmium.com.

First Who, Then What

[06:25] – One could argue that we were misguided in focusing on the topics and skills of the learning business MBA before we talked about the team. Jim Collins—mega-selling author of Good to Great and an expert in innovation and strategy—popularized the concept of getting the right people on the bus. Collins framed this as “first who, then what.”

In this series so far, we have talked quite a bit about the what. Now we’re coming around to the who. But Collins might have said we should have been talking about who in the first place. In his view, those who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats on the bus before they figure out where they’re going to drive that bus.

When you’re dealing with chaos and uncertainty—and certainly there’s plenty of both to go around in the current moment—it’s impossible to predict what’s coming, so your best bet is to have a busload of people who can adapt and perform well no matter what comes. Collins asserts that great vision without great people is irrelevant.

If your learning business is new, the concept of “first who, then what” could be really helpful. For an established learning business, it maybe a little trickier, unless you’re planning to clean house and fire and rehire—which probably isn’t the case. For established learning businesses, what’s more helpful is to talk to everyone on the bus to make sure you understand their skills, skills gaps, desires, and mindset. Through that conversation, you’ll better understand what you might need to do to address capacity in your learning business.

Some of the things you might do to address capacity include the following:

Get supplemental help. This might mean hiring a contractor or a consultant for a specific project. Hopefully they will help you learn how to fish along the way. Any consultant who comes in should be aiming to help an organization develop capacity. Even a freelancer can help teach you how to fish so that you are building capacity in the organization using supplemental resources. Volunteers can also fill out your capabilities, skills, and knowledge.
Hire new staff. Hiring might happen through natural attrition, or, if you have the funding—or can make the business case for it—it might mean expanding the team.
Invest directly in the training and development of people on your team. This goes beyond having consultants teach you. This is about getting the team the training and development it needs in specific topical areas. We’ve found that learning businesses often don’t do enough of this. They can be so focused on serving their external audience’s education and learning needs that they fail to do the same with their internal team.

The Internal Training and Development Imperative for Learning Businesses [10:49] – Some common barriers to investing in the training and development of the internal team include the following:

It can be a resource issue. Training and development often take money, and, even if you find free materials, training and development still take time. So time or money or time and money can be a barrier to addressing the internal training and development needs of your team.
It can be an issue of finding the right content. Part of what we’re trying to do with the podcast in general is to provide content relevant to a learning business. We’ve put together an informal learning business curriculum, which highlights different episodes of the podcast and other resources that are categorized according to the Learning Business Maturity Model™. You can go through these individually or, even better, do it as a team. Get a study group together in your organization, and work through the content we’re providing.
It can be a culture issue. You need to have a learning culture. A learning culture is one that clearly values and prioritizes learning, and it rewards the people on the team who pursue learning. This continual learning means the organization is able to change, adapt, and evolve as circumstances change. Learning culture is an asset in any organization, but, for a learning business, it’s even more relevant. It’s about walking the walk along with talking the talk. Also, for a learning business, the culture is not confined to that single organization, but it extends out into the broader community, field, or industry that the learning business serves because it’s trying to raise capacity not just internally but across the field, industry, or community the learning business serves. As a prerequisite to supporting the broader culture, it’s crucial that a learning business model the desired outcomes.

You have to address all three barriers to build capacity, and this is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. Referencing another classic in the business literature world, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Actionby Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton speaks to this discrepancy between knowing and doing.

You can know something, but then you have to do it actually. And there’s often a gap between that. And I think it’s often capacity that represents that gap because you can have great ideas, but, if you’re not really able to execute those great ideas, execute that strategy, execute that vision, if you don’t have the capacity for doing that, then you’re just not going to have a thriving learning business.

Jeff Cobb

Learning Business Capacity Matrix [16:21] – To help you assess your capacity, we suggest creating a simple matrix, like the one shown below. Use knowledge domains as column headers, and then list your team members as rows.

Learning Business Capacity Matrix In the knowledge domains, we included strategy, marketing, technology, learning science, and finance, which are all important areas for a learning business to have some acumen in. Depending on where you are as a learning business, you might want to get more granular or add a different domain and generally tailor the matrix to your specific learning business and what’s most important to you. Once you get the domains and people on the bus laid out in the matrix, you’re able to analyze, assess, and document where you are—your strengths and gaps—and then figure out a plan for shoring up those gaps.

You could include a final row and also a final column for notes. The notes in the final row would be specific to a domain. The notes in the final column would allow you to jot ideas and information about individual team members. Once you have this information laid out, the matrix can become a tool for internal sharing and peer learning. This is embedding it in the culture.

The matrix, as we’re describing it, is obviously a very simple tool. But just putting things down on paper—surfacing them, making them visible so that they can be shared and discussed and learned from—just doing that can be a profoundly powerful step to take in increasing your capacity.

Celisa Steele

These kinds of simple tools help to surface the big, meaty things that a learning business needs to tackle. We do the same sort of thing with the Value Ramp to help you look at your portfolio and with the Market Insight Matrix to help you assess and go deeper in understanding your market. The capacity matrix another simple tool to make things visible so they can be talked about. The capacity matrix becomes what we’ve often referred to as a social learning object. It gives you something everybody can see, focus on together, and have meaningful conversation around—discussion that will lead to positive change and building capacity.

Other Thoughts on Capacity [22:04] – In episode 284, we talked about financial modeling and financials at both the product level and at the portfolio level. What we’re talking about with assessing your capacity is the same kind of dichotomy. You want to do it both for your overall team, and you want to have individual goals for team members.

You need to have a focus for each individual employee, but you also want to emphasize the team nature. Not every team member has to be proficient or strong in all of the domains that you identify, but you need to make sure you’re covered and that at least some resource is available in each of your key domains.

Once you’ve had those conversations with the people on the bus, it’s helpful for the team members to share their individual goals and progress. Everybody on the team should know what everybody else is working on and where they might be having some successes or where they might be running into to barriers. Even when people have different areas of knowledge, skills, and focus, it’s still often the case that we can help each other out in making progress on our individual goals.

With the overall team view from the matrix, you’re all collectively able to monitor progress over time and see changes in capacity as individuals realize their goals. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, ideally. The matrix gives you a team view. For individual goals, something like the personal learning road map that Mary Byers shared in episode 281 is equally simple but also equally effective. You can use those two tools—the capacity matrix and the personal learning road map—to help you focus on how to develop and improve capacity for your learning business over time.

personal learning road map from Mary Byers In episode 284, we also talked about the time horizon for financial projections (typically a three- to five-year time frame for learning products works well). Time horizon is also a consideration with the capacity matrix and the personal learning road map—you want to have some notion of timeline. You have your current skills and knowledge and some areas for growth, and some gaps may take more time to fill. You might see some short-term gains in some areas, but it’s important to be aware that it may take months or possibly even years to see the full benefit of investing in the ongoing development of team members.

There’s a corollary between the capacity matrix and the strategy canvas that we’ve talked about in the context of blue ocean strategy in episode 280. You want to see where you are now—and both the strategy canvas and the capacity matrix can help you understand that—but they can also help you understand where you want to be. The domains that you choose to include as part of your capacity matrix, how you address them, and the specific focus or perspective your learning business brings as you’re paying attention to those can be a way for you to differentiate, become unique, and strengthen overall.

As you’re determining the areas to focus on in your capacity matrix, think strategically, maybe even think back to the areas that you might have outlined on a strategy canvas and or laid out on your Value Ramp. Where is it you’re trying to excel and differentiate as an organization, and how is the way in which you’re building capacity mapping to that and ensuring that you realize that potential to differentiate and to become unique as a learning business?

A learning business’s capacity can be a strategic advantage. It’s hard for someone else to copy your team and all the capacity that you bring to bear on any projects. Even if a competitor were to poach a person or two from your team, this is a case where the sum is hopefully greater than the parts. If you’re really acting as a team, as a cohesive unit unified by common goals, then your capacity really is bringing a strategic advantage.

[27:37] – Wrap-up

We hope this learning business MBA series has given you some ideas and approaches for deepening and broadening the skills and knowledge of your team, and, if you haven’t started yet, we hope you’ll get to work now on implementing some of those ideas and approaches. The capacity matrix can be a great starting point.

This is the last episode in the learning business MBA series. We’ll resume releasing new episodes of the Leading Learning Podcast in January 2022. In the meantime, we invite you to make use of the archive of hundreds of past episodes and other resources on the Leading Learning site to dig deeper into the critical skills and knowledge needed by learning businesses.

If you have suggestions for future podcast episodes, whether topics to cover or someone to interview, please leave a comment below or e-mail us at leadinglearning@tagoras.com.

To make sure you don’t miss the remaining episodes in the series, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also helps us get some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple.

We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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Other Episodes in This Series:

Learning to Get Down to Business
The Strategy and Marketing Episode
Studying Innovation with Mary Byers
Learning Diversification with Jim Obsitnik
MBA Student for a Day with Steven Schragis of One Day U
The Irresistible Episode—Now with Financial Modeling!

Episodes on Related Topics:

8 Tips for Optimizing Your Value Ramp
Free Tools and Resources for Your Lifelong Learning Business
7 Ways to Build Capacity for Your Learning Business
Leveraging the Learning Business Maturity Model

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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't

The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action

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We’ve reached our next-to-last installment in our learning business MBA series, where we’re continuing to explore the question “What kinds of skills, knowledge, and behaviors do learning businesses need to be successful?”

A common theme has emerged as an answer. (1) You have to know your market and audience, and (2) you have to get product development right. But there’s another component that too often does not get added—or doesn’t get added with enough discipline and consistency—and that’s financial modeling. But it’s critical that learning businesses do the financial projections to establish that their right audience and right product add up to a financially viable offering.

That’s why in this sixth episode in our learning business MBA series we’re offering a crash course on the basics of financial modeling for learning products. We discuss why you need to start with an irresistible offer and what to consider in terms of time horizon, projected revenue, cost of sales, and expenses. We also share the many ways financial modeling can be used to help grow and improve your learning business.

Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes Show Notes

[00:25] – Intro

Your Irresistible Offer [01:28] – To do good financial modeling, you need to be clear on your offer, and, ideally, you need to have an irresistible offer. We’ve recently been reminded of the concept of the irresistible offer by our colleague Danny Iny, CEO of Mirasee, a company that works with entrepreneurial course creators to create, launch, and sell online courses. (Check out our past episode “Leveraged Learning with Danny Iny.”)

To come up with an irresistible offer, you have to be clear on the target audience. There’s an important distinction between market and audience. The target market is the whole group of people or organizations that your learning business wants to sell to. The target audience is narrower—it’s a subset of the target market. It’s the group of individuals or organizations that your learning business expects to buy a particular learning product.

To be clear on the target audience, document it. This documentation might take the form of basic demographics—age range, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, etc.—or you might get into personas or customer avatars. Note that a simple text description that helps you and everyone on your team be clear about your target audience is significantly more important than developing slick personas with mock photos, pithy bios, and made-up names.

In addition to being clear on your target audience, you have to be clear on your offer. This can also take the simple form of text that describes what you’re offering. You need to be clear on what it is, how it works, and what it costs. When thinking about what it is, think about the competitive factors that we discussed in “The Strategy and Marketing Episode,” when we talked about blue ocean strategy and the strategy canvas. Know the competitive factors in your market—that is, the factors on which organizations tend to compete in order to win customers. Address the relevant factors in your offer, and, in keeping with blue ocean strategy, maybe zig where others zag, or add in some factors that competitors may not be considering.

[05:11] – You don’t need a fancy prototype or detailed content outline initially. It’s okay and even best to start with a simple text description that’s easy to update and change. It’s easier to get input from a wide variety of stakeholders if you’re only dealing with text, so we recommend that you start there. To make your offer appealing—or, better yet, irresistible—it needs to be perceived as delivering more value than it costs. To create irresistibility, draw on relevance, credibility, and urgency.

Relevance crosses the lines between business and adult learning because we know how important relevance is to the adult learner. Adult learners need to know that what you’re offering applies to them and that they’re going to be able to apply it in their life and in their work and get some sort of return off of it. That has to be part and parcel of the educational experience, and that makes it part and parcel of the overall offer.

Credibility is about describing why learners should learn from you. There are probably others that offer learning options on the same or very similar subjects, so think about what makes yours better and different.

Urgency drives customers to buy from you. How is that sense of urgency created? Examples include things such as early bird specials or other tiered pricing, end-of-year credit renewal windows, or new regulations.

An Irresistible Offer Still Warrants Financial Modeling [09:26] – Even if you have an offer that’s relevant, credible, and urgent, that’s not enough. You need to then do the financial modeling to know whether there’s a sufficient return on investment in pursuing this irresistible offer.

It’s hard enough to do the work and do it really well to get to the irresistible offer. And a lot of organizations don’t even get that far. But, even if they do that, they then often don’t take the step after that and do the hard work to really lay out the financials for this. Look at the revenue, look at the costs, look at the factors that are going to make this sell or not sell in the marketplace, and map out that financial story to see if they’ve actually got a viable product or not. Even if it’s irresistible, you still got to sell enough of it to actually make ends meet at the end of the day.

Jeff Cobb

In the first episode in this series, we credited Josh Goldman, now director of consulting at Tagoras, for the term “the learning business MBA.” When talking about the skills and knowledge needed for learning businesses to succeed, we mentioned to him that we’ve often seen organizations not be clear about their margins and their costs for their learning portfolio, and rarely have we seen organizations be clear at the product level. Josh shared that he’s encountered that lack of product-level P&Ls both in his past jobs and also now in his role at Tagoras.

If you don’t have an accurate representation of both potentially the gross revenue but also then the net profit, so to speak, how are you making decisions about which programs to invest, reinvest, or divest from if you can’t get that view?… I think there’s the balance between how to get enough value out of the manual time spent in adding some of those data points to your analysis versus not having access to that information and trying to make judgment calls on to what degree of accuracy do you need to have in the financial portfolio review. Does it need to be a scalpel, or could you get away with a steak knife, so to speak, analogy?

Josh Goldman

We think you should do your financial modeling, but, using Josh’s analogy, you don’t necessarily need to worry about scalpel-like precision. You just need to get a good sense of what’s possible and probable. To help you do that, we’ll cover the basics of financial projections for professionals working in and running learning businesses.

The Basics of Financial Modeling for Learning Products: Revenue [13:04] – When working on financial projections for a learning product or service, one consideration is the time horizon. Three to five years is often an appropriate time horizon when looking at getting a new learning product off the ground. Costs are usually higher in the first year or years, and then margins tend to ratchet up over time. Your time horizon may vary, but you you want to look far enough out to get a fairly clear picture of what the return might really be but not so far out that the projections begin to lose their value because they become pure conjecture.

Across your chosen time horizon, you need to look at three things: projected revenue, cost of sales, and expenses. Once you have those, you can subtract the cost of sales and other expenses from the projected revenue to arrive at projected net, or profit. The goal with projections is to get your learning business a clear idea of net revenue, or profit, because that’s the bottom line—literally.

There are a few key variables you’ll need to be able to project revenue related to learning products:

The number of enrollments or items sold
The price for the product
The annual growth rate

In year one, the number of enrollments or items sold might be relatively low as you do the work to make prospective customers aware of your product. Then you might ramp up more in years two and three, and then settle into a more modest rate of growth after that. An “annual growth rate,” as a term, sounds like it’s all about getting more and more learners to buy, and it is. While that’s a great goal to have in mind, make sure that your annual growth rate takes into account learners that you might lose each year.

We’ll also highlight that we called these aspects of revenue—the number of enrollments, the price, and the annual growth rate—variables, and they can vary. They’re usually educated guesses, which means there is likely a range of reasonable numbers to insert for any of these values. So make it possible to change them and have those changes be automatically reflected across your projections. This gives you the ability to see immediately how changing the price point may impact your gross and net revenues and how much difference higher or lower penetration rates or annual growth rates can make.

Sponsor: Cadmium

[18:17] – If you’re looking for a technology partner to help you grow your learning business year over year, please check out our sponsor for this series.

Learn more, and request a demo to see how Cadmium can help your learning business at gocadmium.com.

The Basics of Financial Modeling for Learning Products: Cost of Sales, Expenses, and Margin [19:17] – Cost of sales are expenses that can be attributed directly to creating, delivering, and maintaining the learning product. Some of those costs are one-time, and some are recurring. Assuming you have more than one learning product, you might determine a reasonable percentage of your LMS, Zoom, or other software costs to allocate to each of your products. Also, some costs of sales happen every time a learning product is offered (paying an instructor for a classroom-based course), and cost of sales might include royalties to subject matter experts or other sources if your learning product is based on licensed content.

Expenses cover indirect cost related to creating, delivering, and maintaining the product. These include staff costs—not the staff instructional designer working on the course (that would be a cost of sales) but your time overseeing that ID, for example. Expenses also include marketing and sales, which are a critical part. If you end up with high cost of sales and thus low gross margins, that cuts into what you can afford to spend on sales and marketing. In our experience, most organizations do under-spend on sales and marketing.

Note that what gets classified as a cost of sales versus an expense may vary a bit from organization to organization. The main thing is to make sure you account for the direct and indirect costs of creating, delivering, and maintaining a learning product. Once you have your revenue numbers and your cost of sales and expenses, you’ll be able to see your gross margin for the product. Gross margin is a profitability ratio that speaks to the financial wellbeing of a product. Gross profit margin is computed by dividing net sales less cost of goods sold by net sales.

Higher gross margins mean a greater ability to invest in sales and marketing—or simply an increase in net margin. The net margin further removes the values of interest, taxes, and other operating expenses from net revenue to arrive at a more conservative figure. Note that digital offerings generally have higher gross margins, mostly because they don’t require investing in things like facilities or travel for speakers. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have higher net profit because you may decide to invest more in sales and marketing to get the enrollment levels you desire for these products.

How Financial Modeling of Learning Products Can Be Used [24:15] – We’ve worked with many organizations over the years in our consulting work to help them develop financials to make informed decisions. Broadly speaking, the ways that this type of financial modeling can be helpful is in three areas—deciding whether to invest, reinvest, or divest.

We’ve focused so far mostly on financial projections—the financial modeling done to help a learning business understand what might be involved to launch a new product and make it profitable. That’s a clear use case, one where we don’t see enough organizations do the work to really understand what creating and maintaining a new product might involve. If you work with the types of projections we’re talking about here, you have variables you can play with to create a picture of what the financials for a product are likely to look like across whatever time horizon you choose.

You can also use a tool like the Value Ramp™ to help you look at the logic of your portfolio and how things are priced. (Check out our episode “8 Tips for Optimizing Your Value Ramp.”)

Tagoras Value Ramp With one learning business, we ran two scenarios, one based on more conservative variables and the other based on more aggressive penetration and growth.

Using conservative estimates for the growth rate and penetration rates, the learning business was projected to lose some money the first two years but to then start to make money.

Scenario 1 P&L Projections: Conservative In a more aggressive scenario, the learning business would start making money sooner and make bring in significantly more net revenue over the five-year time horizon. We noted assumptions in the spreadsheets where we made the projections, so that those reviewing the financials could see what we’d thought through and been logical about. This result is a clear, cohesive vision of what might happen with a learning product, and that becomes an excellent a communication tool for staff and other stakeholders, such as boards.

Scenario 2 P&L Projections: Moderate to Aggressive [27:37] – These kinds of financial projections can be used to inform go/no-go decisions, and they can also be used to help make the decision to divest, to sunset a product. Many organizations get to the point where they realize something in their portfolio isn’t working as well as they hoped it would, but they still believe there’s a need there.

Maybe you don’t quite have the right product aligned with the right audience, so you rethink it and try out a new product or a reconfiguration. In that case, you have historical data and financials on the product being sunset. You can line up financials for what you’re planning against it and look at how the new product might help you replace or even surpass past revenue over time.

[29:01] – There are multiple ways a learning business can use financial modeling:

For go/no-go decisions on new products
To look at the impact of sunsetting a product
To assess new revenue models or new business models (For example, you could compare a business-to-business versus business-to-consumer approach for a product or look at what moving to a subscription model might mean versus selling single products to individual learners.)
To compare products in your portfolio (Seeing different margins on different products might give you ideas about which products to focus on.)
To see what each product contributes to your overall revenue (This can help you do some risk assessment if, for example, your revenue is highly dependent on a single product.)
As a communication tool and learning tool as you and your team continually revisit your assumptions and recalibrate based on reality

[34:38] – Remember that you need to track financial performance over time—this isn’t a one-and-done thing. Assuming you move ahead with developing and delivering a product, check back against those projections to see how it’s panning out. If it is panning out exactly as you projected, that’s great—but that hardly ever happens. If your projections are off, then use it as a chance to learn and ask questions. If you’re not hitting the numbers you thought you could, why not? Is it the price? Is it the penetration? Are you reaching the right people with the product? Do you need to do some things to the product to make it more attractive to the audience?

You need to collect the data. You need to compare it to the projections that you had put in place. You need to look at the discrepancies and discuss them. It’s a chance for course correction. It’s a chance for potentially just pulling the plug. It’s a chance for doubling down…. If you’re just really blowing it out of the water, it’s a chance to think about developing related or complementary products or expanding to adjacent audiences. So, in short, financial modeling really allows for data-driven decision-making, for informed decision-making.

Celisa Steele

[36:31] – Wrap-up

Reflection Questions We’ll offer some reflection questions for you to ponder:

How buttoned up are you about financials?
Are there any products you need to update or see about sunsetting?
Do you have any new product ideas to test out?

We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple.

We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Other Episodes in This Series:

Learning to Get Down to Business
The Strategy and Marketing Episode
Studying Innovation with Mary Byers
Learning Diversification with Jim Obsitnik
MBA Student for a Day with Steven Schragis of One Day U

Episodes on Related Topics:

Leveraged Learning with Danny Iny
Reach, Revenue, and Impact
3 Core Elements of Learning Business Strategy

The post The Irresistible Episode—Now with Financial Modeling! appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Steven Schragis is founder and director of One Day University, an adult education program that brings the best and most popular professors from all over the country to develop fun and engaging talks that inform and inspire adult “students-for-a-day.” At One Day U, learning isn’t driven by career advancement goals or earning a degree; it’s for people who simply want to engage in the pure joy of lifelong learning.

Steven has positioned One Day University to effectively meet the needs of a large niche market of learners while maintaining a clear and unique value proposition. This makes Steven the perfect professor for you, our learning business MBA student-for-a-day.

In this fifth episode in our seven-part series on the learning business MBA, Jeff talks with Steven about creating One Day U, how it has evolved as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and the importance of keeping fun in mind when developing at least certain types of learning offerings. They also discuss how to successfully leverage partnerships, tips for hiring, and what it takes to succeed as a learning business.

Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes [00:15] – Introduction of Steven.

One Day University [01:17] – Can you tell us a little bit about what One Day University is, what it does, and your role there?

One Day University was founded in 2006, and, until the pandemic hit, it was a live-event company. They ran events around the country where they would invite “star professors”—those that students love learning from—and a mostly 50-and-older audience would come and enjoy it.

Since the COVID pandemic, One Day U no longer runs live events (or very few of them). The organization has pivoted to online delivery and a membership model, and people around the country have joined. Five days a week, members get a new 50-minute lecture from a professor on a different subject.

[02:41] – How did you decide to get into of this business in the first place?

Steven was the national director for a company called The Learning Annex, a continuing education group, and he wanted to try something on his own. After bringing his daughter to college and hearing different professors give a brief talk about what they teach, he realized how much he and other parents enjoyed the lectures.

[03:36] – What did you find challenging, particularly from a business standpoint about building a learning business?

Running live events is somewhat challenging because people have to travel to the event, and One Day U didn’t know what its pricing should be or how to present the events. They ended up partnering with media companies around the country, mostly newspapers, that did the marketing for them, and the company took off from there.

[04:48] – Did you develop specific criteria or approaches to identify great professors, those who are really good at delivering and facilitating learning experiences?

Finding great professors is not very hard. It’s not secret information. The great professors are the ones students are all talking about, and every school has about two or three. In the beginning, One Day U went to campuses and asked around. There are also Web sites where people talk about professors, and the colleges run articles about their most popular professors. Contacting the professors was also easy because their e-mail addresses are usually listed on the university Web sites.

[06:03] – Did you find that most of the faculty you approach are receptive? How has that changed over time?

As One Day U became better known, securing professors became even easier. Everybody likes being identified as one of the most popular professors at their school. These people are rock stars on their campus, but they aren’t necessarily known off their campus. Steven can rattle off names, but most people will not have heard of them.

They’re not famous. They probably didn’t write a number-one bestseller, but, on their campus, everybody knows they’re a great teacher. It turns out some are old, and some are young, and some are men, or some are women. There’s no one way to be a great teacher, but, the ones that are, they know it, and the students know it, and we find out pretty quickly.

Steven Schragis

Pivoting with the Pandemic [07:13] – One Day U traditionally held live, face-to-face events, but, like most learning businesses, once the pandemic hit, the company had to pivot to survive. What sort of considerations went into making that transition?

In March 2020, One Day U wasn’t thinking of doing anything, but then the government announced its Paycheck Protection Program loans. Steven couldn’t say no to that deal, so One Day U applied and got a loan in a few days. Then employees started asking what they could do. They came up with the idea of soliciting people who had been to a One Day University event live (and they had held live events all over the country) and asking if they’d like to join a membership program. In the first week, thousands said yes. What One Day U offered evolved a bit over the next two to three months.

As far as technology, within a week, they were able to record material and send it out to members. Turnkey software exists, and people at One Day U figured out how to use it, and they built it from there.

Sponsor: Cadmium

[09:54] – If you’re looking for a turnkey partner to help your learning business with technology and more, check out our sponsor for this series.

Learn more, and request a demo to see how Cadmium can help your learning business at gocadmium.com.

A Membership Model [10:50] – How did you decide on a membership model, as opposed to selling courses one by one?

Having to sell over and over is a lot harder than getting members and promising them something. One Day U tried to price it pretty low. Recently has the company has begun offering intensive, longer courses (which they call “premiums”) that cost money beyond the membership, and about 10 percent of their members buy those.

[11:43] – How does the premium model work, and how do you decide to add that into your offerings?

Lectures are 50 minutes with a 10-minute Q&A, done via text chat. Because people have a somewhat limited attention span, One Day U has used this one-hour, five-days-a-week concept. But sometimes one hour wasn’t enough time to go in depth or to answer all of questions in the chat. A few months ago, they started offering some longer sessions two to three times a month for people who are very interested in that particular subject.

The Future: Face-to-Face or Virtual? [12:51] – Assuming COVID-related restrictions are behind us, do you think you will revert to the same level of face-to-face offerings? What does the virtual-versus-in-person mix look like in the future for you?

The organization is trying a few live events, but a lot of people still aren’t comfortable coming yet, so One Day U isn’t pushing in-person very hard. When it is safe, One Day U may try some large, carnival-like learning festivals with lots of professors in certain major cities. It’s an idea they’ve toyed with before but never had the time to think through, until now.

Guidance for Leveraging Partnerships [14:08] – Partnerships are important for you. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about? And is there any guidance you would offer to others who want to leverage partnerships to grow their learning business?

You have to be unique. You have to be able to talk about your product—and I hate to call education or learning a product, but we’re a business. We’re a for-profit business. That’s why we’re doing this…. So you really need to learn to say how are you different, in fact better than a thousand other people. If you could do that, then doors will open.

Steven Schragis

Steven finds that only when he’s successful at convincing people that there’s no alternative to One Day University—either work with them or don’t work with anybody—will the partnership fall into place.

[15:21] – How do you typically articulate your value proposition when talking with a potential partner? What do you say about One Day University to make them realize that they need to work with you?

There are a million people offering educational talks, and people’s time is valuable. People take One Day U classes for the same reasons they would go to a Broadway show or a museum, and that means they need to be entertained. One Day U tell their instructors up front that they have to be fun.

The company obsesses about titles, using online focus groups to try out different ones because the same course called by another title can triple the enrollment. Most actual schools don’t obsess about the title of courses, but this is what keeps One Day U learners interested and what distinguishes them from others.

One Day University gets compared to MasterClass a lot. Steven distinguishes his company by emphasizing that they don’t look for celebrities; they look for the best possible professor. Being well known doesn’t make that person a great teacher.

[18:22] – Have you had partnerships that haven’t panned out? What do you want to try to avoid in a partner?

There’s no benefit to One Day University except that it’s good for your brain. When One Day U has partnered with groups that had objectives different than the company’s, the partnership hasn’t been very successful. When the company partners with groups that cater to same audience as One Day U, it’s been more effective.

What It Takes to Succeed As a Learning Business [19:39] – What kinds of skills, knowledge, and behavior do learning businesses need to be successful?

One Day U serves an audience of people who are choosing to learn, but they don’t have to. For Steven, that means One Day U can’t forget that those people need to enjoy themselves. It has to be fun, and it can’t go on too long. It has to sound interesting and then deliver on being interesting, while also seeming unique.

When all of us read the statistics of people who start these things and then drop out, and they’re enormously high, a key reason is it’s not fun. It’s not interesting, so, unless you have to do it, you’ll drop out. If it’s something you thought would be good for you, probably would be good for you, but this is like pulling teeth, you’re going to lose those people. So we really try to work to make it enjoyable.

Steven Schragis

[22:24] – Are marketing, an attention to details, and production values part of the skills and knowledge that are important for learning businesses?

Steven says the phrase “A company is only as good as their technology” really is true. If the sound isn’t clear, you will lose people. Also, make sure to keep track of data, and use it to evaluate efforts. Doing business by the seat of your pants doesn’t work. He admits he personally may not understand all the details, but he hires people who do.

[23:33] – How have you built the team you need and cultivated and developed those people over time?

Other than his business partner, Steven says almost everyone One Day U has hired was right out of college. He looks for people who can learn fast, have the right attitude, and can communicate well. He asks interviewees to share about a movie they love and to try to convince him why he should see it. This helps him identify people who can communicate well with a sense of humor and who look like they’ll work well with others. They may know nothing on day one, but, by day 60, they’ll know a lot.

Advice for Learning Businesses [27:28] – What other advice do you have for those who want to grow and take their learning business to the next level?

Most of the growth One Day U has had has come through partnerships. Often there’s a way to structure things a partnership so that both sides will be glad they went into the deal. One Day U has had working relationships with 59 different media companies, newspapers mostly. Why those 59 in particular? Those are the 59 that answered Steven’s e-mails.

So if someone reaches out to you, answer it…. Even if you’re not sure up front what the arrangement can be, after you talk to someone, usually it’s there…. The opportunities are there if you communicate…

Steven Schragis

[29:30] – Wrap-up

We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple.

We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Other Episodes in This Series:

Learning to Get Down to Business
The Strategy and Marketing Episode
Studying Innovation with Mary Byers
Learning Diversification with Jim Obsitnik

Episodes on Related Topics:

Leading a Lifelong Learning Institute with Chris McLeod of OLLI at Duke
The Member-Driven Learning Collective That Is Think Olio
Personalized Lifelong Learning for All with Lauren Della Bella and Dick Thomas

The post MBA Student for a Day with Steven Schragis of One Day U appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Jim Obsitnik is the chief executive officer at Cadmium, a software-as-a-service provider that brings events and education technology together. He believes in the higher social calling of learning and education and has spent many years in the learning space. Jim also holds an MBA from the Wharton School with a focus in marketing, which makes him an excellent guest lecturer in our learning business MBA series.

In this midpoint episode in our seven-part series, Jeff talks with Jim to get his expert perspective on strategy, product development, the commonalities of software-as-a-service and learning businesses, the relationship between revenue and learning portfolio diversification, and more.

Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes [00:20] – Introduction of Jim

What It Takes to Succeed As a Learning Business [01:21] – What do those leading and working in a learning business need to know or be able to do to be successful?

Know your customer really well and whom you’re trying to serve. Also, know what value you bring to the table. For learning businesses specifically, it’s about knowing who that learner is—not only by the types of content they engage with but also the types of customers they are, particularly generationally, because different generations engage with content in different ways, according to Jim.

First is knowing your customer. Then understand what your product is. In the case of learning businesses, the product is the knowledge and the content. If your product isn’t of the highest quality, then chances are your learners will go find the content somewhere else. And, even if your content is accurate, if it’s not engaging and compelling, then you’ll start to see drop-offs. The move to on-demand learning and leveraging the Internet and digital technologies has helped to evolve the overall learning landscape.

I’d encourage [learning businesses] to always think about the connection back to the business, about the mission that your organization is on, about your customers, and, ultimately, how revenue is generated. If you can connect the dots there, then you can have a much better conversation with your executives about how you are helping to achieve the mission and generate revenue. But you’ll also have a better understanding of what is going to move the needle for your customers in terms of compelling, value-added content and how you deliver that….

Jim Obsitnik

Knowing Your Customer [06:20] – When it comes to knowing your audience and perspective customers, how do you know you actually know them? What are some of the signs to look for?

Because customers are ever-changing, Jim doesn’t know if a learning business can ever fully know them. Rather, knowing the customer is an iterative, on-going process. Cadmium, where Jim is CEO, is a software-as-a-service technology provider. What Jim loves about the SaaS business model is that the focus on service forces you to put an emphasis on your customers. The good thing about the Internet and Internet technologies is how easy it is for someone to engage with you. The downside is, if you don’t get the service part right, you can quickly lose people.

With service, you have to build your organization focused around understanding the customer while being very agile in that understanding. You have to focus on getting to know your customer and understand that if you don’t truly engage with them throughout your entire process, then you will miss out on something because customers are ever-changing.

SaaS is relevant to learning businesses because, fundamentally, learning businesses are building technology products and digital assets. Especially when it comes to things like on-demand learning programs, it’s important to get representative users and customers engaged in the development process as early as possible. Also, make sure that whoever’s work touches the development process in your learning business hears directly from the customer rather than a product manager or someone else who’s interpreting what the customer is saying.

What I have found in my career is that having filters is not a good thing because people are people, and people interpret different things differently. And if you truly want to innovate, if you truly want to create, if you believe that having multiple minds come together to create something is better than having one mind creating, then you need to have everyone listen in on what customers are saying.

Jim Obsitnik

Awareness That Revenue Diversification Can Equal Learning Diversification [12:04] – In a learning business, revenue diversification can equal learning diversification, but organizations have got to see that connection and connect the dots. How conscious are organizations of both the challenge and opportunity?

Jim says it runs the gamut. Some customers know their strategy and understand why it makes sense that learning happens in multiple formats and at different times (some on-demand, some live), and they see that is linked to their revenue streams. For other customers, Jim and his team need to help connect those dots, both at a strategic level in conversations they have with executive directors, CEOs, and COOs and also with people who are the “feet on the street” doing the actual work.

They’re trying to help both people who are doing it day in and day out and the executives understand how portfolio diversification is intimately intertwined revenue streams. Ultimately, it correlates back to the business and generating revenue so you can achieve whatever mission is that you’re on as an organization.

Sponsor: Cadmium

[17:55] – If you’re looking for a partner to help you achieve your mission, check out our sponsor for this series.

Learn more, and request a demo to see how Cadmium can help your learning business at gocadmium.com.

Learning Technology and an Overarching Strategy [18:49] – When you think about your most savvy customers and how they’re using learning technology as a leverage to get a return on investment, are there things they do that you wish other learning businesses would embrace?

Jim says some customers have a good understanding of their entire strategy. Oftentimes, the biggest disconnect he sees is that many organizations think of their events (whether physical, virtual, etc.) as separate from what the learning team is doing. While they require some different skill sets, he sees organizations deliver so much more value when events and education are thought of together. Organizationally, events and education may still be separate, but there should be an overarching strategy that links the two.

Check out what the recent data says about what percentage of organizations have a formal, documented strategy related to their virtual events in The Virtual Conferences Report 2021.

You can create a comprehensive strategy that ultimately diversifies your revenue streams. I believe diversification of revenue streams leads to lower risk for your company, so you’re not reliant on just one single revenue stream.

Jim Obsitnik

Advice for Learning Businesses [21:48] – What advice do you have for a learning business that’s looking to grow to the next level?

There has been such dramatic change since early 2020 with COVID. Jim empathizes with organizations and learners. It has been and still is difficult because of the uncertainty and disruption that has occurred in our daily lives. Having said that, he thinks learning businesses can help calm things down by coming back to strategy. Strategy sometimes is viewed as overly complex, but it can actually be quite simple. Strategy is simply a methodical way of how you view the world.

Jim recommends the simple act of writing down your strategy as a first step. Although it will be imperfect, you can iterate. But, with it written down, at least you’ll have an anchor point when it comes to strategy, and you can then make better decisions about your technology and who you want to partner with.

Jim recommends learning businesses “don’t try to boil the ocean.” Rather, find the immediate pain points that are connected to your strategy, and go solve those. As you’re looking at whom you work with to help you execute on your strategy—especially when it comes to technology and service providers—make sure you know what value they bring to the table now and also think about their future-proof potential as well.

[26:28] – Wrap-up

Learn more about Cadmium at gocadmium.com, and you can find Jim on LinkedIn. Jim welcomes the chance to talk, and he can bring his years of experience in the learning space to bear in any conversations.

We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple.

We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Other Episodes in This Series:

Learning to Get Down to Business
The Strategy and Marketing Episode
Studying Innovation with Mary Byers

Episodes on Related Topics:

3 Core Elements of Learning Business Strategy
Learning Business Strategy Q&A
Strategic Doing with Ed Morrison

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Below you will find links to the recording and slides for “The State of Virtual Conferences 2021” Webinar. We are grateful to Digitell for sponsoring the Webinar so that we could offer it free of charge to you.

Webinar Recording, Slides, and More

Slides (PDF)
The Virtual Conferences Report 2021 (Web page)

Resource Links

The following resource links were shared or mentioned shared during the Webinar—or we’ve added them here because you might find them useful.

ReviewMyVCP.com (Web site)
The peer reviews at ReviewMyVCP can help you in vetting and evaluating platforms. And if you’ve used a platform for a virtual conference, please, please, please submit a review! Taking just a few minutes to do that can provide valuable information to your peers looking for a platform.
The Essential Guide to Virtual Conference Platforms (Web page)
This is a great resource as you try to understand the technology landscape and understand the options for offering virtual conferences.
Other Virtual Conference Resources (Web page)
There are a range of resources on the Leading Learning site, all of which are linked to from this page.
Leading Learning Podcast (Web page)
The Leading Learning Podcast offers audio intelligence for learning leaders and those working in learning businesses, and we’ve dedicated past episodes to virtual conferences, learntech, and strategy.

We encourage you to follow Leading Learning on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for additional, ongoing resources.

Need help with virtual conference strategy or platform selection?
Find out what Tagoras can offer >>

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This podcast series is our attempt to offer a theoretical learning business MBA program, and we invite you to play along. Imagine you’re in business school and about to hear a guest lecture by Mary Byers, a speaker, facilitator, consultant, and author of several books, including Race for Relevance: Five Radical Changes for Associations. She’s …

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Race for Relevance: 5 Radical Changes for Associations

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Both marketing and strategy are fundamental to the health and success of a learning business, which is why we’re addressing them in the context of the learning business MBA. Of course, the learning business MBA doesn’t exist yet. Rather, we’re using it as shorthand for the key skills, knowledge, and behaviors needed by those working …

The post The Strategy and Marketing Episode appeared first on Leading Learning.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Top Management Strategy: What It Is and How to Make It Work

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by Jake Fabbri of Fonteva The safety regulations of the pandemic required many of us to adapt to remote work and digital engagements, which included virtual meetings and conferences. After a year and a half of working from home, we have become more accustomed to virtual events—so much so that associations will keep them around …

The post Virtual Events Are Here to Stay: The Future of Associations appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Chances are, if you’re in the learning business, you probably didn’t go to school knowing this is where your career would take you. Some of you may a have strong background on the learning or education side, while others may have it on the business side—but likely, you don’t have an equally strong background when …

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by Matt Hugg of Nonprofit.Courses How many times have you heard someone say, “I went to school…the School of Hard Knocks”? This humorous nod at non-traditional education can be a proud declaration or a depressing admission. Either way, the subject would probably have rather not gone through it. Then there’s “on-the-job” learning. That’s like the …

The post Why Strategic Training Matters for Capacity Building appeared first on Leading Learning.

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This is the last installment in our seven-episode series on learning science’s role in a learning business, and we’ve covered a variety of interesting topics. But we want learning science to be more than interesting. We want you to apply it so you can elevate the success and impact of your learning business, as well …

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Learning science uses evidence-based practice to support learning, and evaluation plays a critical role in providing that evidence by revealing its true impact. To help us unpack how evaluations should inform decisions about learning, we spoke with Dr. Robert Brinkerhoff and Dr. Daniela Schroeter, co-directors of the Brinkerhoff Evaluation Institute (BEI). Rob is an internationally …

The post Evidence-Based Evaluation with Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter appeared first on Leading Learning.

The Success Case Method: Find Out Quickly What's Working and What's Not

Telling Training's Story: Evaluation Made Simple, Credible, and Effective

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This data comes from the most recent round of our Webinar survey that was conducted in July 2021. There were 180 qualified responses to the survey. Participation in the survey was diverse. Respondents represented a wide range of professions and industries as well as a range of organization types – from trade and professional associations, …

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Practice and feedback are essential to effective learning, yet all too often they aren’t given the time and attention they deserve by learning businesses. Practice and feedback are powerful tools for moving a learning experience away from pure theory and content and towards deeper learning and application in the real world. In this fifth episode …

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Both Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra Roldan are evidence-based learning designers who combine a nuanced understanding of learning theory with years of hands-on experience developing solutions. Ruth is principal and president of Clark Training & Consulting and has spent her career as an instructional psychologist, working with diverse organizations. She’s the author of many articles …

The post Designing Content Scientifically with Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra Roldan appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Learner needs are important—but, in the context of learning businesses, learner wants are just as important. Correctly satisfying these needs and wants requires figuring out what to offer—not by assuming or guessing what’s needed in the market but by following processes and systems that yield the data to prove it. In this third installment in …

The post Needs, Wants, and Learning Science appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Dr. Megan Sumeracki is an associate professor of psychology at Rhode Island College and co-founder of The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive psychological scientists aiming to make scientific research on learning more accessible to students, teachers, and other educators. Her area of expertise is in human learning and memory, and in applying the science …

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For any organization offering learning, learning science is important. But it’s arguably even more important for learning businesses because of the far-reaching impact that can be achieved from effectively applying it. In this first installment in our “Learning Science for Learning Businesses” new seven-part series, we take a broad look at the science of learning, …

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Editorial Note: We’ve written about the importance of learning culture and suggested that fostering a learning culture requires a different perspective on learning and—by extension—what’s needed to support effective learning. It also requires re-thinking significantly how the stakeholders in your learning business interact, the assumptions they bring to the table, and how new perspectives translate …

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by Amy Morrisey of Artisan E-Learning We work with a lot of different associations at Artisan E-Learning. We’ve noticed when associations are new to e-learning, it’s common for them to underestimate the complexity and number of moving parts involved in a project. It’s helpful to have an understanding of e-learning course creation, from coordinating subject …

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by Amber Winter of Web Courseworks Trade associations need to provide experiences that are valuable for both their member organizations as a whole and the individual learners that are part of those organizations. It’s easy to see why trade associations face challenges such as high administrative cost, struggles to increase membership, and low non-dues revenue. …

The post 3 Tips to Empower Member Organizations with E-learning appeared first on Leading Learning.

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The terms learning culture (or, alternatively, culture of learning) and learning ecosystem have been relatively trendy in the corporate learning and development world for many years, but our experience has been that they are used much less frequently in the world of learning businesses. We’re seeing some signs that may be changing, and it’s a …

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As we close out our seven-part series on the frontiers of learntech, we want to help you make sense of what the wide-ranging topics that emerged mean for the future of your learning business. Through the interviews with Ashish Rangnekar, Sam Sannandeji, Sae Schatz, and Donald Clark and our own reflective episodes, we’ve had the …

The post Making Learntech’s Promise Real appeared first on Leading Learning.

Artificial Intelligence for Learning: How to use AI to Support Employee Development

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Ashish Rangnekar, a self-described lifelong learner, is co-founder and CEO of BenchPrep, where he’s focused on helping organizations digitally transform their learning offerings in the new digital world order. BenchPrep elevates and empowers learning businesses through their full-stack learning platform, aimed at delivering the best digital experience to drive outcomes and increase revenue. In this …

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by Salma Torres of Skyepack For continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning providers, it’s vital to consider not only the content of educational courses but also the way in which material is presented. Effective, thoughtful instructional design prioritizes the learner at every step to maximize value from your offerings. The COVID-19 pandemic threw a …

The post 6 Instructional Design Approaches to Capitalize on in 2021 appeared first on Leading Learning.

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As the learning landscape and market have evolved, the technology platforms most closely associated with learning—including learning management systems—have evolved too, and new platforms have emerged. In our executive briefing Conquering the Confusion: The Role of the LMS in the Evolving Learntech Landscape, we examine why and how learntech has evolved, consider how different types …

The post LMS vs LXP vs LRS vs LRS – The Core Four Learntech Platforms appeared first on Leading Learning.

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Recognized as a leader in extended reality (XR) learning, Sam Sannandeji is founder and CEO of Modest Tree, a Canadian company providing immersive software to empower non-technical people to create and maintain their own augmented reality and virtual reality training. He brings both a technical, hands-on expertise of how XR works with an understanding of …

The post Finding XR’s Sweet Spot with Sam Sannandeji appeared first on Leading Learning.

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This marks the halfway point in our series on the frontiers of learntech. Our hope is that you have already begun to consider the implications this explosion in learning technology will have on your learning business. And when it comes to implications we want to focus on some of the major themes that emerged from our …

The post Bias and Equity in Learntech appeared first on Leading Learning.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

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Throughout her career, Sae Schatz has been deeply immersed in the application and advancement of learntech. She currently serves as director of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a government program for science, technology, and policy related to distributed learning. She’s also an editor of and contributor to the e-book Modernizing Learning: Building the Future Learning Ecosystem. …

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With an unmatched passion, knowledge, and optimism related to advances in learntech, Donald Clark has over three decades of experience at the intersection of technology and learning. He is CEO of WildFire, an AI content creation company, and a professor, researcher, speaker, and learntech blogger (he’s written a series of posts on 100 learning theorists …

The post AI, Data, and Optimism with Donald Clark appeared first on Leading Learning.

Leading Learning: Recent Episodes

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