In this episode Dave interviews Brian Childs, the founder and CEO of Learning Outcomes to talk about their recent regional retreat called LoCon.
LoCon is the "unconference" for learning professionals. These small group retreats are designed to encourage thoughtful conversations through structured activities and fun social interactions. This year LoCon was hosted in Vancouver BC and consisted of 40 enablement program leaders coming together to talk about the Future of Learning. Unlike regular conferences which are structured around thought leaders on a big stage and vendors relegated to a trade show floor, LoCon brings everyone together in small group interactions that foster open, honest sharing of ideas.
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Dave Derington 00:01
Hello CELab fans, this is Dave and we're going to have a quick what I call a mini today, some mini episode and we are going to talk about low con. Brian. Welcome to the show. Brian Charles.
Brian Childs 00:20
Yeah. Great to be here.
Dave Derington 00:22
Want you to talk about what low con is? We just had this over the weekend, Friday through Sunday. Give me Give me an overview. This was the most exciting event I think I've ever been in a long time.
Brian Childs 00:32
Yeah, it was fantastic. So my name Hey, everybody. My name is Brian Childs. I'm the founder of learning outcomes and learning outcomes helps companies connect their program leaders with best practices and subject matter experts. And in that vein, we put together something called Low con for the customer education community. And low con is really a I call it a conversation, right? It's a unconference. So what low con is, is it tries to restructure the way that conferences work. And for many of us, we go to conferences all throughout the year. And honestly, I think I mean, Dave and I probably agree with this, but it's like, I think conferences are just kind of kind of broken, like, oh, yeah, there's there's good aspects of it is good social aspects. But it's, they just feel like they're so impersonal, right? You go to a conference, you watch people on stage talk, you really want you learn some stuff, you really want to interact with those people. Maybe you go out and get drunk with some salespeople after that. It kind of like glance off of one another. But the best parts about a conference are where you get to have these deep connections and conversations with people. There's just never enough time. So
Dave Derington 01:44
anyway, I want to reframe that again. I love I love how you put this right, yeah, let's just let's just have a honest conversation about this. You're right, you go to a conference, and it's, I go see this person, I sit in a workshop in an auditorium, I go do this thing. But there aren't the kinds of things that we set out to do. Like you were just saying it's the human the connection, the networking, like this shifted everything upside down.
Brian Childs 02:13
Well, the thing, the thing, that is the thing that's missing, right, and calm when you Yeah, when you go to a conference, the thing that's missing is there's there tends to be a practicality that's missing from the experience, right? Well, you mean by that? Well, you might, you might see some things on a slide somewhere, you might interact with some people, but it's often there's often this missing piece of like, how do I apply this to my work? Right? I might have an image that I took when someone's presenting that's like, that's
