Leading Learning

Learning is, at its root, a neurobiological process. But most workplace learning doesn’t recognize that reality.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Dr. Tessa Forshaw, cognitive scientist and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studies how people work, learn, and create in the flow of their work. They discuss five principles grounded in learning science and what each means for how learning experiences should be designed. The conversation also explores the specific advantages external learning businesses have when applying these principles and why making space for metacognition may be the single most impactful thing you can do to improve your programs.

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Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:02] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Learning isn’t just content. It’s a neurobiological process. But, according to our guest, the way most workplace learning is designed doesn’t recognize that reality.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:27] Our guest in this episode, number 480, is Dr. Tessa Forshaw, cognitive scientist and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studies how people work, learn, and create in the flow of their work.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:42] In our conversation, Tessa walks through five principles grounded in science—from the fact that learning is biological and social to the importance of situated learning, productive effort, and transfer. And she explains what each principle means for how learning experiences should be designed.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:00] You and Tessa also explore why learning businesses may have some surprising advantages when it comes to applying these principles and where to focus if you want your programs to make a real difference in how learners perform on the job.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:13] Yes, and Tessa makes a strong case for metacognition as the single most impactful thing you can build into any learning program to improve retention, durability, and transfer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:25] If you design, deliver, or lead learning experiences, and you want to better align what you do with what the science actually tells us about how adults learn, then this conversation with Dr. Tessa Forshaw is for you.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:44] You’re the faculty chair of the Workforce and Workplace Concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. You’re also directing the Workforce Learning and Innovation Initiative. Tell us a little bit about that initiative and your role with it.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:01:59] Education schools have spent decades studying how people learn, and there’s an incredible amount of expertise at HGSE amongst my colleagues who studied education and learning for such a long time, but rarely has that expertise been pointed at workforce learning. It’s not like you turn 18 and don’t continue into a university, and then, magically, your brain learns differently and all the principles change. That’s not true. This initiative is focused on how do we make sure that we’re extending and applying all the science that we know about how people learn that is deeply embedded in HGSE into this very high-priority population. There are three streams associated with the program. The first is this idea of preparing—a concentration in the master’s program in workforce and workplace learning. It’s like a major for students in the master’s program, and it’s about how do we prepare the next generation of workforce learning leaders.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:03:01] The second component is what we’re calling “equip,” and that’s focused on professional certificates in workforce and workplace learning. We recently did the first cohort of that earlier in the year; we have another one coming up in July. Again, that’s the first type of workforce-learning-focused certificate at HGSE. So that’s very exciting. And then the third component of the initiative is what we call “discover.” That’s about applied research partnerships with organizations, where we partner with them to do typically design-based research in real organizations, in real contexts, focused around real problems of practice. We apply research methodologies to uncover what’s working, what’s not, and then share that with the field.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:48] I’ve read that you’ve asserted that workforce learning still doesn’t really match what we know about how people learn. I would love to hear what you see as some of the biggest mismatches between that science of learning and what we know and then the way that adult workers are commonly taught or the way we design learning for those adult workers.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:04:13] I love that that’s what you’ve gleaned from my work. I definitely think that. When I talk to a lot of learning leaders, learning is often discussed as content delivery. They will talk about learning as the content that is being created or the event that is being held. But it’s really important that we remember that learning isn’t content. Learning is a neurobiological process, and that process is influenced by chemicals in our brain and hormones in our body that are shaped by the environment and the context that we sit within. When we understand learning in that lens, it both opens up where learning can happen and what it looks like, but it also puts the responsibility of establishing the conditions that create and foster those positive neurochemicals and hormones to incite learning and alleviate the ones that don’t. And it puts that responsibility on L&D teams or on organizations providing learning experiences in a way that it hasn’t typically been considered before.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:27] You were saying, before we got started, that one of the things that you talk about in the certificate are five principles for the future of workplace learning. Could you outline and briefly explain those five principles?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:05:43] Yes, I absolutely can. The five principles that we talk about start with this idea: Learning is biological. We understand that behavior change comes from changes in the mind, which comes from changes in the brain, which comes from changes in the cell. I’m sure you’re familiar with those games that were really popular about 10 years ago, where they were all like, “Neuroplasticity!” There was a lot of fake going on there, but there is a seed of truth or a grain of truth, and that is that neuroplasticity is the foundation of learning. The ability for us to create a new neural pathway between two neurons is the foundation of all learning. When we understand that the cell influences the brain, which influences the mind, which influences behavior, that helps us think about how we can create learning in organizations, especially because so many workplaces are full of things that make that biological process harder. They’re full of cortisol. They’re full of cognitive overload. They’re full of constant context switching. They’re full of being triggered and having your amygdala hijacked when stress takes over, and your brain doesn’t operate at its peak performance anymore. When we understand learning is biological, we can also start to understand that learning at work is very rarely about effort or attention, and it’s much more about the conditions in our bodies, in our environments that are blocking this cellular change from happening. So that’s one component.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:07:16] The next principle is that learning is social. We know from decades of research on expertise development and the nature of learning that people become experts by being around people who are further along in that area of expertise. Having people more experienced share mental models, expose their reasoning to you, and foster that traditional romantic idea of apprenticeship that we have from hundreds of years ago. So learning is very social, and it happens in relationships with others. The third principle is that learning is situated. This is focused on the idea that pulling people out of work to go and learn is a tough design choice because the brain encodes skills along with the context in which they are learned in. A lot of people don’t realize that our environment plays a huge role in the retrieval of learning because we associate different knowledge and skills, practices to the physical environment in which we learn them. When we’re in those environments, they can help us cue it forward. If we learn something in an abstracted classroom in a beautiful L&D center that’s off-campus, and then we’re supposed to go back and apply it on a factory floor, that’s going to be very hard because the environment isn’t cueing that knowledge that we’ve learned to be brought forward, and those retrieval pathways aren’t yet strong because it’s new knowledge.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:08:55] The fourth principle is that learning takes effort. We talked a little bit about learning being a biological process and there being the creation of a pathway between two neurons. If you could imagine a bank of sand, and you have a stick at either end, and you want to create a pathway between the two of them that stays, you have to really dig into the sand and put some effort in there. That’s the same in your mind—you actually need effort to forge that pathway. Learning takes effort. Being easy and super fun isn’t necessarily what we’re going for. We’re going for experiences that provide opportunities for effort. Finally, that learning has to transfer so that the point of learning is that it can be applied in future contexts. That means that when we’re—especially today, where those future contexts are often ambiguous, and we don’t know how they’re going to change—that means that when we think about learning, we have to think about designing opportunities to expansively frame all of the different ways things could be applied, and, again, that’s part of helping that encoding in a way that’s much easier for us to retrieve it at that moment of need. So those are five principles.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:10] As I’ve shared with you, most of our listeners work in what we call “learning businesses,” and so they are all about trying to support learners, and they want to help them improve on the job, at work, as professionals, but they don’t tend to have direct access to their learners on the job. I’m wondering how these principles might inform how folks like that, who have a little bit of a distance between them and their learners’ workplaces, think about building courses, creating programs, other learning experiences. Are some of those principles more or less relevant when thinking about learning businesses rather than corporate L&D?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:11:01] That’s a great question. In the first version of the program, we had some people from learning businesses, as you describe them, and, in the discussions that I’ve had with each of our participants since, one of the things that came up was particularly this first one of learning being biological. When you have a separated environment, and that is just the reality of your business, that’s a huge win for creating and controlling the culture of the environment in a way that can support the biology. For example, you have the opportunity to pace the experience in such a way that assumes your learners are coming in tired and distracted. You have the opportunity to alleviate some of that time pressure to provide them with space, to make sure that there’s food available to them because, if you’re hungry, your body releases hunger hormones, and hunger hormones shut down neuroplasticity. You have these sorts of opportunities to help lean into the design of the biological requirements and control those in a way that’s very difficult in a team meeting on the go at work, where the manager is trying to teach somebody to support that.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:12:16] With the relationships component, you also have a huge opportunity to create environments of pure accountability, of bringing in experts who are not people that they might otherwise be exposed to, who they can build relationships with. There’s still a lot that you can do around the social nature of learning and make it about learning between humans and with humans. It doesn’t have to be learning with the person who sits next to them. So there’s a lot that can be done there.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:12:47] I think the situated component definitely is one of the things that comes up as a little more challenging. When I was chatting to this participant, what we spoke a lot around was how do you think about providing opportunities to map to practice or providing opportunities for them to do activities. They might have something that they take back and give them the instruction of “Do this in your work environment and notice….” Encourage them to be metacognitive and notice, “What about the environment is important to this particular activity that we’re learning?” And then bring that back into the class and into the discussion. It’s not situated in the sense that it’s physically happening in a space that it occurs, but the situated nature of where the skills and the learning need to be performed is inherent in the discussion and is part of the consideration so that you’re still building associations to some of those features and realities. That was interesting.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:14:00] The last one, effort is the same. But learning being situated and being needed to transfer can often be in tension with each other. Because, if something is situated, it’s easier to cue forward in the moment of performance in which it was designed to be used. But that makes it really hard to dis-embed it and transfer it to a future context that you don’t yet know. Does that make sense? If I learn something on my job in this specific context, and I’m applying it all the time because it’s deeply cued by the physical environment that I’m in, that can make it harder for me if my job gets disrupted, and I have to take on a brand-new role. It can make it much harder for me to understand how those skills could apply in that new context where they’re not being automatically cued. External learning organizations have a big role to play in the transfer piece because they’re not as burdened by the situated, which is important (as we’ve already discussed) but in tension, and they have the opportunity to expansively frame.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:15:03] What I mean by that is to help learners learn a thing and then provide them examples of all the different kinds of places and contexts that these skills functionally would have relevance. A great example of that is, if you’re teaching coding, instead of bringing in the alumni who’s the software engineer in the code that you taught—which is often what we see with coding boot camps and things like that—what about bringing in the five other alumni who didn’t go on to do anything specifically with being a software engineer but instead are using the skills that they learned in this program in diverse ways? They’ve used the idea of logical thinking and syntax to design their own personal training business, or they’ve used coding to help them expand their skill set and enter into marketing automation at work. They’ve not become the exact thing. And so, as an organization who is not as proximate to where the learning is happening, that’s a huge asset.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:13] Transfer is something I did want to talk about because it is so important, and you gave some great examples there about maybe not showing how someone can use this learning experience to achieve the more expected goal of a coding boot camp (become a software coder) but also how the way you begin to think when you’re going through that boot camp can apply in other situations. Do you have other things that you’ve learned about what helps adults transfer learning into those new roles, new projects, new performance situations?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:16:48] Great question. I’ve come off a six-year focus of learning transfer. I went down a very deep rabbit hole. I want to share a little bit about my own journey with that and how it changed how I think about transfer change if that’s okay. When I went into this, I understood transfer as being you learn something, and then you’re able to immediately apply it. Often that learning happens in a classroom or a formal environment of some kind, and then the next day or whatever, you can apply it. That view of transfer has been historically what we’ve had for about 100 years from very old scholars. Thorndike has a theory called “common elements”—that if something had common elements, you could transfer it to it. And they would do these tests where you would put a student in a learning environment that was like a math class, and then the next day they could apply the principles of the math class to a novel problem in front of them. Lo and behold, this didn’t work. There’ve been entire books written about “transfer on trial, “the elusive transfer doesn’t exist”—these kinds of headings. I came to realize that’s because we have a very narrow view of what transfer is. And we were measuring transfer as the person only being able to apply exactly what was given to them 10 minutes before. And we were also, in that scenario, assuming that the thing that they were taught 10 minutes before, they were taught well, which isn’t necessarily true.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:18:34] What I started to notice, as I stepped back from transfer in this sort of view, was that people are able to transfer in things to approach novel problems that aren’t necessarily the thing that we taught them. There was this study done by Dan Schwartz—who’s the current dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford—about 20 years ago, and there’s this one paragraph in it that is so illustrative of this, where they were trying to teach students about bald eagles. They then got them to do a project on bald eagles. And what they noticed was that, while students didn’t use exactly what they were taught, they were drawing from parts of knowledge that they’ve acquired throughout their entire 13 years of schooling to solve this problem. Of course they are. We don’t have control over how somebody’s neuro-architecture looks, about what cues forward what knowledge for them. But what we can do is make sure that we help people to surface and use what knowledge they already have, to look at them as assetful, that they already have a lot to work with, that they’ve learned in their life, in their professional life, in their schooling, in their personal life, and to bring that forward to approach novel tasks that they have never done before. That’s how I started to change my view of transfer to be much more about how do you bring forward whatever it is you have to approach a novel task and to start to solve it.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:20:12] You might not get 100 percent of the way, but you’re definitely going to have some sort of first principles, some basic knowledge or analogies from your life that you can bring forward that are relevant to get you going. And so, through that line of inquiry, we decided to do a study that looked at a place where this novel role transfer happens with great frequency. That’s because sometimes, when we’re looking at something that’s elusive, as I said, it’s good to go birdwatching—you go to the habitat where you know the bird will be to study it, rather than walking outside and looking up and hoping to find that bird in your sky. That’s what we did. We studied 75 consultants in the early parts of their career, where they do different jobs in one year, one person. It’ll be like, “I’m doing quality assurance testing for an Oracle software implementation. Now I’m doing a due diligence assessment for a private equity takeover of an online retailer. Now I’m doing a go-to-market strategy for a knee reconstruction device. Now I’m helping with the change management plans for the leadership office for an M&A of a company.” Really different jobs. To anybody outside of consulting, you’d be like, “Don’t you need entirely different degrees to do those?” But one person is doing all of these. We looked at how is it that they do them to a reasonably successful level, and there are no formal training interventions in between each one?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:21:57] What we found was that there were a series of individual practices that these consultants often demonstrated. There were a series of environmental features that were present in the two different consulting organizations that we looked at. And there was also a set of managerial practices of the new manager, that was on the novel role. We took all of those, and then we designed interventions focused on the individual practices and the managerial practices. Ultimately, what we found over the series of design-based studies was that only the managerial practices had a predictive outcome on if a learner was able to successfully transfer knowledge to a novel project and novel task, as measured by their managing director’s evaluation of their performance and time-to-competency in their novel role.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:22:55] First, I would caution that we’re talking about elite consultants who probably went to elite universities, and so that often means that some of the effect of the personal practices might have been negligible for us to detect because they were already all performing them to such a baseline, based on who they are and how they got there. Whereas, if we intervened with the personal practices in a different context, my question is would we also see that as predictive? I don’t want people to take away what I’m saying as individual practices around transfer don’t matter; it’s to say that, in this context, we didn’t see that as being predictive. But the manager’s piece is something that is interesting, especially for learning businesses like you’re talking about and the audience here, because they don’t always have control over what the manager does. But the manager plays a hugely outsized role in a learner’s ability to transfer and apply learning on the job.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:05] That’s interesting. Like you said, it’s a potential challenge, but it does suggest there might be some interventions or resources that could come along. “Okay, here you are as an individual coming to this course, this conference. Here are some materials you might take back and share with your manager when you get back,” perhaps to prime that manager to be most supportive of that learner applying and transferring knowledge.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:24:31] Yes, and one very specific behavior that was outsized in the set was the manager’s role in helping them connect prior learning to the novel context. They would say things like, “Hey, so you know how you went to that conference, and there you did that whole session on”—I’m going to make something up here—“how to structure unstructured data to make it effective in AI models? Some of those things could be really interesting to how we’re approaching this problem. I’d love you to go away and explicitly do that mapping.” By helping them, by inviting them, firstly, to do that (again we talked about cueing), the manager is then cueing the learner to start going, “Oh, I have to go back and retrieve all of these things and bring them here, and now I’m going to start making connections between this thing that I’m doing and those prior things that I’ve learned.”

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:25:29] Remember, learning is about creating a connection between two neurons. That is one really important practice as a manager: taking responsibility for guiding the learner to think about how the things they learn in x context apply to the specific task that you’re doing, and sometimes that also means helping them with that reasoning. That might mean having them do that thinking, bring it back, and then engage in the reasoning with them to help them get it right. Remember, we talked about how we transfer prior learning—sometimes you’re only going to get 80 percent of the way there based on everything that you already know. So the manager is quite important in making sure that we don’t have what one of my colleagues calls “overzealous transfer,” where you are overexcited, transferring forward things that shouldn’t apply to this novel context.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:23] It’s also making me think that there’s the potential for a learning business that would have, for example, a history of what a learner took in terms of courses or attended conferences, at least with that learning business. There would be some potential for cueing based on, “Hey, you remember when you took course x last year? Think about how that might apply now in this current course.” So it does seem like there’s some potential. It’s not the managerial role per se, but some of that cueing could still potentially happen.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:26:53] Yes, absolutely. For my own teaching practice, a lot of this work changed how I teach myself. I had that tough moment in the mirror where I was like, “Oh, some of this needs to change based on these findings.” And one of the things that I changed was in every class—I know that this is hard because we’re all time-pressed—but I make intentional space of three or four minutes of “Okay, today we’re going to be talking about creative problem-solving.” I teach a lot of skills that are creative and cognitive skills. “We’re going to talk about creative problem-solving. I want you to spend the next three or four minutes bringing in what do you think creative problem-solving is? Where are some examples of creative problem-solving? Where are some examples that you’ve seen of problem-solving that wasn’t creative? How are those two things different?” What I am doing in that moment is helping them transfer in everything that they know from it doesn’t matter where, like I said—it could be they learned creative problem-solving in an improv class that they did at a mother-daughter event at their kids’ school. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:28:04] Bring in what they know and help them start to reason through it. And so they’re starting from this place of “I already have some things that I know about what we’re talking about.” But the other benefit is, then, as we start to engage in learning over this course of this experience, they are more able to connect the new knowledge to existing knowledge, which means it’s going to be more durable and easy to retrieve because the more connected it is and the more associated with existing retrieval pathways it is, the easier it is for us to recall. That’s a massive win for the durability. And then the second piece is that, if there’s anything in their existing mental model that I want them to unlearn, I’m bringing that forward so that this new knowledge can help with that reorganization. And it means that, if they ever default to the old way of thinking that I needed them to unlearn, this new knowledge is also attached to it. And so they might go, “Oh, I need to do it—actually, no. I’ve got to do this other thing too. That’s right.” So it’s a really helpful practice that I’ve extrapolated.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:23] I want to go back to the principle around the role of social relationships and learning. Those can be more formal mentorships or more informal relationships with others who are doing similar kinds of work or thinking. I am again thinking about our listeners who primarily don’t necessarily have access to mentors on the job for those learners. But what can they still do on the social side that might tap into some of those relationships and the way that they can help make sure that the learning gets to take advantage of that importance of the social role in how we learn?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:30:02] It’s a fascinating thing to me that, in corporate learning and learning businesses and stuff, we talk a lot about cohort and community, but sometimes we don’t recognize that it’s not nice and makes the environment great and good for a network, but these sorts of features of cohort and community make learning more durable. Because, when we learn things through a story that someone else tells us, that starts to engage our ability to have empathy. Empathy is one of the most effective neurological experiences that we can have to help us reorganize preexisting mental models. We tend to be able to do that much more fluidly through empathy than in other ways, without empathy. That’s one example, but there are so many. The other things are, by hearing different people’s ways of speaking and things like that, we start to be able to engage in understanding if there’s a language and a discourse of the community that we’re trying to be part of and to speak in their terminology. Those things happen socially and informally. It’s a whole discipline of literature. It goes back hundreds of years—Vygotsky really believing that learning was this socio-relational process, and it’s very true.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:31:29] I would encourage organizations to think about community, cohorts, and things like that, not in a way of “How do we help them network, or how do we make sure that they have a WhatsApp group to organize drinks?” but to think about the design of those as part of learning and essential to learning. Sometimes that means needing to facilitate and model what those interactions need to look like at the beginning. That can mean giving buddies within cohorts that are around affinity but helping them by structuring the beginning of that relationship so they get used to it and get good at it. It can also mean simple things like providing individuals opportunities to share their mental models, even if it’s not in an effort to be buddied up. But you’re in a classroom, and everyone’s sitting there, and you say to someone, “I’d love it if you could share your mental model of how you’re thinking about that thing you described,” and, if they do that, then other people are engaging—that’s a socio-relational aspect of learning. There’s a lot that can be done but thinking about it as a necessary requirement for learning and as a design principle in that way. As I said, the community and cohort piece is really important. It changes what you come up with. It changes how you think about those experiences in your program—how you value them, the time you give them, and the weight you give them.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:10] That makes a lot of sense. I feel like sometimes we have, as you said, this idea of cohorts, but what it comes down to is this group of people who happen to be going through the class at the same time. But, if you leave it only at that, then it’s not doing the work of the cohort. Thinking about how to more intentionally create those meaningful exchanges so that one peer can hear from another how they’re thinking about a particular situation or topic is incredibly powerful. I underline what you’re saying about making time for that and making sure that it’s part of the design.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:45] I’m thinking about listeners who are looking to improve their workforce-relevant offerings. They have courses where they are trying to make their learners able to do better on the job, in the profession. If you’re thinking about what they might be able to do in the short term to better align their programs with what you know about how adults learn at work, what might be a suggestion that you encourage them to think about or try out and test?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:34:15] I would be encouraging them to make time in their offerings for learners to be metacognitive. Often we expect learners to do that separately, or we know it’s nice, but we try to make them do it at the same time as being cognitive. You can’t learn something and have cognitive attention to that thing you’re learning and be metacognitive about it at the same time. It’s not possible. So making intentional moments for learners to think about things like, “As you enter this experience, what are strategies that you find helpful to your learning and your attention? What do you need to do right now to adjust your environment to make sure that you’ll show up in a way that meets your goal for this session?” Even things like. As you’re in the middle of the learning environment, inviting learners to surface things that are very clear to them and feel very crystallized and stuff that still feels very uncertain and that they don’t feel like they have a complete understanding of yet. Pausing in the middle to help them do that and help them come up with strategies for how they might adjust how they’re thinking, et cetera. If they’re holding on to something strongly, which happens a lot with adult learners—we have very deeply automated or routinized perspectives sometimes, and helping them notice when that’s as a result of a bias that might be inhibiting them to learn.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:35:51] What I mean by bias, cognitive bias. For example, we as humans succumb to dozens and dozens of cognitive biases every day and for good reason; they help us use less metabolic energy. So there’s a really good reason for them. We don’t want them to go away, but it’s good to notice them. One might be like, “Are you resisting the new principles that we’re teaching right now? And is that coming from a place of genuine critical thinking and skepticism, or is that coming from a place of status quo bias? Is that because right now you’re resistant to this because you feel like the way it’s done, the way it’s always been done, feels comfortable, feels easier, feels like it would take less effort, and that’s inhibiting your ability to engage in what we’re discussing right now?” Inviting these conversations into learning experiences is essential because the data on metacognition is unambiguous, in that it results in better performance, better durability, better transfer of the skills. It’s the single thing that I would do if I was trying to improve my programming and improve the learners’ ability to apply what they’re learning in my context to work.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:17] We always love to ask folks who come on the Leading Learning Podcast about their approach to their own ongoing learning. I would love to hear from you if you have specific habits, practices, or sources that you use to continue to grow professionally personally.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:37:34] I live in this funny tension sometimes where I know there are things I should do, and then I catch myself not doing them, and then I get mad at myself—disaster spiral. But something that I personally find helpful, every so often, as an educator, is to sometimes intentionally go out and learn something new and to practice some of the things that I use as educational tools for others, or instructional tools for others, myself. For example—this is very esoteric, I apologize—I’m currently learning to become what’s called a “champagne specialist,” and that’s because I was like I’m going to go learn about something that I don’t really know a whole lot about that seemed like it would be fun. And I was looking for something that had a very social kind of component to it. I do try to practice these intentional moments of metacognition myself.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:38:32] I try to think about regulating my own learning. Was I paying attention in that class? What was bothering me? How will I change for next time? If I come in next time after having also been tired and frustrated, what are some steps that I could take to adjust how I’m showing up? I try to interrogate that. In addition to being really good as being a lifelong learner, to have really good awareness of how you learn as a person. I also think it’s important—from a human-centered practice—to remember what it means to be a learner when you’re an educator and to notice what’s tricky, what’s easy, what instructional moves you’ve been doing for a long time that don’t work, that do work. So it can be a good practice.

Celisa Steele: [00:39:32] That’s an excellent point about your own continued learning, especially if you are someone who spends a lot of time educating others, to put yourself back in the shoes of those folks you’re working with. It gives you that empathy, which—you were talking about earlier—is such an important part of how we learn and the neuroplasticity piece. We’ve covered a bit of ground in our time together today. If you were to stress a point or two points or three points for listeners, what is it that you are hoping they take away from listening to our conversation?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw: [00:40:07] Especially for folks who work within learning businesses, I would be remembering that of the five principles, even though one of them is situated, don’t walk away from this saying, “Oh, well, we can’t do that.” Remember that you actually have a superpower in terms of your ability to control for the neurobiology, in terms of your ability to expansively frame, and in your ability to intentionally craft social relationships that are unique and assetful as compared to learning that happens in corporate L&D or in the flow of work context. So please don’t at all be disheartened. I want to underscore that. There are real assets to lean into. That would be one. And, if I can have a second small one, that is also to recognize and cut yourself some slack because learning right now and the world are in such a state of flux, and there’s so much ambiguity in the business. There are tools that are coming up every day, and it feels like if you haven’t read every single New York Times, HBR article, and tried the three new things that launched last week by 10 a.m., you’re already behind. And that’s not true. The fundamental principles of how humans learn are the same with or without AI. Just hold on to the fact that you don’t need to get caught in a rat race, and you’re doing well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:41:48] That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Tessa Forshaw, the cognitive scientist directing the Workforce Learning and Innovation Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Stay with us for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:42:00] You can find Tessa on LinkedIn and learn more about the initiative and the certificate program in workforce and workplace learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:42:16] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it. That helps more people benefit from the conversation, and it supports the work we do with the podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:42:26] Tessa opened our conversation by reframing what learning actually is—not content delivery but a neurobiological process shaped by brain chemistry, hormones, and environment. That shift in perspective is the foundation of five principles for designing effective learning experiences.

Jeff Cobb: [00:42:45] Those principles—that learning is biological, social, situated, and requires effort and must transfer—give learning designers a science-based lens for evaluating and improving their programs.

Celisa Steele: [00:42:59] And she left us with a clear and quite easy-to-implement tip: Make intentional space for metacognition in your programs. The data, she says, is unambiguous—when learners have structured time to reflect on their own thinking and learning, then performance, durability, and transfer all improve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:43:18] Thanks again for listening—see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Many organizations say they are mission-driven. But mission drift is real and often happens because of the very structures and activities organizations have been told represent best practices. So what does it take to build an organization that stays true to what it set out to do?

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Eric Ries, entrepreneur and author of the books The Lean Startup and Incorruptible. They discuss how Incorruptible builds on the lean startup thinking Eric is known for, why the for-profit versus nonprofit distinction matters less than most assume, and how a four-part governance framework—built around compliance, purpose, coherence, and integrity—can help any organization stay aligned with its mission.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Mission drift doesn’t happen all at once. It creeps in—and, according to our guest, it often happens because organizations are following the so‑called best practices for how to grow and govern.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:28] Our guest is Eric Ries, entrepreneur and author of the landmark book The Lean Startup and, most recently, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great. Eric’s ideas—including “minimum viable product” and “build-measure-learn”—have fundamentally shaped how the world thinks about products and innovation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:51] If The Lean Startup is about how to build something worthwhile, Incorruptible tackles the next question: How do you keep it that way?

Celisa Steele: [00:00:58] Eric shares his provocative argument that the for‑profit versus nonprofit distinction is largely a red herring, and he offers a new definition of what it actually means to be a for‑profit organization that may surprise you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:12] Yes, and Eric lays out a four‑part framework for governance, along with a “harder is easier” principle that reframes what it takes to build lasting trust in an organization.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:23] If you’re involved in running any learning business (no matter its tax status) and you want a challenging new perspective on how organizations lose their way and what it takes to build one that doesn’t, then stick around for this conversation with Eric Ries.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:45] We’re here mainly to talk about Incorruptible—your new book—and I’m looking forward to diving into that, but I don’t think I can have you on the show and not ask something about The Lean Startup. Having been somebody who’s been an entrepreneur, been involved in startups, I’m very familiar with it; I’ve got it on my iPad with many notes, highlights, and that sort of thing. One of the concepts from it that we use repeatedly in our work with organizations is minimum viable product and encouraging them to put that minimum viable product out there, have that build-measure-learn cycle in what they’re doing. I’d love your perspective—15 years out from publishing the book, how has that concept held up from your viewpoint, and how has it evolved over that time period?

Eric Ries: [00:02:28] It’s held up pretty well. People get it confused all the time because people think, “Oh, if we’re just building a minimum product, that’s opposed to quality or long‑term planning or something like that.” But the point of minimum viable product is simply, if we’re in a situation where there’s going to be a long number of steps that have to unfold in order for whatever the thing is to be successful—I can tell you stories about where the thing itself is like a whizbang gadget; a cool platform; a deep‑sea, oil-well-drilling platform; an internal process change; or a new curriculum (I really have seen every kind of thing you can imagine this thing can apply to)—there are two dimensions (I said this 15 years ago or more) of the world that are going to make this more and more difficult. One is the changes in the technological landscape are going to democratize the tools of production but also drop cycle times. So things are going to get faster. It’s going to become easier for more people to build things, try things, communicate things. That prediction’s held up pretty well.

Eric Ries: [00:03:29] But, at the same time, we’re going to see a great increase in the level of underlying uncertainty about what’s going to work. Partly, number one, because consumers, employees, and whoever we’re trying to reach, students, they all have more options than ever before, and they’re facing a bewildering array of experts, advice, best practices, advertising, and the fragmentation of social media. When we have that combination of fast cycle time capability and extreme uncertainty in the environment, we need a process, a structured way of thinking about what to do with the infinity of things we might do. Traditional management, general management that has been practiced all over the course of the 20th century, was based in two principles: the principle of planning and the principle of forecasting. If you go back and read the foundational works of 20th-century management thinking—Fred Taylor. I’m thinking especially of Alfred Sloan’s My Years with General Motors because he really lays out how difficult it was to run a business without these concepts. It was very difficult. The key idea is that, in order to make a plan, in order to hold people accountable to that plan, we need to have an accurate forecast of what’s supposed to happen. If you want to claim credit for having done a good job as a manager, you can’t just say, “Well, I sold more cars this year than last year.” Maybe the economy’s up, and everybody sold more cars this year.

Eric Ries: [00:04:47] Similarly, you can’t say you’re fired because you sold fewer cars than last year. Maybe we’re in a recession, and, if you did slightly less bad than everybody else, that’s a win. The key is to be able to forecast and beat the forecast. Most of us have been taught that in our careers, not as an idea but just as the way work is done. The hidden assumptions are the killers, always. Most people that I talk to cannot imagine that this idea ever had to be invented. To them, it’s as natural as gravity. But it’s not. It was an idea. It was invented at a certain time. It has certain strengths and also certain liabilities—the biggest one, where do accurate forecasts come from? Accurate forecasts require a long and stable operating history from which to extrapolate. And who feels like the world is getting more stable every day? Uh‑oh. First of all, whenever we’re doing something new, we’re doing entrepreneurship, no matter what it says on our business card. A lot of people become what I call “involuntary entrepreneurs” when the world changes around them, and, all of a sudden, they’re having to scramble to reinvent something they’ve done consistently, maybe for many, many years. Parallels to AI are pretty obvious. That is the essence of minimum viable product: to figure out what is the structured, scientific, least‑effort way we can discover whether the core business hypothesis that we are operating against is true or false.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:10] I love the whole idea of operating against the hypothesis, which means you have to test it. You have to measure. You have to learn. That’s the whole build‑measure‑learn cycle. I’m probably paraphrasing language from the new book—or at least how the book is presented to me—that The Lean Startup, in many ways, was about how to build something worth protecting. But now you’re moving into how to protect it because sometimes things don’t work. You build it, it’s great, and then things go awry. Can you talk a little bit about what prompted you to write Incorruptible and what’s at the heart of that book?

Eric Ries: [00:06:46] I’ll tell you a story. A founder came to see me for help, but he was not your typical Y Combinator, two kids in a garage. He was a tenured university professor working in a biology lab. He had had a breakthrough in the lab that he was trying to turn into a spinout from the university. To protect his privacy, I’ll just call him “the professor.” What the professor was trying to do was a technology that could literally cure dozens of diseases—or it could unleash untold and horrific bioweapons. Imagine having like a ChatGPT, but you could just make me a new molecule. It was that powerful.So he was having this very unusual problem. He was trying to recruit other university professors to join his team and leave their tenured labs and join him. And they wanted to do it. It was going very well, except they kept asking him questions that he couldn’t answer. Questions like, “How can we trust that this technology will be used for cures and not for evil?” He’d be like, “Oh, don’t worry. I have good intentions.” And that wasn’t getting it done. They were like, “Okay, but aren’t you making a for‑profit company?” “Yes, but we’re mission‑driven.” “Oh, are you? But what about your investors? Are they bought into the mission?” “They definitely said so.” “That’s not too satisfying. What if they were to try to pressure you to do something bad?” “Oh, don’t worry. I would say no.” “What if they fire you?” “I don’t know. They won’t do that.” It was not very reassuring.

Eric Ries: [00:08:30] Anyway, he was like, “How do I be a for‑profit company but still mission‑driven?” Meanwhile, if he talked to investors about it, if he gave them even the slightest hint that he had concerns about the mission, they’d be like, “Doesn’t sound like you’re very serious about a business.” He felt trapped. Stuck. At the same time, I happened to be going to an event. I was on my way to an event when I was talking to him. The event was for a founder friend of mine who was at the end of his journey. This guy was just starting his entrepreneurial journey. The CEO I was going to the event for had been CEO for 15 years of a company he had built from nothing into a multi‑billion‑dollar success. And I was explaining that I had to get off the phone because I had to go to this event. I’m explaining there were going to be 1,000 people here to talk about the CEO and the things that he had built. I was watching people trickle into the event. I saw people that I knew the CEO had even fired, who had flown back at their own expense to come to this event for him. And the guy was like, “Wow, mad respect. That’s the kind of CEO I want to be one day.”

Eric Ries: [00:09:13] I was like, “I’m sorry. I’m clearly not making this clear. This is not a party. This is a wake.” He said, “What?” I said, “Yes, he doesn’t work there anymore.” He had made literally billions of dollars for his investors, and it wasn’t enough. He’s been kicked out. Now the company’s in new hands. They’re taking the company in a new direction. So we’re kind of going there to celebrate, but we’re kind of going there to mourn something that was lost. And he was like, “Wait, are you saying that’s going to be me one day?” I said, “Yes, this is what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve been doing this for 15 years now. I’ve watched so many people lose control of the thing that they made, sometimes because they get fired by their investors, sometimes because their board betrays them, sometimes because the organization becomes bureaucratic, malignant, or worse, and they can’t control or understand why.” He was like, “But is what I’m asking you for help with possible? Can I build an organization that is incorruptible?”

Eric Ries: [00:10:10] I said, “It’s a good news/bad news situation. The good news is, yes, I do believe it is possible. The bad news is you’ve already taken steps in the wrong direction because you are following the best practices that everyone says are the very best ways to build an organization. But, actually, our modern best practices about how organizations should be built, structured, and governed are, in fact, value‑destroying.” I asked him, “Are you willing to go with me and look at the evidence that this is so? Because I know it’s a bold claim.” And he was willing. Thanks to that willingness—after I went to the party—we reconvened and put his company on a new and totally different course that, ultimately, I think, is going to lead to that technology being used in a safe way rather than a dangerous way. But this is the phenomenon we see across our economy—companies and organizations are being surgically deboned, fed into the meat grinder of financialization, and losing their integrity, coherence, values, and even their soul. There is something we can do about it, but it’s going to require a radical rethink of dogmas that we’ve all been taught.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:15] Your target in the book is more the for‑profit company, the corporation beholden to shareholders. But anybody who’s listening to this (and we have a lot of nonprofit listeners) recognizes this same pull in just about any type of organization where, over time, you lose sight of the core mission and where you were really trying to go, and other things slip in and take over.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:42] Core to this book, as I understand it, is that the corruption is often, maybe most of the time, a design failure more than a moral failure. Can you talk about that? And what are some of the earliest signs a company or organization might see that the design is somehow wrong, that they’re not on that right path?

Eric Ries: [00:12:02] Let me address both things that you said because this problem we tend to talk about as a business problem or originating from the for‑profit sector has metastasized out of for‑profit. Part of it is we have financialized everything in our economy. In the book, I have discussions, stories, and evidence about how the same phenomenon is happening at hospitals, universities, political parties, journalism, sports teams, in so many places you wouldn’t expect it to show up—transit, construction costs, and public sector stuff.What’s going on is our grandparents lived a life of separately defined civic spheres. The civic sector, public sector, was distinct from private sector, was distinct from journalism—the so‑called fourth estate was a separate estate. Sports teams were totally separate. Whereas today, if you look at those areas, you’ll hear people cynically say, “Once money gets involved, what are you going to do?” Think about the role of a sports league commissioner compared to the days of the great Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who purged baseball after the Black Sox scandal. Now we have scandals like that a couple times a year. Everyone’s like, “But the commissioner works for the owners. The owners just want to make money. What do you expect?”

Eric Ries: [00:13:19] Our grandparents expected something very different. They would have been surprised to see nonprofit hospitals, for example, lobbying against the creation of a National Patient Safety Board. Why? We would be surprised to see law firms and universities both bending the knee to outside pressure instead of standing up for their core mission. Why? It’s the almighty dollar. But our grandparents had plenty of dollars. There’s been a fundamental change in the idea of what leadership and management are supposed to be. Let’s try to understand why that’s happened and what its effects are.What are the signs? The number one symptom of this corruption is we have found innumerable ways in our society to make money without creating value. It’s really that simple. I’ll tell you a funny story. When I was creating the Long‑Term Stock Exchange, I used to get calls from journalists when there would be a funny finance story they wanted to comment on. I don’t know how many people remember, during the pandemic, the WallStreetBets era, where there were these online stock traders on Reddit and places like that that were getting all worked up about payment for order flow and other kinds of corrupt financial practices. They were trying to throw their weight around, driving up the value of what are called “meme stocks” now. I can’t remember whether it was GameStop or AMC Theatres. It seemed like a random assortment of stocks that were being affected by this phenomenon.

Eric Ries: [00:14:39] Anyway, the finance reporters had a hard time writing this story because they would call me and be like, “Look, we’re trying to write this story. What are people outraged about? We can’t understand it.” I would explain, “Well, I think it’s straightforward. Payment for order flow is a classic example of a conflict of interest between the gatekeeper, the intermediary, and the end customer. It’s the same as payola in radio or stocking fees in grocery. You see this a lot in our modern economy.” And they’re like, “But that’s been legal and going on for years. What’s the problem? What’s new here? What’s the issue?” They were really having to struggle. I had to say, “Listen, stop. The issue is people get upset whenever they find someone making money without creating value.” People, for centuries, have understood that to be a form of corruption. Now, in our modern language, the word “corruption” has had its definition narrowed almost to the point of uselessness. Maybe if someone creates outright embezzlement or fraud, we can still call that corrupt. We can all think of cases in recent years where we can’t even agree on that. Our grandparents were livid about insider trading and gambling. Now those things have basically been legalized. So what’s going on?

Eric Ries: [00:15:47] The sign of corruption is that someone is breaking the fundamental moral logic of our financial system, which is as follows. If you ask people to defend financialization or capitalism or anything about our economic system, they always retreat eventually, digging the justifications down until you hit the moral bedrock, which is this: When two people engage in a fully informed, fully voluntary, uncoerced transaction for mutual benefit, both parties are better off. By definition, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have done the transaction. When that happens, new value is created in the world. It’s a magic trick. It’s the ultimate magic trick of our modern economy—that we can create wealth without stealing it. Amazing. But listen to how many criteria that requires. If I sell an addictive product, where’s the consent? If I mislead you, if I use deceptive practices, where’s the fully informed? There are so many kinds of transactions today that we celebrate, in the for‑profit and nonprofit sectors alike, that, in our grandparents’ and great‑grandparents’ time, not just would have been seen as morally dubious, but they would have been crimes. Now we’ve legalized them. We are reaping the inevitable consequence of having done this civilization-scale wrong turn, and now it’s time to make some corrections.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:13] Can you talk a little bit about how mission factors into this, especially for our audience? Because they’ll say, “Well, those corporate guys maybe don’t have a sense of mission, but we have a mission. We have our mission statement.” What’s the difference between having a mission statement and truly being mission‑controlled, mission‑driven?

Eric Ries: [00:17:33] I appreciate that because part of my argument in the book is that our current distinction between not‑for‑profit and for‑profit is mistaken. Today, we let this very arcane provision of the tax code be reflected as what we think is the most fundamental distinction of organizational types. It’s totally wrong. When we say for‑profit today, we generally mean investor‑controlled or donor‑controlled. When we say nonprofit, we tend to mean self‑controlled, autonomous. Many of the organizations you’re talking about have a mission statement, but they are not mission‑driven. They are, at best, what I call “mission‑hopeful.” They’re operating a conventional business playbook and giving it the sheen, the patina, the candy coating of talking about mission. But, when the chips are down—and we’ve seen examples of this in recent years—when their revenue lines are threatened, they have no values at all. They will do what they have to do to preserve themselves. Such an organization is not a trustworthy counterparty because you have no idea what it’s going to do in the future. The right way to think about this is the Smithsonian Institute is a very for‑profit organization, and Philip Morris, the Merchants of Death, are incredibly not‑for‑profit. They are destroying value, whereas the Smithsonian Institute creates value.

Eric Ries: [00:18:51] Once we accept this distinction, it opens up the possibility for what I call “the new governance”—a new theory of governance that allows us to put mission and purpose at the center of all our corporate practices. When I say “corporate,” I don’t mean related to corporations. I mean relating to the corporeal body of an organization.Today, most board meetings are dry, dull, and, frankly, so boring. If you’ve ever been to a board meeting, it’s unbearably boring because we have reduced board discussions to compliance and what passes for a very meager sense of purpose today—generally the self‑enrichment and preservation of the financial assets of the thing. We’ve come to see governance, organizations as legal and financial contracts, instruments of economic activity rather than as vital living things. Culture, mission, purpose—these issues tend to have receded from board agendas. I give lots of examples in the book. One of my favorites is hospital boards. Someone studied the hospital boards to see how often they talk about or discuss patient safety or tie safety outcomes or health outcomes to executive compensation. It’s almost nothing. Meanwhile, talking about how to compensate the executive director is occupying an increasing amount of time. And the criteria for being a really good executive director of a nonprofit these days mostly has to do with your fundraising prowess.

Eric Ries: [00:20:18] When you do that, what you see is the culture of an organization starts to develop corrosion—an illness, an obsession with what investors or donors might want, not what they actually do want. Forming a long‑term, healthy partnership with a donor could be good. What they might want. You start to hear people say, “Well, we could do that, but investors might not like it. The market might not like it.” Again, going back to hospitals, there’s been this push to have more transparency about errors. Medical errors kill. Depending on how you ask, one of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. Naturally, I’m sure a private equity‑owned hospital would have a hard time being transparent about its own mistakes. But it’s nonprofit hospitals that have led the charge for fear of losing money, losing patients, losing donations, having malpractice insurance go up. Legitimate financial fears are driving outcomes, not the mission anymore, even though these hospitals have powerful nominal mission statements. This divergence between an organization’s stated mission and its actual mission, as experienced by employees and customers, has become a yawning chasm for many companies. And, if you don’t close that, it eventually leads to a corrupt outcome, generally some kind of collapse.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:39] You’re really thinking about profit differently. You’re defining “profit” in a different way than would traditionally be the case.

Eric Ries: [00:21:46] My definition of “profit” is as follows: To be a for‑profit organization is to be one that is trying to maximize human flourishing. If you’re doing that, then you are enacting the core logic of our financial system. You are creating new value. And you are concerned with all the human beings your organization touches, not just the short‑term ones, not just the ones that are conveniently easy to measure, but all of them. In economics, the bugs, with our conventional definition of profit, are well‑known: deferred liabilities, negative externalities, what I call “using a human life as an input factor of production”—seeing it as acceptable losses if somebody has to die or be maimed in order for the engine to turn. Those problems are well‑known. But, generally speaking, what are you going to do? “That’s just how it is.” But I say, “No.”

Eric Ries: [00:22:34] We who build, lead, manage, and educate organizations have a say. We get to decide what these words mean and how they are defined. We don’t have to listen to some expert.What I try to argue in the book might seem a little bit counterintuitive to your listeners the first time they hear it. It sounds very abstract. What does it matter what our definition of profit is? But it turns out to be extremely practical. I give examples in the book, and I’ve had a bunch of readers tell me that this way of thinking has unlocked new opportunities for them too. Leaders in the book used this theoretical concept to discover new sources of value and mission attainment, new sources of professional acceleration, and career enjoyment. So, yes, we can make board meetings a lot more interesting, in addition to having a lot more positive impact and making more money, for that matter.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:28] I did want to follow up with you on boards. I’ve served on some myself. I know the environment of which you speak. For a board that has thought mostly in terms of compliance, fiduciary duty, what’s one question it should start asking that it probably hasn’t been asking before that might take it down this better road?

Eric Ries: [00:23:50] Let me first lay out the four dimensions of the new governance, and I’ll give you a question for each. The four dimensions are compliance, purpose, coherence, and integrity. Compliance is well covered, so we don’t need compliance tips from me. I’m not saying that’s not important. It is important. But purpose—we have to ask ourselves what is the purpose of this organization? People think that purpose is really vague aspiration. I quote this guy. He was an ESG critic from Wall Street who was criticizing Unilever for saying they’re going to infuse purpose into all their products. He was like, “At the point we’re talking about the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, I think we’ve lost the plot.” I was like, “Fair enough. That’s a good point.” But what’s so funny about that quote is, although it may be a humble product, Hellmann’s mayonnaise is food. Its purpose is crystal clear: to nourish and delight the people that eat it. People are like, “What does it matter?” It does matter because, if an efficiency consultant shows up and says, “We could make Hellmann’s mayonnaise 3 cents cheaper by putting a carcinogen in there. No one’s going to get cancer for 10 or 20 years. We’ll all be long gone by the time the bill comes due, but we’ll be rewarded in the meantime.” It really matters if the category leader, the leader in question, says, “Wait a minute. Is my purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to extract as much money as possible from our customers, or is it to nourish and delight them?” This is a substantial, important question.

Eric Ries: [00:25:12] Think about purpose this way: not as what is our aspiration or intention—because who cares?—rather, what are we legally committed to maximize? If you’re a for‑profit company in most of the industrial world today, you are legally required by default to maximize shareholder returns. We’ve got an idea called shareholder primacy. That idea has metastasized into a lot of nonprofits who think the growth of the nonprofit itself is the thing we’re trying to optimize for. If that’s the case, if you want to put growth at the top, be prepared to reap the whirlwind. But, if it’s not growth for its own sake, what is it? What is it? That’s the purpose question.What are we legally obligated to maximize? The coherence question is this: To what degree are all of our resources—human, financial, political, social—aligned towards one common goal? In the book, I tried to reintroduce the world to one of the most pioneering management theorists of all time. Her name was Mary Parker Follett. She wrote in the 1910s and 1920s, and then she was utterly erased from the management record at the same time Frederick Winslow Taylor was celebrated and lauded. You can draw your own conclusions for why he was celebrated and she was erased. But, if I told you a bunch of the things she said, you would think they were written by a contemporary person, and you would be like, “Wow, that person is cutting-edge.” She was really a century ahead of her time.

Eric Ries: [00:26:35] She believed in “power with,” not “power over.” She said the purpose of a leader is to make more leaders. She would go around and say things like this: “Mr. Roundtree, the owner of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory, is not the leader of the Roundtree Chocolate Factory.” People would be like, “Lady, what are you talking about? His name is right on the door. His family has owned that factory. Everyone works for him. In what possible way is he not the leader? And, also, you’re praising him as a great leader. What’s going on?” She said, “Well, he is a great leader. But, when people follow, they do not follow him. Rather, he is skilled in instilling in his employees a sense of common purpose. The common purpose, and not Mr. Roundtree himself, is their invisible leader.” This is one of the most powerful ideas in management because this is a description of how things actually work rather than how we wish they worked. Generally speaking, in for‑profits, nonprofits, governments—it doesn’t matter—most people follow their intuitive inner sense of what is required for the job. What is the organization’s purpose in having me do this job? Quite often we see situations where they are commanded to do something different and nonetheless keep following that invisible instinct.

Eric Ries: [00:27:51] Most of our discussion today about culture, stakeholders, and blah, blah, blah is vague, useless, and lame. In this book, I talk not about stakeholders but about fiduciaries. Who are you a fiduciary to? Who would you rather die than betray? If we’re a hospital, if you tell me that’s patients, then I want to see that everything in the organization—every person, every incentive—is aligned around patient safety and health outcomes. I don’t want to see even one place where you could conceivably be paid for doing an unnecessary procedure. Uh‑oh. We’ll be like, “That’s not how the insurance companies we partner with work.” Are we coherent or incoherent? What is our primary purpose?

Eric Ries: [00:28:35] The last is integrity, and this is the one that gets people irritated the most. For a person, if I say, “You’re a high‑integrity person….” Think of a friend. When I say the word “integrity,” does it conjure someone’s name in your mind?

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:48] Yes.

Eric Ries: [00:28:49] You don’t have to say their name, but you know what I’m talking about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:51] Yes.

Eric Ries: [00:28:51] If that friend says they’ll meet you at a place at [2:15], are they going to be there at [2:30]? At [4:00]? They’re going to be there at [2:15]. They’ll probably be at [2:13] waiting for you. If that person wasn’t sure if they could be there at [2:15], would they tell you they’re going to be there at [2:15]? No. They would tell you, “I don’t know if I can be there or not.” This is a person who, when they make a promise, it’s good as gold. We treasure that attribute in people.In organizations, it’s the same. If an organization can make a promise and keep it, it can earn the most valuable asset in the world: trustworthiness. Here’s the problem. For an organization, no individual can ever really make a promise on behalf of the organization just through their own personal will and determination. Even if I get a personal promise from the CEO of the company, the CEO can be replaced. And, even in a nonprofit context, imagine I get a promise from the whole board, the executive director, and every person—“We promise, promise, promise”—what if the organization’s largest donor comes in and says, “I won’t fund you anymore if you do that?” Do they have the structural integrity to say, “Sorry. When we make a promise, we keep it”?

Eric Ries: [00:29:55] For an organization, these two senses of integrity are the same. An organization that is weak, that can be pressured from the outside, can never be trusted to make or keep a promise. So the integrity question for governance is what are we committed to that no outside force could prevent us from doing? It requires boards to be much more savvy about power. Who has the power over this organization?What are the underlying—what I call “the fundamental forces”—that act on this organization? Unfortunately, most boards are oblivious to this. Very famously, back when OpenAI was a nonprofit, we got a really abject lesson in this. The board fired the CEO because they had the on‑paper power to do so, but they did it in a moment when the organization was literally about to engage in a multi‑billion‑dollar financial transaction.

Eric Ries: [00:30:51] The employees really wanted that transaction to complete. They had a stake in its outcome. So the employees went into revolt. Their biggest supplier, Microsoft, objected to this action. If the employees, the investors, and your biggest supplier all come and say, “No, we don’t accept this outcome,” do you really have the power to do it? Turned out, no. Sam Altman was back at work five days later. Integrity requires us to look not just at our on‑paper power but to have a real understanding of what power the organization has and who has power over it. Those conversations are tricky. Do we really want to talk about our vulnerabilities, our weakness in the face of a powerful donor? Do we really want to contemplate having to defy a powerful person or ally? It’s a little frightening, but it’s a lot more interesting than just a compliance checklist. So those are the four dimensions: compliance, purpose, coherence, integrity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:51] Can you talk about the role of incentives in all of that? Because a lot of times, incentives are out of alignment, it seems like. So say more about that.

Eric Ries: [00:31:59] In the academic literature, this is called surrogation, where the number becomes a surrogate for the thing itself. Have you ever wondered why customer service is so bad in this country? We have data—it’s roughly twice as bad as it was 50 years ago on average, even though the customer service function has been professionalized. We’ve spent untold billions on improving customer service. We’re actually making it worse. Why? Because we’ve allowed metrics, like average hold time, to become a surrogate for the thing itself. We noticed 50 years ago that if we answer the customer’s question promptly and quickly, they get off the phone quickly, then they’re more satisfied. That’s good service. But now we made the exhaust from the process the goal of the process. It’s like taking the exhaust engine and sticking it in the intake valve for a combustion engine. We’re polluting with carbon monoxide our own thinking. We started to think, “Anything that makes average hold time better makes the customer service better.”Now we’ve discovered there are lots of ways to get people off the phone without solving their problem. Have you called your cable company recently? I’ll tell the story of Johnson & Johnson. This is very relevant. We’ve been on a healthcare kick for some reason in my answers here today, so I’ll stick with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:04] I feel the healthcare pain, so that’s a good one.

Eric Ries: [00:33:06] We know this one is real. It affects all of our lives in a visceral way. Johnson & Johnson was a family‑run company, and the second‑generation leader was Robert Wood Johnson II. He worked his way up from the boiler room. He became chairman of the company when his father died during the Great Depression. He was a high‑integrity leader but also iron‑willed, old‑school corporate chair you did not cross. He famously fired his own cousin and his own son from the business for improprieties. A person you did not cross.During the Depression, he raised wages when everyone else was lowering them. He would open factories when others were closing them. And he was like, “Look, we have a commitment to the purpose of our organization that, even in bad economic times, this is what we do.” As a result, once the Depression ended, Johnson & Johnson rocketed to the top of corporate success in the 1940s. So much so that he took the company public during World War II—the market environment of 1942! Before he took the company public, he was worried, even then, that the company would fall to short‑termism and become greedy—a company that was only interested in its investors.

Eric Ries: [00:34:18] So he created the famous Johnson & Johnson “Our Credo”—a statement of purpose for a for‑profit company that went as follows: “Our first priority, our first fiduciary obligation, is to our patients, then to doctors and nurses, then to our employees, then to our communities, and, last, to our shareholders.” The exact opposite of today’s best practices. He was so worried that people would forget the Credo that he had it carved into 10‑foot‑high limestone blocks and installed in the company headquarters, where they still exist to this day. They are a monument to his idea, Ozymandias style. The idea was that every person who worked at J&J would have to walk by the Credo every day on their way to work. It would remind them what their purpose was.While he was alive, this worked great because he was judge, jury, and executioner of interpreting the corporate purpose of J&J. And, like I said, if you crossed him, you were fired. But, when he died, the company slowly and gradually began to drift from those principles and fall into the gravitational pull of this massive celestial body called “shareholder primacy” over time. The Credo never changed.In fact, it’s still on the walls to this day. But the actual metrics, the thing that people got aligned to was, more and more, about quarterly growth, earnings, consistency, stock price, shareholders.

Eric Ries: [00:35:41] Eventually, Johnson & Johnson was rocked by the kinds of scandals that Robert Wood Johnson would have found utterly baffling. People know the scandals over and over again. The worst of them, by far, was the time they put asbestos in the baby powder, causing thousands of people to get cancer, and then they covered it up. We know they covered it up because there was litigation, and the documents all came out. These breaches of trust eventually come back to bite you. But the CEOs who oversaw this cover‑up, who oversaw years and decades of scandals, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, personally. We are paying people to engage in this practice. The reason I bring this up, and you asked about alignment, is you have to understand that the people who put the asbestos in the baby powder and then covered it up literally walked by the Credo every day on their way to work.

Eric Ries: [00:36:31] Human beings are infinitely capable of the cognitive dissonance of claiming obeisance to some mission or mission statement while understanding what the organization really wants me to do—the thing that drives my compensation, promotion, rewards. The things I’m really aligned to is the surrogate metric of dollars, growth, share price, or whatever. If we want to avoid that, we have to have a corporate discipline. I think this is a board‑level responsibility. We have to have a significant responsibility in the organization to use what I call “holistic metrics” that track the full range of human impacts that our organization creates, so that we never allow any financial metric to become a surrogate. Therefore, we become trustworthy. And, again, this is not about giving up on profit, growth, success, or even money. The trustworthiness asset is what gives us the competitive advantage we need for our organization to grow and thrive.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:23] As somebody with a long literary background, I love the Ozymandias reference. We might have to quote the poem in the show notes. [You can read or listen to the poem “Ozymandias” on the Poetry Foundation’s Web site.] To wrap up, if there’s one thing that you would want a leader of a mission‑driven organization to do differently on the proverbial Monday morning after hearing this conversation—just one shift in how they think about building, governing, or protecting what they’ve created—what would that be?

Eric Ries: [00:37:52] What haven’t we talked about yet? Okay, here’s a simple principle. It’s called “harder is easier.” This is maybe the easiest thing in the book to understand. I don’t know if it’s the easiest to do. Here it is. When people talk to me about this, I’ve been trying to get leaders to up their game for 20 years. I’ve got a lot of experience telling people, “Look, if you do this new technique, it will help you.” The most common answer I get, especially in recent years, is people will be like, “Eric, I hear you, but business is already so hard. Leadership is already so hard. I can’t get my employees to do what I want.We’re under all this pressure. We’re dealing with budget cuts. We’re dealing with this. We have this team running off and doing that, that team running off doing that. My board’s telling me I have to embrace AI. My employees don’t want to do it. They’re being recalcitrant. Business is too hard. I can’t add one more thing to my plate.” Then I say, “I hear you. I’m very compassionate. It is hard. But I want you to consider this possibility: Is it possible that the reason business is so hard is that nobody trusts you? Think about how much easier your life might be if your employees, your customers, your donors, your board—what if you all had true mutual trust?”

Eric Ries: [00:39:08] Unfortunately, most people have never worked in a mission‑driven organization, the real thing, that when management says something, they mean it. When your boss tells you something is a corporate priority, it actually is the priority. If someone tells you this is the merit‑based system we use for people to get ahead, there’s not some secret political other thing. Most people have never seen this, so they don’t realize that, when you take the harder road, you make a bunch of the most nasty problems in leadership way easier for yourself. Alignment becomes automatic.In order to activate this “harder is easier” principle, you only need two things, and they don’t require your boss’s permission or the board’s. You, as a leader, any leader, can do these two things any day of the week. One, you need an aspirational mission aligned with human flourishing. Without that, you can’t activate the heart of the people you choose to lead. They have to intuitively understand, “Well, of course, we do it that way.” I tell a story in the book of a company whose literal directive to all their employees is to love your customer, treat them like you treat your own parents. People hear that, and they’re like, “Oh, come on. You got to be kidding me. What is this—some kind of vague ’Oh, we’re all a family here’? No.”

Eric Ries: [00:40:25] They’ve made that into an operating handbook that is extremely practical but also extremely easy for normal people to understand. So much of corporate strategy is a waste of time because the people asked to execute the strategy do not understand what is being asked of them. It is out of alignment with their own inner wisdom, sense of value, and common purpose. So we need an aspirational mission aligned with human flourishing.The second thing we need is a commitment to make principled decisions, no matter what. It’s an ethos, a character. I give a bunch of examples in the book of people whose harder-than-easier mission forced them to make a principled decision that was painful and difficult, but they stuck with it because they understood that that would ultimately be what makes them trustworthy. The reason I bring it up is that one thing a leader can do—of all the things in the book, this is the one most in the control of a leader. The greatest leaders I know—the people I admire in government, for‑profit, and non‑profit—all share this characteristic: They have an ethos, a personal sense of mission, principles, and values. They have a real character about them, a business philosophy, a leadership philosophy.

Eric Ries: [00:41:32] They understand that, by doing that, it makes life more difficult. It will increasingly bring them into conflict with conventional business practice or with the fact that now there’s a partner who’s being recalcitrant. It creates difficulties on purpose. And they love it. They love the difficulties because, every time they encounter one, it’s a teaching opportunity to instill that ethos into the organization. If you’ve ever had a leader who says good stuff but then their actions don’t seem to back it up, you know how corrosive that can be. Good leaders are hungry to find opportunities to prove their rhetoric matches reality. They’ll go out of their way to get involved, to show, to teach this is how we resolve this conflict because the resolutions are not A or B. We always have to find a synthesis resolution that achieves the mission, keeps the organization financially viable, and is backed by our principles. And that often requires breakthrough thinking, even in the smallest details. That, again, makes everyone’s job more interesting, in addition to being more competitive, more trustworthy, having all these other benefits.

Celisa Steele: [00:42:44] That wraps up our conversation with Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible. Stick around another minute for our recap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:42:53] Eric’s new book is available wherever books are sold, and you can visit incorruptible.co to sign up for his newsletter and to make use of the bookstore finder to shop local. Signing up for the newsletter will get you access to bonus content, including a secret chapter cut from the original manuscript and implementation guides tailored to different sectors and job titles.

Celisa Steele: [00:43:21] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it. That helps more people find the show and benefit from the conversation, and it supports the work we do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:43:31] Eric connected his now classic book The Lean Startup about how to build something worthwhile to his new book Incorruptible, which asks the follow-on question: How do you keep organizations from losing their soul over time?

Celisa Steele: [00:43:45] He suggested that the standard for‑profit versus nonprofit distinction is largely misleading and offered a contrarian definition of for‑profit as any organization committed to maximizing human flourishing, not just shareholder returns.

Celisa Steele: [00:44:01] Eric also walked through four dimensions of what he calls “the new governance”—compliance, purpose, coherence, and integrity—and used stories to show how mission drift can happen even when the right values are literally carved in stone.

Celisa Steele: [00:44:16] And he left us with his “harder is easier” principle. When leaders commit to an aspirational mission and make principled decisions no matter what, they build trust—and trust makes everything else in leadership easier.

Jeff Cobb: [00:44:31] Thanks again for listening—see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast!

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The post From Lean Startup to Incorruptible Organization with Eric Ries appeared first on Leading Learning.

It can be frustrating when your marketing doesn’t convert the way you expect. You put in the time to craft messages that you feel are clear, compelling, and persuasive—and still prospective learners don’t act. Part of the challenge is that people don’t make decisions the way we think they do.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with Nancy Harhut, author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing. Listen in for practical takeaways in three areas: understanding what drives learner decisions, crafting messages that prompt action, and increasing engagement and follow-through once learners enroll.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] When your marketing doesn’t convert the way you expect, it can be frustrating and maybe a little confusing. You’ve put in the time to craft messages that are clear, compelling, and persuasive, and, still, prospective learners don’t act. Part of the reason is that people don’t make decisions the way we think they do. Much of the time, they’re operating on autopilot, relying on subconscious shortcuts rather than carefully weighing all the information we put in front of them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:43] Our guest in this episode, number 478, is Nancy Harhut, author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing and chief creative officer at HBT Marketing. Nancy specializes in applying behavioral science to help organizations prompt action and build stronger connections with their audiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:02] Nancy explains how behavioral science can help learning businesses better understand what truly drives attention, decision-making, and action—from the role of emotion to the power of specificity and simplicity in messaging.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:15] And, in the spirit of keeping things to three—because, as Nancy points out, three is a very persuasive number—you’ll hear practical takeaways in three areas: understanding what drives learner decisions, crafting messages that prompt action, and increasing engagement and follow-through once learners enroll.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] If you want to better understand why prospects sometimes act in confounding ways, how to prompt the actions you want, and how to keep learners engaged after they enroll, then this conversation with Nancy Harhut is for you.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:52] Tell us a little bit more about HBT Marketing, what it does, and a little bit more about your role there.

Nancy Harhut: [00:01:58] What we do is a little different than what a lot of marketing agencies do. We take marketing best practices, but we overlay behavioral science on top of them. What do I mean when I say behavioral science? It’s very simply the study of how people behave or, more specifically, why do people do what they do. And how can a marketer get them to do more of what we want them to do? That’s what we specialize in. We can do e-mail campaigns, direct mail campaigns, landing pages, social campaigns, but the net is we help our clients get more of the response they’re looking for by tapping into these decision-making shortcuts that everyone, including clients, customers, and prospects, relies on.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:41] Right there in the name you have HBT (human behavior triggers), and that gets to that behavioral science aspect and the angle that you were talking about. Talk a bit about what you think people most often misunderstand about how humans make decisions and what influences the actions that we take.

Nancy Harhut: [00:03:06] The number one misconception about how people make decisions is we think that people make well-thought-out, well-considered decisions. And there’s a reason for that. We think that we make well-thought-out, well-considered decisions, so we think our customers and our prospects do as well. But there is a lot of scientific evidence that suggests otherwise. Do we put our thinking caps on? Do we weigh the pros and cons? Sure. Sometimes. Sometimes you do that cost-benefit analysis.But a lot of times we’re cruising through life on autopilot, and what happens is we’re cruising along on autopilot and relying on these hardwired decision-making shortcuts that humans have developed over the ages as a way to conserve mental energy. And so, when we as marketers craft our messages, we devote so much time and energy to making sure that they’re perfect and they say exactly what they need to say, and we think that our audience is going to spend as much time absorbing the message as we do creating it.

Nancy Harhut: [00:04:06] The sad reality is that’s not what happens. People skim, and they scan. Different things attract their attention. A lot of times they completely overlook things. They’re half paying attention, half onto something else, and they’re not making decisions the way we think they are. In fact, very often they’re making decisions emotionally, and then they’re justifying their decisions with all of those rational reasons that we pack into our marketing messages. That’s probably a big misconception or a big mistake that marketers run into, which is we think that people are making these well-thought-out, well-considered decisions, and they’re often not.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:43] We’re going to get into more specifics as we continue to talk. A lot of our listeners’ learning businesses rely very heavily on e-mail when they’re trying to get registrations for courses, get folks to a conference, or get them to pursue a certificate or any of their other offerings. I would love to hear what you see as some of the common mistakes in e-mail marketing and then, even more importantly, what behavioral science suggests that we should do instead or do differently in our e-mail marketing.

Nancy Harhut: [00:05:18] I’m going to build on what I was just saying, which is this emotional-rational thing. One of the big mistakes is we think that people are rational, so we pack our e-mails with all these rational reasons. What we should be doing is leading with something that’s emotional, and then we can follow up with the rational reasons. There’s research that shows that up to 95 percent of purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind. There’s also research that shows that we need to tap into the emotional parts of our brains in order to make a decision. There was a researcher named Antonio Damasio, and he conducted research among humans who had sustained injury to the part of their brain that controls emotion. What he found was they were virtually incapable of making a decision. Even a decision as simple as “What would you like for lunch today, Celisa?” They couldn’t decide. Back and forth and back and forth and round and round, they couldn’t decide. Damasio proved that we need to access the emotional parts of our brains. So what we should be doing in e-mail marketing is leading with emotion and then backing it up with the rational reasons.

Nancy Harhut: [00:06:18] As I tell you that, I want to quickly add a caveat, which is to say we don’t want to put too many reasons in. We don’t want to jam too much in. One would think that if you’re listing all the benefits of taking a course or going to a conference, the more the better, right? That kind of makes sense. The more benefits I will take away, the more likely I am to say, “Oh, yes, this is what I want to do.” And yet that’s not true. There was research from UCLA and Georgetown that showed that three bullet points—whether in your e-mail, your landing page, or even on product packaging—are better than four or five. When you have one or two, it’s not enough; it doesn’t really carry the momentum.Three is the magic number. In fact, three bullet points are judged to be 10.4 percent more persuasive than four bullet points. Again, it’s a little counterintuitive. We think, “Well, the more, the better, and let’s go with five or six or ten.” And really three is what we want. What we want to do as e-mail marketers is to lead with emotion. We want to be clear and concise. Keep it to the three bullets. Don’t try to say everything. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Have an e-mail campaign if you have a lot to say, if you have a lot to share, but don’t try to put it all into one.

Nancy Harhut: [00:07:39] And then we want to be clear because a lot of times what we do in e-mail marketing is talk around what we really want to say. We talk about our solutions, but we don’t really define what they are. We talk about outcomes, but we’re not specific about what they are. And research has shown that the more specific we can be, the more persuasive we are. Concrete language is way better, way more effective than abstract or vague language.There was one study that was done with an e-commerce site, and, for a period of 90 days, they instructed their salespeople, their marketing people to use more concrete language. Say they were selling pants. Instead of saying “pants,” they would say “blue jeans.” Just a little bit more specific, a little bit more concrete. One creates that mental picture in a different way than the other does. Blue jeans is a more concrete mental picture than pants. For a period of 90 days they used the more concrete language, and spend went up 30 percent. So we want the emotion, we want to be concise, and we want to be clear, concrete. We want to create those mental pictures so that people can see what they will get if they sign up, if they say yes to the offer.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:55] You said lead with emotion. Can you offer an example or two of how we might go about evoking emotion in an e-mail?

Nancy Harhut: [00:09:03] You’re in a professional setting, so people think, “Oh, well, people are going to make decisions based on the good of the business,” and it’s all very practical and very rational and very cut and dry. And yet, at the end of the day, we’re all people. What might prompt me to take a class or to sign up for a course? It might be the idea that my boss or the board is going to be very pleased with me. It might be the idea that I’m going to feel really smart, empowered, and confident in my job. It could be the idea that, if I don’t take this course, I’m going to feel like I’m lagging behind. I’m losing out. And none of us likes to feel that way. In fact, the pain of loss can actually be twice as powerful as the pleasure of gain.

Nancy Harhut: [00:09:52] So the temptation sometimes is to say all these wonderful things that will happen to you if you just sign up for our course—and, again, there’s nothing wrong with benefits; we need benefits—but sometimes a little well-placed loss aversion is going to go further. The things that you’ll lose out on if you don’t sign up for the course or the pain you can avoid if you do sign up for the course. You won’t find yourself lagging behind. You won’t find yourself with that blank stare on your face when you’re in this next department meeting, and you have no idea what this latest technology is all about.It’s tapping into some of these very human emotions that you might think, for business-to-consumer, sure, but business-to-business, not so much. But we really do want to tap into them for business-to-business. It’s how you’re going to feel if you don’t take the course, how you’re going to feel if you do take the course, how you think the boss might feel about you if you take the course—those are the emotions you want to go after.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:52] I would love to get your thoughts on how AI is changing how people think about attention, trust, persuasion. Are there major changes, or is it still the same fundamentals, but now AI is adding more to the mix?

Nancy Harhut: [00:11:10] That’s a very good and nuanced question. Things are definitely changing with AI. They’re changing so rapidly. But, by the same token, people are people, and we, as a species (humans), have developed certain hardwired decision-making shortcuts that have been with us literally over the ages, and they served their purpose for our ancient ancestors by helping them stay alive, and they’re so embedded in us now that we default to them without thinking. So the behavioral science is still very, very effective. But how is AI entering into the picture and changing things? You mentioned attention, trust, persuasion. Trust has become key right now. If you’re a brand, you absolutely need to be trusted. And, with the advent of AI, trust starts to erode. It’s really interesting—there have been behavioral science studies that show that, if a human gets something wrong, gives you the wrong answer, gives you the wrong information, you can be a little bit more forgiving. But, when the AI does it, people get angry because we hold artificial intelligence to a higher standard.

Nancy Harhut: [00:12:20] We have to be very careful, as marketers, that the information that we’re putting out there is, in fact, correct, that we’re not making mistakes. And yet we know that AI hallucinates. AI tries to please. AI will grab the most likely answer, but it might not be the correct answer. So we have to worry about those things.We also know (behavioral scientists have studied this) that now, because AI is so prevalent, people aren’t searching as deeply. The first answer that comes up with that AI box that summarizes everything, we’re like, “Okay, good, I’m done. I’ve got my answer.” What does that mean?It means that we have to really capture somebody’s attention. We have to make sure they pay attention to our message. And what comes in handy here is storytelling because you have a story that only you can tell. AI can’t create it for you. It’s yours and yours alone. It’s not like one of your competitors. It’s not like someone else’s.

Nancy Harhut: [00:13:13] Storytelling also has a lot of emotion, for that matter too. It helps with that emotional connection. But it also helps you stand out. It helps you capture that attention, helps you build the trust because you’re speaking honestly and authentically, and you’re sharing details that no one else would have. Those are things that help you grab attention. There’s something called the Von Restorff effect, which behavioral scientists describe as this idea that, when you stand out from everything around you, people notice you, and they have a greater likelihood to remember you. AI is the great equalizer. Everyone’s going to be doing the same thing. We’re all going to sound the same. We’re all saying the same things, taking the same approach.This is when a marketer wants to think about, “How can I do things differently? If everyone is zigging, let’s zag. What can I do that’s going to make me sound different, look different, seem different? Because that’s what’s going to own the space in my target’s mind, and that’s what’s going to make them think of me versus the competition.” Those are just a few of the ways that AI is factoring in. We still know that storytelling works. We still know that the Von Restorff effect is effective. We still know that people value trust. We just have to deploy those things against this changing background of AI entering the mix.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:33] That idea of AI delivering the same answer to everyone—there’s a certain blandness to AI-generated content or ideas. That idea of going deeper and figuring out how you can zag if others are zigging, that really resonates with me.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:51] A lot of our listeners offer certifications, education, all sorts of professional development opportunities, and these are things that the people they serve will say that they value, but they still won’t necessarily do them. They’ll still postpone them or not sign up for that course or that conference. Talk about what behavioral science might help us understand about why adults might delay acting, even on things that they say they themselves value and matter to them.

Nancy Harhut: [00:15:27] That’s a great question. What it comes down to is very often people will say one thing and do another. You’re like, “Why did they lie to me?” But they didn’t really lie. They believed what they were saying at the time, but then something else happened. A couple of things happened. One is this idea of present focus bias. Behavioral scientists have found that humans love instant gratification. We want what we want, and we want it now. And, if the payoff is a little bit further down the road, if it’s more distant, we have a tendency to devalue it. Imagine you’ve got $100 in your hands. You’d probably like to go out to dinner and a show versus save that money for a rainy day, put it in your retirement account. It’s the same thing with education. It’s like, “Yes, I think this is a great idea. We should have professional development. We should have these courses. We should have these Webinars or seminars or conferences. And, yes, I want to go, but not today. I’m going to do it later.” Because the payoff is later. “I have to go. I have to learn this, and, eventually, it’s going to help me in my career.” And because it’s a more distant payoff, we’re less likely to act on it right away. We want the immediate gratification.

Nancy Harhut: [00:16:41] Another thing that behavioral scientists talk about is something called the intention-action gap. And there, again, it’s like, “Yes, I intend to take this. Yes, I want to. Yes, I think this is a great idea.” But we just don’t quite get around to doing it. We think we’re going to. We assume that we will. It makes sense at the time. And yet other things come up. Things distract us. Things get in the way. The important takeaway here is it’s not that people are lying when they say they value this, that it’s important. They’re not lying. They’re not really good at predicting their future behavior. There are some behavioral science studies that show a complete stranger can better predict what you will do in the future than you yourself can. So it’s tough. That’s what we’re working against. What marketers need to do is to overcome that idea of present focus bias. We need to build a bridge between who you are right now—saying, “Yes, I work in this field, and I like this field, and I want to continue to succeed in this field, and so I want to keep learning and growing.”—and the person who is actually going to benefit from it. It’s like, “You’re saying this right now, and, if you really believe that you want to do well in this field, and staying in this field requires continuing education, then you need to take this step so that one month, one year, two years down the road, you’ll have what you need.”

Nancy Harhut: [00:18:07] There are ways to create that bridge. One is by getting you to think of yourself today but in the future—so using words like “imagine.” “Imagine having this new certification.” “Imagine having taken this class and learning these three points.” Because, if you ask someone to imagine something, they can create that mental picture. And, if they can create the mental picture, they’re much more likely to act on it. Because, when you think about it, when people make a decision, it happens twice. It happens once in their brains, once in their heads; they decide to do it. And then they physically do it. Build that bridge by saying, “Imagine yourself…” or “Can you see yourself…?” or “Picture yourself….” That can be very, very helpful. The other thing we can do, again understanding that people prefer instant gratification, we can pull some little element out where we do get instant gratification. If we’re asking someone to sign up for a course and the course is going to take ten weeks, or we’re asking them to sign up for a conference and the conference isn’t for three months, that’s not instant gratification. But maybe you can sign up in a minute—that’s instant gratification. Or maybe “Sign up, and we’ll immediately send you the cheat sheet or the curriculum.” Anything that we can pull forward that has instant gratification, even if it’s just a small element of the larger course, conference, what have you, that can work in our favor in terms of overcoming present focus bias.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:45] Let’s say we’ve overcome that present focus bias. We’ve gotten someone to sign up for that course or to register for that conference. Do some of the same behavioral principles still apply once we get folks at the conference or in the classroom? I’m thinking about things that can sometimes be hurdles even after you get their registration—things like making sure that they show up and show up for all the sessions, that they complete the work, that they are engaging in the discussions or whatever coursework. Talk about how or whether we might be able to leverage some of those behavioral science techniques even after the sale, beyond the initial marketing.

Nancy Harhut: [00:20:25] One thing that comes to mind right away is something called social proof—the idea that when we’re uncertain, we have a tendency to do what other people do, particularly if those people are like us. You can use this both for acquisition and once we have somebody enrolled. For acquisition, it would be like, “A lot of people in this industry have signed up for this,” or “We’re 90 percent full.” It’s like, “Oh, people like me are signing up for this course or for this conference. Maybe I should too.” But then, once somebody’s enrolled, we can continue to use social proof. We can talk about the fact that most people complete their assignments in the first week, or 79 percent of people participate at least once in a discussion group. So we start to use that idea of social proof because people don’t always know what to do, and so we look to others and assume that, if they’re doing it, it must be the thing to do. If all of these people are participating, I should participate. If all of these people are turning their assignments in on time, I should too. If all of these people sign up for the advanced version of the course, maybe I should too.

Nancy Harhut: [00:21:28] Then there’s something known as commitment and consistency—this idea that once someone takes the first step, makes that first commitment, they’re much more likely to remain consistent with it when future opportunities arise. If we get that first yes—and somehow make it public (that’s even better)—we’re much more likely to get that second, that third, that fourth yes, and we can continue to increase our asks.Maybe what we do is get someone to say, “Yes, I’m interested in this course. Send me a little bit more information.” They haven’t even committed to taking it yet. They’re just saying, “Yes, I’m interested.” That’s a really small ask. And, if they’re answering somehow in public, so much the better. Maybe they’re doing it on LinkedIn, for example, or in a physical setting with a show of hands. It doesn’t always have to be public. But the key is that first small yes—“Yes, I’m interested”—then you send the information, and the person is much more likely to look at the information because they requested it, so you don’t have to think about it again. It’s like, “Oh, yes, right. I already vetted that course/organization/conference.” It’s much more likely that they’re just going to keep moving along. They take a look at it, and then it’s like, “Well, I asked for the information. I guess I should sign up.Why would I have asked for it if I didn’t think I wanted to sign up?”

Nancy Harhut: [00:22:46] So you start to do that. Now you’re in the class, and it’s the same thing. It’s like, “Well, you’ve made this investment of time and money to take this class, so make sure you stay current with it. Make sure you get the most out of it that you can.” There are ways to tap into that idea of commitment and consistency. You made that first commitment, just keep doing it. Labeling is another great tactic. What behavioral scientists have found is when you label somebody as part of a group, they start to behave like the other members in that group, even if they hadn’t previously considered themselves to be a member of that group.Researchers in Chicago interviewed people about an upcoming election, and, after talking to them for a while, they put them into one group or another, and they did it completely arbitrarily.It had nothing to do with the interview questions. They just eeny, meeny, miny, moed. But they went to one group and said, “You guys are the more politically active.”

Nancy Harhut: [00:23:37] And, on election day, 15 percent more of those people showed up to vote, simply because they were told they were more politically active. What would a politically active person do on election day? They would show up to vote. If you start to address some people and say, “You’re among our best students. You’re someone who’s committed to furthering your career. You’re someone who’s serious about education.” If you start to label people that way, they start to behave that way.Even if they think, “I never really thought of myself as being particularly serious about education,” when you say, “Hey, you’re one of our better learners,” or “You’re someone who’s serious about getting the most out of this class,” you start to rise to the occasion and behave like the other members in that group—that group of people who are serious about education, that group of people who are among the most active students. Those are a couple of ways that we can use behavioral science tactics, not just to get somebody interested initially and enrolled initially, but to get them to follow through and to be an active participant on the journey.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:42] That labeling example is very interesting to me because I’m thinking about mindset and how we know that that’s very important in adult learning. That idea of do you have the growth mindset or a more fixed mindset? And how you can encourage people to adopt the growth mindset by saying things like, “You are a committed learner,” or “You have the ability to learn this if you apply yourself.”

Celisa Steele: [00:25:07] There are things that are very effective in learning, like reflection and practice, making sure that people don’t just listen to an idea but actually put it to work and begin to apply it. Are there any additional thoughts about how behavioral science can help us better encourage those activities that we know are so important to adult learning but rely on that adult learner to take the time to elaborate, to practice, to reflect? What would you say to help us with that aspect?

Nancy Harhut: [00:25:41] I do a lot of speaking and training, and one of the things that I’ve learned through behavioral science, which I apply in my own work, is you try to do maybe 20 minutes of content and then take some kind of a break. It doesn’t have to be a stand-up-and-stretch break. It doesn’t have to be a stop-go-get-a-coffee break, but a switch. If I’ve been talking for 15 minutes, let’s pause and do an assignment, for example. Actually, doing an assignment—and you alluded to this—is a great way to help encode the information in someone’s brain because, when you’re a passive listener, you’re absorbing some of it. If you have a tendency to write, you’re absorbing even more of it. And writing by hand is better than tapping on the keyboard; there are scientific studies that show that to be true. But, if you then are asked, “How would you apply this at your law firm/accounting firm/place of business/whatever?,” that forces people to actively use the information that they’ve just heard or that they’ve just taken notes on, and that makes it more likely to stick in their memories, more likely to be able to be called up when they need it. That’s something that I practice. That’s something that I think would be worthwhile.

Nancy Harhut: [00:26:48] The other couple of interesting things that come to mind are behavioral scientists have found that words that sound alike or that begin with the same sound are encoded in the same part of the brain, and they’re easier to retrieve. That makes them more memorable and more credible, more believable. Whenever we can use alliteration—a series of words that begin with the same sound or the same letter—or whenever we can use rhyme, it’s not just a fun little marketing trick or linguistic trick; it’s actually a tool to help people better remember information. Obviously, as we’re teaching, as we’re developing course material, everything can’t rhyme or be alliterative. But, when you have a key framework or key points that you really want people to remember, it’s helpful to tap into alliteration; it’s helpful to tap into rhyme because it makes it more likely that people are going to encode that information. They’re going to remember it. They’re going to be able to retrieve it easily.

Nancy Harhut: [00:27:52] The interesting thing is, when the brain can more easily retrieve information, it feels right. And, when something feels right, it’s not a big leap for us to assume that it is right. It makes information more truthful, more accurate, more credible. Obviously, if something is truthful, if it’s accurate, we have a tendency to believe it. If we don’t believe it, if we don’t think that something is credible or accurate, we’re not going to believe it, and we’re not going to retain it. We’re not going to use it. So there are some definite advantages in addition to memory for using things like alliteration, for using things like rhyme. And, again, it can’t be for everything. But, for certain key points that you want to deliver, certain frameworks, certain approaches, it can be very, very helpful.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:41] If we have listeners who are thinking, “Okay, wow. This all makes so much sense, but how do I begin to apply this?” are there some practical or low-risk, not-too-heavy-on-the-investment-front ways that a learning business could start applying some of this behavioral science that you’ve been citing and mentioning as we talk?

Nancy Harhut: [00:29:03] I come from a test-and-learn background, and you mentioned that a lot of your listeners rely on e-mail to get people to enroll, so carve out a little pilot program, and have your regular e-mails that you usually send, but then do a version that uses social proof (tap into the fact that a lot of people are doing this) or loss aversion (what you’re going to miss out on if you don’t sign up) or one of these behavioral science tactics. Do a test, and see. It’s not going to take you that much time or effort to develop a second version of the e-mail. A lot of the content could be the same, but how you get into it. Maybe you take your existing one and infuse emotion into the beginning of it, and you test the existing against the emotionally infused one. And then you look to see, “What does the engagement look like? Are we getting more clicks, more inquiries, more sign-ups?” It’s a pretty simple way to begin to work your way into adopting some of these behavioral science tactics.

Nancy Harhut: [00:30:06] It doesn’t require throwing out everything you’re currently doing. It doesn’t require a new addition to your martech stack. Nothing like that. It’s creating a version of your marketing message that embraces behavioral science and then taking a look and seeing, “Am I getting the traction that I hope I will, that I expect that I should, from these tactics?” If the first one doesn’t work, try a second one because not everything works for everyone. What we’re talking about are tactics that generally are very effective. But what you want to do is to test your way in and find out what’s the best way to reach your target with your target’s mindset and with your message. You do a little bit of experimentation, and you begin to start to build that foundation for what’s going to work for your marketing messages and your situation.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:55] As you were talking about testing some different options, you were talking about clicks, opens, and conversions even. We always talk about learning businesses needing to focus on three key areas: reach, revenue, and impact. Getting folks to enroll in that course is very clearly tied to the revenue part of it. That’s going to help the learning business achieve those revenue targets. But another big part of what they’re after is impact and making sure that, once they get people to that course or that conference, those people are learning, and it is helping them improve what they’re doing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, whatever it is. If a learning business is trying to think about measuring how behavioral science can help them achieve their goals, is there a way to look at metrics/measures that might be beyond those clicks, enrollment rates, and things like that?

Nancy Harhut: [00:31:55] Based on what you said, what comes to mind is looking at customer satisfaction scores, referrals, recommendations. Are people talking about it on the social? Are they sharing about it? Would they recommend the class or the conference next time around? Would they suggest that a colleague attend? How would they rank it? Those are all softer measures, but very important measures. There’s an interesting behavioral science tactic that comes into play, and this was something that I learned from Dan Ariely, who’s a world-renowned behavioral economist but also a professor. He taught at Duke, for example. He would teach a class, and then, afterwards, as the class was concluding, students were supposed to do evaluations. And, in order to get a better evaluation, he would say to them, “Put together a list of ten things that I can improve next semester.” Not one thing, not three things. Ten things.

Nancy Harhut: [00:32:53] And what happens is you come out of the gate, and you’re fired up. You’re like, “Oh, you should tell more jokes. You should give us more time for our assignments.” But, after you get through the first two or three, you start to run out of steam. Ten is a lot. Ten ways to improve the course? And so what happens is you start to think, “It must have been a pretty good course. I can’t think of ten ways for him to improve.” And, as a result, you score the class better. You rate it higher. You rate it better. I thought that was just brilliant. And it makes sense. He said you can do the same thing with your spouse. Three things to change about my spouse: boom, boom, boom. I can rattle that off. Ten things to change about my spouse? I guess I’m pretty happily married. I wouldn’t really change much. So it’s an interesting tactic just getting people to reflect on what they’ve learned, what they’ve gained from the class.

Nancy Harhut: [00:33:46] Sometimes when I speak at the very end of a training session or presentation, I’ll go around the room and ask people, “What’s the one thing you want to try tomorrow?” I’m not asking them for ten, but I’m asking the whole room. Everyone’s got one thing that they want to try tomorrow. And when you listen to a room of 10, 20, or 100—I’ve had way bigger rooms than that, but you can’t ask 1,000 people—but, when you’re starting to go around the room, and everyone’s got something that they’re excited about, it’s making them reflect on what they just learned and the value of it. There are definitely ways that understanding human behavior can help when it comes to some of these softer but very important metrics of how people reacted to the class, the course, or the conference, and did it have the impact that you were looking for.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:31] You are obviously very well-versed in a lot of the research and these concepts. I want to ask you a question, which we ask of everyone who comes on the Leading Learning Podcast, which is about your own personal continuing learning. How do you approach that? Do you have habits, practices, sources that you use to continue to grow professionally and personally?

Nancy Harhut: [00:34:54] Yes, I do. I love what I do. Whenever there’s a new book out in the category, I’m interested in it. I’m listening to people more than I’m talking on podcasts. I go to conferences. I go to conferences to present, but I stick around, and I go to all these other sessions and soak up all the information that’s available to me. I also do training sessions. I work with people. And it’s a cliche, but I learn as much as I teach because I know what I know, but different ways to apply it, different ways people are thinking about it, different challenges that people are wrestling with—all of that starts to come back to me, and it makes me a more informed practitioner. So keeping a finger on the pulse of the industry, reading, the podcasts, the conferences, just sharing information is a two-way street. Sharing it and taking information back is a complement to that.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:50] We’ve covered a fair amount of ground in our time together. If you were to point listeners to one to three points that you hope they walk away from this conversation with, what would you say? What would those points be?

Nancy Harhut: [00:36:05] Three points. Point number one: People don’t think the way you think they think. People don’t always make these well-thought-out, well-considered decisions. Point number two: Very often they operate on autopilot. They’re cruising through life on autopilot. They see a situation and default to these hard-wired, automatic, instinctive, reflexive responses that have been developed over the ages and are embedded in us. And then the third and very important thing is that these automatic responses can be prompted or triggered. If you have a good grasp of behavioral science, if you understand how people make decisions, you can nudge them or prompt them to make the decisions you want them to make. No magic wand. You can’t make people do exactly what you want them to do all the time. But you increase the likelihood that people will pay attention to your message, understand it, remember it, and act on it if you tap into behavioral science.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:08] That wraps up our conversation with Nancy Harhut, author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing and chief creative officer at HBT Marketing. Stay with us a moment longer for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:18] Nancy invites you to connect on LinkedIn, where she regularly posts and shares about topics we discussed in our conversation, and she welcomes any follow-up questions you might have.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:40] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it. That helps more people find the show and benefit from the conversation, and it supports the work we do.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:49] In our conversation, Nancy highlighted the importance of leading with emotion, being clear and specific in messaging, and keeping things concise. Remember three well-chosen points can often be more persuasive than a longer list.

Jeff Cobb: [00:38:02] Plenty to think about and put into action as you seek to attract, engage, and support learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:38:08] Thanks again for listening—see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Getting Learners to Act with Nancy Harhut appeared first on Leading Learning.

Learning businesses are operating in an environment that feels more demanding, more uncertain, and harder to parse than ever. It’s natural to rely on familiar instincts—gather more data, add new offerings, work harder. But those instincts are sometimes counterproductive.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb explore what learning business leaders may need to stop doing. Against the backdrop of BANI, they examine common habits—like optimizing for efficiency and pursuing certainty—that can increase fragility and limit impact. They also offer a set of reflective questions to help leaders make more intentional decisions and create space for resilience, more nuanced judgment, and meaningful progress towards the most important goals.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] If you’re leading or working in a learning business today, chances are you’re making decisions in an environment that feels more demanding and less forgiving than it used to be—more pressure, more noise, and fewer clear signals about what actually makes a difference.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:31] In those conditions, it’s natural to rely on familiar instincts—work harder, add new offerings, gather more data, keep things moving.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:39] We ourselves are very much a part of this world. We offer events, programs, and courses, so this isn’t about pointing fingers. It’s about instincts we’ve had to question in our own work at Leading Learning and Tagoras and what we see across many learning businesses we work with through consulting and other avenues.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:00] The challenge is that some of our instincts, while well-intentioned, can quietly work against the outcomes we care most about—clarity, resilience, and meaningful impact, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:13] In this episode, we want to focus not on what learning business leaders should do more of, but on what they may need to stop doing.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:21] We’ll talk about a set of common habits that tend to show up when things feel uncertain—why they’re so tempting, how they can create unintended consequences, and what becomes possible when leaders step back and let go of a few things that no longer serve them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:37] Because sometimes the most valuable leadership move isn’t adding something new—it’s deciding what to stop doing.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:43] We want to talk about some things to stop doing because we are seeing this pattern in our own work and in where we bump up against the work of other learning businesses. The fact that well-intentioned responses—responses that maybe even worked very well in the past—are increasing fragility, increasing anxiety, and adding to the noise now.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:10] In the past, we’ve talked about VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. We thought this would be a good time to introduce a newer (but by no means new) framing that goes to this question of fragility, anxiety, noise: BANI. Brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:35] We’re not going to do a deep dive on BANI, but it’s a useful backdrop for why some of the things that used to serve no longer serve learning businesses as well. It can also offer some helpful language for a lot of what we’re seeing and experiencing. And, as you said, Jeff, it’s not a new framing. It was introduced around 2018 by a futurist, Jamais Cascio, and it gained even wider attention during the pandemic. But it does seem to me that it’s still (here we are in 2026) very relevant and valuable to use as a backdrop and a framing for what we’ll talk about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:15] Yes, definitely plenty of anxiety still going around. BANI is often described as an evolution of VUCA. It doesn’t replace it so much as it sharpens what VUCA doesn’t fully capture anymore, especially the emotional and structural fragility of our systems.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:33] We’ll unpack each of those letters a little bit more. B, as you said, Jeff, stands for brittle. One of the takeaways here is that systems that look strong and very efficient can break readily under stress. That brittleness isn’t necessarily obvious, but it becomes dramatically obvious the moment that something snaps, something stops working.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:58] In organizations, brittleness often shows up as a dependence on a few key people, say, some subject matter experts, or over-reliance on a particular vendor or system (your LMS, for example), or a lack of slack in the system or redundancy.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:15] VUCA talks about volatility. BANI highlights the fragility that happens in the world today. A stands for anxious. This isn’t our own individual personal anxiety, although that often exists.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:31] It shows up there, though.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:33] But this is about anxiety as a systemic condition.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:37] When people don’t understand what’s happening or what comes next, anxiety drives reactive decisions and encourages doing something over making what can be hard choices.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:49] A lot of leaders are experiencing anxiety at that personal level, and then they’re often unintentionally transmitting it to other folks in their learning business, those around them. A lot of organizational behavior begins to make more sense when you see it through this lens of anxiety that’s driving a lot of the decisions and activity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:12] Yes, the whole organization can start to feel anxious—and, if it’s a brittle organization, then you’ve got B and A going together. Then we get to N, nonlinear. The root of that is that cause and effect don’t scale predictably. You can be in situations where small actions can have an outsized impact—and, conversely, big investments go nowhere.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:36] Patterns that once felt reliable stop working. Past approaches to pricing or to promotion or ways that you used to drive engagement that used to work are beginning to no longer be something that you can count on. This is where, perhaps, some of those familiar planning instincts can start to mislead us because we think we just need to do more of what we did in the past.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:04] Finally, I, incomprehensible. Many systems are now too complex and opaque to fully understand. AI is the glaring example of that. Even with data, it can be hard to explain why something is happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:24] We can spend all this time gathering data points, but we still don’t really know what to make of it, and it can feel incomprehensible. In an incomprehensible world, it’s not that nothing makes sense—but it’s very hard to see how everything fits together and how the whole fits and makes sense in an overarching way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:45] Those are the components of BANI. And, if you buy this idea that the world is more brittle, more anxious, more nonlinear, and more incomprehensible, then it stands to reason that some of the things learning business leaders do out of habit may actually make things worse now. So we want to talk about what we might need to stop doing.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:07] Our number one stop doing is to stop optimizing primarily for efficiency. Efficiency can cause or increase brittleness because, if you have a system that’s optimized for efficiency, that means it can also often break under stress. To unpack that a little bit, think about staffing. You’ve gotten really efficient; you’ve honed it down to just the bare skeleton staff that you need. But then, when you have that thin staffing, there’s very little slack. If something comes up, you don’t necessarily have a way to react. Again, with efficiency, you can have that dependency on somebody who has done a lot for the organization in the past; they’re the veteran who’s been there, who knows how to do it all, but, again, when they get ready to leave, that leaves the system very susceptible to breaking, to brittleness. Another example: You have efficiency, where you have these processes to get products launched. You’re really buttoned up; you have all these steps that you follow/ But that can create long timelines. So those are some ways that being efficient, which is often seen as a benefit, can increase the brittleness of the system—the system being your learning business in this case.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:27] If you feel like you’re experiencing any of those things—and most organizations are experiencing at least some of those things—there are some questions that you might want to use for prompting conversation. One of these would be, where is efficiency quietly reducing resilience in our learning business? Look around. Do you have those processes that were once a good thing, once were very efficient, but now we’re stretching things out forever, particularly if you’ve got thin staffing and little slack?

Celisa Steele: [00:08:56] Another question we offer for your consideration is what happens when one of your key assumptions fails? This is going to require you to make sure that you’re aware of the key assumptions behind how you operate and then look at where is the breaking point or which of those assumptions might most easily make you susceptible to breaking down, to brittleness.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:20] That was our first area to consider stopping—stop optimizing primarily for efficiency. Stop number two would be stop adding products to relieve anxiety. Stop defaulting to putting new things into your catalog, into your portfolio of offerings.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:39] That’s because adding more offerings may reflect your anxiety rather than learner need. Getting products added to your portfolio can feel like a safe move. It’s helping you be more diversified. But what if those additions aren’t meaningfully diversified? What if it’s more of the same? And what if they aren’t being vetted appropriately to assess current learner needs and current learner demand? That can create, then, portfolio sprawl, and, once you have portfolio sprawl, that can also create, or at least contribute to, learner confusion. They’re not sure which of your products are going to help them on their journey.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:22] We all know how this plays out. You get pressure for more offerings from a lot of different sources: board members, organizational members and learners, other areas of the organization, competitors, vendors. We’re in a time right now where everybody’s saying, “We’ve got to add something about AI to our catalog. We’ve got to add AI. We’ve got to add AI.” But that may cause way more anxiety than actual benefit for the organization if you haven’t taken the time to slow down and think about what really needs to happen there.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:53] Again, doing something, taking action often feels like what you should be doing. There’s a false comfort, though, in that push to always be adding. Because in this episode we’re talking about what to stop doing, this is a chance to see the fact that sometimes not doing something, opting not to create that new product might be the best move.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:18] Some conversation prompts on this one. How often is product expansion a coping mechanism for our learning business rather than something we’re doing strategically?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:30] And what does doing something feel like compared to making a hard choice? That question is about feeling—acknowledging the fact that sometimes doing something can feel beneficial, can feel like you’re doing the right thing, while making a hard choice can feel hard. But you want to be aware of those emotions and factor them into how you make decisions, which might mean, again, not doing something and instead making that hard choice to stop doing something.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:02] Those are two areas to stop in so far: Stop optimizing primarily for efficiency, and stop adding products to relieve anxiety. You might be creating more anxiety and not getting a good effect in doing that. The third item would be stop expecting linear relationships.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:21] To unpack that, what we mean is that inputs and outputs are no longer as predictable as they used to. A few generic examples. More marketing, more promotion of a particular product, does not necessarily result in higher enrollments.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:42] Most organizations recognize that at this point; they’ve been experiencing it. More content does not necessarily equate to more impact. Higher prices do not necessarily correlate to lower demand—and the reverse may or may not be true as well. Lowering prices doesn’t necessarily increase demand/increase sales of your products. There is just no linear relationship.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:05] Once you stop long enough to realize that some of these relationships are no longer as predictable as perhaps they were in the past, that can lead you to some questions that you might want to consider. Where have you seen small moves produce outsized impact? Look back over what you’ve done over the last 12 months and see where were you able to tinker a little bit but have a profound change, whether that’s in enrollment or in the impact you’re having on the learners or however you choose to measure that impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:42] I love this question. It’s a great one for strategic reflection, both as an individual and very powerfully as a group. Looking back on that, where were those bright spots? Maybe some were unexpected that you want to figure out how you can potentially replicate going forward. On the other hand, you want to look at where have your big investments really gone nowhere? They did not produce the kind of results that you were looking for. And then asking, overall, how does linear thinking affect (and limit) your forecasting and goal-setting? That expectation that input is going to create an equal output. Where are you bringing that bias to your planning when you need to be thinking differently at this point?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:24] A key takeaway is that you want to acknowledge that it’s hard to forecast with great precision. You’re going to need to let go that need to know. What you want to focus on more is learning loops in your own learning business. Based on what you’re doing, what you’re seeing, what you’re trying, what are the results of that? What does that tell you about what you might want to try next month, next quarter? It’s a continuous learning cycle and refinement of what you’re doing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:56] That was number three, to stop expecting linear relationships. Stop number four is to stop chasing certainty before making decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:08] And that’s because certainty probably isn’t coming, so you might be waiting a long time. And, while you’re waiting for that elusive certainty, you’re making a choice—because you’re defaulting to continuing the status quo.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:23] This one can be particularly tricky these days because you hear so much about wanting to be a data-driven organization. “We’re going to get data. We’re going to do everything based on data.” And you should do that. We’re not saying don’t get data, but you’re never going to get the perfect data. You’re never going to get the clear visibility into the future. And, with AI being a factor right now, the data you get now could change pretty significantly, pretty rapidly, just because of the impact that AI is having.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:49] Data gaps are unavoidable. You’re never going to have that perfect data set. Data is almost always a snapshot of the past, so it’s already of limited use as you think about the future. What you’re doing while you’re continuing to collect data or looking to fill any of those gaps or analyzing and then reanalyzing is that you’re avoiding. You’re putting things off rather than making a decision. What you need to do is begin to do something. Because sometimes leaders treat choices as these big, irreversible, long-term commitments. But, in reality, if you take the view that those choices are uncertain, they’re based on incomplete information, and you have to try them to know how they’re going to turn out, then that opens up an experiment mindset that can let you test things out. It can make it easier to make a choice and try it rather than waiting for that perfect certainty before you decide what you’re going to do, whether that’s releasing a new product, sunsetting a product, whatever it is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:55] This is a perspective we’ve advocated forever, long before we came around to this BANI framework that we’re talking about. Today, you’ve got to be willing to, for example, launch without perfect data. You don’t want to continually say, “We need more data before launching.” You can’t know the market response in advance. You can get some signals, but you’ve got to put something out there to test it—that minimum viable product—and do it with the knowledge that a decision is reversible. You can change pricing; you can change formats; you can set yourself up so that you’re going to be testing in ways that aren’t putting you all in and are getting you that actual market response to then build from.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:36] Similarly, sometimes learning businesses can get too caught up in the need to decide on a format. For example, “Should we have a cohort-based program, or should we have this as a self-paced online offering?” It’s important to remember that both options can be piloted, and the downside of being wrong is limited. Again, if you can get past treating it as a one-time, permanent decision, it can help to decrease your anxiety when you see this as something that we’re going to try, going to experiment with, going to learn from. Pushing ahead can help you decrease the anxiety and speed up the learning—that learning loop that we were talking about earlier.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:19] We often hear from organizations that experiments sound risky. Everybody’s worried about hurting their reputation. And very often organizations aren’t set up to experiment very well, so delay becomes the safest-seeming option. But this is a case where you don’t want to delay. You want to stop delaying and get something out there so you can see some actual results.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:44] Because the delay does carry real costs, even though it might feel safe in the moment to not make that choice and feel a little bit more professional, a little bit more buttoned up by saying, “We’re going to get more data; we’re going to analyze this more.” But often delay is just avoidance of making a choice to try that experiment and learn from it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:03] Some conversation prompts are around this one. Ask yourself, ask your team, where does that “we need more data”-type perspective really hide fear more than anything else?

Celisa Steele: [00:19:16] Anxiety—the anxiety that we’ve been talking about. Related to that, be clear with yourself, clear with your team about how do you decide what’s knowable enough? You’re not going to get to perfect insight, but what’s good enough to help you make decisions and pull the trigger on those experiments?

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:35] And a final one. Ask yourself what decisions are reversible—but we might be treating them as permanent?

Celisa Steele: [00:19:43] A takeaway for me is that good judgment matters more than perfect information—because you’re not going to get that perfect information. In this incomprehensible world that BANI describes, this lack of knowing is just a fact. That’s a feature of the world and environment in which we work. You have to accept that and then figure out how to act given that there is so much that’s undefined and incomprehensible.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:12] Our fifth and final thing to stop doing (probably more than five in most organizations, but we’re going to stop at five) is stop treating stability as the goal.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:25] Stability is fleeting at best. Most systems, if they reach that perfect stasis, equilibrium, they’re not going to remain there. Rather than aiming for stability, you should aim for adaptability.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:41] There’s always this idea that, if we get to this destination that we’ve described, we’re done; then we can rest on our laurels; everything’s going to be good from there on out. That’s almost never the case in the best of circumstances. It’s certainly not the case in the circumstances we have right now. You hear a lot about, “How do we get back to normal or establish that new normal?” as if there’s a destination we can get to that’s going to now be fixed. It just doesn’t happen.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:08] A danger here is that you’re over-investing in fixed structures when those fixed structures aren’t well-suited to the shifting sands of the current environment.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:22] For me, one is to continue to build out traditional courses without stepping back and thinking maybe that’s not the structure for learning going forward. Do we need to do something else? Related to this is an under-investment in sense-making skills. How do we encourage the kind of reflection, curiosity, skills that are going to help people see things differently, develop new knowledge that might lead them to what is next beyond these current structures that we’ve invested so much in?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:53] Some questions you might ask of yourself and your team. First, what does a healthy learning business look like for you now?

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:02] How does leadership change when volatility is assumed? If you’re leading a learning business, what does that look like in this really volatile environment?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:13] What capabilities matter most when any plans you make are going to age very, very quickly? The takeaway here is that your ability to learn as a team within your learning business and your resilience are much more important and much more admirable goals than any sort of stability or equilibrium.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:39] To wrap up, now that we’ve covered our five stops, we can talk a little bit about what they have in common. These aren’t tactics. They involve specific actions, maybe, but they’re mindset shifts.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:54] That’s right. We’re talking about moving from the idea of control to judgment. Where can you exercise better judgment? You’re unlikely to be able to have control over your market, over your learners, over the world, and so it’s better to focus on judgment and making sure that you’re assessing the situation accurately, that you’re using that good judgment to determine how you respond.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:21] As part of that, setting yourself up not so much for efficiency, that lockstep “Here’s how we get the catalog out; here’s how we get the meeting set up; this is the way we’ve always done it”—but moving from efficiency to resilience. As you are encountering all of this volatility that we’re talking about, you have ways to respond to that to not only help you to survive it but even possibly to grow, to become stronger from it. This is the concept of antifragility, which is a good one to spice in here from Nassim Taleb. A lot of what we’re talking about points to how can we be not just resilient but antifragile as an organization?

Celisa Steele: [00:23:59] There’s also a mindset shift from motion to meaning. By motion, we’re talking about all the activities you’re sometimes caught up. “We’re going to get this done. We’re going to get that new course out. We’re going to have the conference. We’re going to do it on repeat.” Rather than getting caught up in that activity and motion, it’s really thinking about meaning and where is what you’re doing having the most impact. What should you be focusing on? What should you be doing? being a little bit more judicial in what you are focused on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:31] And certainly “why” is an important question to ask as part of that repeatedly. Finally, moving from certainty (which there’s so little of these days) into learning and ongoing sense-making. Something we’ve advocated for years is the way that learning business professionals, learning business leaders should operate walking the walk, but it feels more important than ever now.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:58] Environments like those described by BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible)—in those contexts, leadership is less about having answers and more about choosing better questions and choosing better constraints, better limitations that are going to help you focus on what you need to do to deliver the greatest impact to those that you serve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:25] We’ll leave you with one final question that you may want to ask of yourself personally, or, if you have a team, we encourage you to consider this with your team. What’s one thing you might stop doing—and what would that make possible?

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:47] When learning business leaders operate in environments that are noisy, pressured, and hard to read, it’s easy to default to habits that feel productive—even when they don’t lead to good outcomes.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:58] Taking time to question those habits can create space for better judgment and more intentional decisions. Take time to examine where efficiency might be undermining resilience, where motion might be masking anxiety, and where certainty is being chased at the expense of sense-making.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:16] Stopping some things doesn’t mean doing less leadership. It often means making room for clearer thinking about what deserves attention, investment, and care.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:32] If you find the Leading Learning Podcast valuable, please consider sharing this episode or another with a colleague or co-worker.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:38] Thanks for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post What Learning Business Leaders Need to Stop Doing appeared first on Leading Learning.

Many learning businesses struggle with decisions about what to create, improve, and retire. With input coming from committees, volunteers, subject matter experts, and staff across the organization, it’s easy for the learning portfolio to become fragmented, duplicative, and difficult to manage in a coherent, sane way.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb explore what happens when responsibility for the learning portfolio is too dispersed and why that’s a business problem, not just an organizational nuisance. They discuss the difference between input and decision rights, outline the four steps in portfolio management, and share questions organizations can use to bring greater clarity—and sanity—to portfolio decision-making.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] In many learning businesses, decisions about what to offer don’t come consistently from one clearly defined place. Instead, decisions about what to offer are shaped by committees, volunteers, subject matter experts, executives, and staff across the organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] Having a lot of people involved is not necessarily a problem. But it is a problem when it’s not clear who owns the portfolio and who has the authority to make key decisions about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] That lack of clarity has consequences. You can end up with scattered offerings, duplication, inconsistent pricing, weak prioritization, and very little discipline around what should be improved, rethought, or retired.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:58] In this episode, we want to talk about what happens when responsibility for the learning portfolio is too dispersed, why that’s more than a low-grade nuisance, and what it takes to bring greater coherence to how decisions get made.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:13] We’ll look at what this problem tends to look like in practice, why input is not the same thing as decision rights, and why intentional portfolio management starts with being clear about who decides what.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:25] Because decisions about your learning portfolio are being made one way or another, the question is whether they’re being made consciously, coherently, and by the right people.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:36] We’ll start by explaining, a little bit more, a pattern that we tend to see repeatedly in organizations that we work with on the consulting side of things, especially association learning businesses—in brief, that many people have a hand in the learning portfolio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:55] Your average association in particular—though this can apply to many types of learning businesses—is going to have committees, volunteers involved, subject matter experts (usually a subset of those volunteers), often executives weighing in (not necessarily executives who have any responsibility for the learning function), and different staff groups who have different needs related to education that are charged with delivering that may or may not fall under whoever is in charge specifically of learning at the organization.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:27] As you already pointed out, Jeff, we don’t see having a lot of people involved necessarily as a problem. In fact, when a lot of people care about education and learning, that can be a good thing. But a problem arises when too few people have clear responsibility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:45] Clear responsibility and clear accountability around the decisions that get made. And the result of that, which we see so often, is an incoherent portfolio. You get scattered offerings, duplication (of effort, of content), inconsistent pricing, weak prioritization, and little discipline around sunsetting. Basically, we see catalogs and the portfolio of offerings essentially accumulate over time in a scattered fashion.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:15] That’s the pain point that led us to want to have this conversation today. What this looks like in practice—to go a little bit deeper—is that very often you might have one committee making decisions around Webinar topics, but then you might have an entirely different committee that is looking at conference session submissions, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:38] In fact, in both of those areas, you might have multiple committees doing those things. You’re lucky if it’s just one committee. You might have one department that handles the annual conference and other events, and then another one that’s handling things like online courses or seminars that the organization offers.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:56] And these committees/departments/groups are not necessarily talking to one another. Even when everything technically sits under the umbrella of an education department, it’s still possible that no one is truly seeing the whole portfolio. And, as you said, not just having a responsibility for that but also having accountability around that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:19] Yes, and this is especially true in organizations where there are a lot of committees or multiple departments across the organization that either have a need to or are charged with creating some form of educational content to serve their particular constituents, which is all legitimate, but it gets hard to know what’s going on where. And, again, those things we’ve already talked about—duplication and that sort of stuff—are occurring all the time. And what can often happen in those sorts of organizations is that education staff get treated as service providers or implementers rather than business stewards, people who are strategically leading a learning business forward and have a coherent and cohesive vision of what’s happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:07] When you’re saying that they get treated as service providers, other groups might come to them with essentially an order, saying, “We need….”

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:14] “Make this Webinar for us.”

Celisa Steele: [00:05:15] Exactly. And then the education staff aren’t necessarily empowered or expected to push back and say, “Well, hey, is a Webinar actually the right format for that?” Or, “How do you know that this is the right topic?” Or any of that sort of vetting. It’s more that they say, “Okay,” and then they head off and do their job to produce that Webinar. So what ends up happening is—because of all this fragmentation and different folks involved, and if there is no clear accountability and responsibility—you have the proverbial one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing, and the portfolio then reflects that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:51] All of this is more than just an org chart issue. It’s more than just an annoyance. I imagine we’ve probably already got some heads nodding out there, and listeners probably recognize that this is a real business problem. This is fundamentally an issue with running a learning business effectively. It impacts revenue, it impacts resource allocation, and it has significant opportunity costs that go with it.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:18] That’s right. If staff are producing a large number of offerings and doing that primarily because various groups are requesting them, that’s going to keep them busy, which means they’re going to have less time for what might be more important, more strategic work. That speaks to that opportunity cost that you just mentioned, Jeff.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:38] In this situation we’re talking about, decisions about things like modality, for example, will often get bundled into content requests without being examined. You get the request for “a Webinar on X,” and that may identify a real and legitimate topic need. Often, you’re going to be getting that from a volunteer, committee, or something like that, and they know the field or industry they’re serving. They know it’s a legitimate topic. But that may not be the right format or product response. They don’t have the understanding of what formats are going to align with what learning objectives and what business objectives.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:17] It could be that, instead of a Webinar on X, you need a journal article or a deep-dive course on X. What’s happening in all these situations is accidental governance. Rather than having deliberate, conscious, and well-informed decision-making, you’re running on “the way we’ve done things” and a more ad-hoc, hodgepodge approach to governing what goes into your portfolio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:46] What we’re arguing for is not necessarily more (or less) bureaucracy. It’s getting at the heart of how real decisions about the business are being made and how you get a clear process around that.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:06] One of the key distinctions that we want to touch on is that input is not the same as decision rights.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:16] Committees and subject matter experts can provide valuable input on topics, on needs, on realities from the field/industry/profession. But that input should be a point of departure, not the final answer—not, like we just talked about, where “It’s going to be a Webinar on X; go make it.”

Celisa Steele: [00:08:37] Like you said, that input can be very valid, but it’s not necessarily the final determination. It’s not the final determination about content, modality, or even that anything needs to be done. Because, again, there needs to be some level of professionalization around how these decisions are being made, and usually it’s going to be education staff who, for example, understand better which modalities can serve which purposes or instructional designers who understand which types of activities might support the specified or desired learning outcomes. You want to work in collaboration with your volunteers and subject matter experts, but ultimately decision-making needs to reside at a higher level.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:23] In addition to modality, design, those sorts of things, there is the business side of this. How do you price things? That certainly should not be coming out of a committee. That, again, should be left to professionals, which may be the education staff or the education staff in collaboration with marketing, with finance. But you want the people who have the expertise and the experience and are looking at the learning business as a business to be making those sorts of decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:51] There’s a hidden or shadow problem underneath the problem that we’ve been talking about. The issue often gets interpreted as, “We have too many cooks in the kitchen.” “There are too many people involved in these decisions.” “The committees are making things messy.” That’s the interpretation because it’s easy to see those aspects of it. It’s very visible when you have a lot of committees. It’s very visible when you have a lot of people contributing input, but, underneath, there’s a more fundamental breakdown—the organization hasn’t been clear about how portfolio management is supposed to work.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:30] It’s a process issue in the sense that there’s not a common understanding of how that decision process is supposed to flow, which should be, to start with, someone has to coordinate the information needed to make good decisions and be responsible for there being good information and that information being available to people. Then someone has to turn that information into possible offerings or moves that you’re going to make with your portfolio.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:59] Then somebody has to look at those ideas of possible offerings, portfolio moves, and say, “Okay, this is what’s going to need to be created. This is what we’re going to need to update. This is what we’re going to need to get out of our portfolio entirely and sunset it.” Of course, once those decisions are made about what’s being created, maintained, or sunset, someone has to make sure that those decisions are enacted, that creation gets done, that the item gets removed from the online catalog, and so on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:34] In many organizations, that whole process is diffuse. All of those stages are fragmented. There may be somebody nominally in charge, but it’s not clear who truly has responsibility/accountability for the decisions. And the four steps of the process are not being tightly coordinated and accounted for in the way they should be. So, if you start with, one, gathering and synthesizing input/data, someone has to be ultimately accountable for and responsible for that happening. It doesn’t mean that they’re doing all of it. There’s probably going to be multiple people involved in giving that input and looking at that data. Somebody has to be responsible, though, for that happening on an ongoing basis for the organization. From our perspective, that’s probably the learning business leader, who’s making that decision. Certainly, it is a staff person. That should not be allocated to a committee or a board. And, if it’s not the learning business leader, then it needs to be somebody who’s been clearly deputized within the learning business to say, “This is your role. This is what you’re accountable for.”

Celisa Steele: [00:12:40] You said probably not a board, probably not a committee. Again, to be really clear, a committee may be providing some of that input.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:48] Probably will be, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:49] The board is probably providing some of that input, but again you have to have someone who is responsible for making sure that the appropriate input and data is gathered and synthesized.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:01] And that the process is working and is achieving what it is supposed to be achieving. That’s for step one. Step two is generating and testing ideas. Again, you might have many people involved with that, but there needs to be a person who is responsible and accountable for that. Again, our view is that person should be on staff in the learning business, probably the learning business leader or somebody who’s been deputized to play that particular role.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:25] At this stage, you might be doing things like, “Okay, we’re going to develop a minimum viable product,” for example. This is the level of piloting and testing ideas or sending out an A/B e-mail test. This is what’s happening at that step. Again, you are probably pulling from a variety of sources, but somebody is ultimately responsible for generating and testing those ideas.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:49] The person who’s ultimately responsible and accountable doesn’t mean that they are doing this work, hands-on. We’re talking about leadership and management here. There needs to be clear leadership, management, and the responsibility and accountability that come with it for each step in this process. We’ve talked about gathering and synthesizing input and data, step one. Step two is generating and testing ideas. Step three is going to be making those explicit portfolio decisions. Certainly, learning business leaders should be responsible and accountable there. And then fourth is executing. Generally, it’s not going to be the learning business leader who’s designing and developing programs and that sort of thing, but that person needs to be accountable and responsible or have a clear deputy who is responsible for that aspect of the process.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:30] Again, management, oversight, leadership—not the hands-on work of it. But, still, somebody has to be responsible and make sure that execution is happening.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:39] And this all needs to be clearly defined, communicated, and followed as a process.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:45] For the sake of the podcast, we’re saying “somebody”—that somebody would be named in your organization. You would know who it is there. The other point to make about these four steps that you were talking through, Jeff, is that it’s a loop. These are not linear steps—you start at one, and you end at four. This is a loop because, after you get to that step four, execution, there’s going to be new data, and there’s going to be more input, and you want to learn from those results. This flow from information to ideas to decisions to action is a cycle, and it repeats, and it’s going to repeat, hopefully, ad infinitum, as long as you, as a learning business, are in business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:25] Right. That’s a theme that runs through all of our tools and all of our work—all of this is cyclical. It repeats over time and improves over time.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:34] Let’s talk a little bit about what this might look like in practice. We’ve been saying “someone,” “somebody,” but, as I just mentioned, you would ideally know in your organization who that somebody is. Not even ideally—you need to know who that somebody is. However, the reason we’re using somewhat generic terms like “somebody” and “someone’ is because we don’t believe that there’s a single best practice or a universal model for this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:58] So much of this comes down to just communicating very clearly, making sure people know what the process is, know what their role in the process is, know what the desired outcomes are, and who’s going to be responsible and accountable for those outcomes. Better does not necessarily mean changes to your existing committee structure or to departments or units in your organization. But it does mean establishing clearer responsibilities, clearer accountability, and clearer decision rights throughout the process for the roles within the process.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:33] Part of that will be that the people giving input know what kind of input they’re giving. Are they giving input around modality? Are they giving input more around what are the hot topics needed in the profession? You’re really clear with them, and they’re really clear with what you’re going to do with the input that they’re giving. A better approach to governance and decision-making means that there’s going to be a visible party or parties who are responsible for overseeing the whole portfolio. Everyone’s going to know who that person or who that small group is who is shepherding those four steps that we were talking about and who is ultimately responsible for what happens at each of those steps.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:15] We find it is a smaller group of people than is often the case in many organizations right now. If you are a member organization, for example, you typically are going to have key committee members or key volunteers involved, but staff are really going to be guiding that. They’re going to have the charge for making sure that it’s operating correctly. And staff need to have the authority to make the business and product decisions that come out of whatever those groups are that are looking at the input and generating the ideas.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:48] Part of the reason why having that authority reside with staff is that, one, the staff are usually going to have some domain expertise around things like modality, or they’re going to have better visibility into the business view of what to offer. And then, two, they’re going to also have that view of the whole portfolio. So often a committee—like we were saying—is only hands-on around the development of content for the annual conference, and they might not really understand what you have in terms of self-paced online learning, for example. Both because of domain expertise and expertise of how the learning business is running as a learning business, it makes sense for staff to have the authority for decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:38] The bottom line goal here is that better amounts to being sure that someone, usually a small set of someones are seeing the whole portfolio, everything that you’re trying to do from a learning perspective as an organization, and are making coherent decisions about it that somebody is ultimately responsible and accountable for.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:01] You said “coherent,” and coherent decisions recall coherent actions, which call to mind strategy. Buried in what you were saying there, Jeff, is the fact that you cannot make sane portfolio decisions if you aren’t clear on who you’re serving and what role learning is playing in that service to those people.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:24] It’s very true, but we see organizations do it all the time. They start reworking the portfolio, assuming that adjustments here and there in the portfolio are the answer to everything, but they haven’t understood or gotten to that underlying strategy as the touchstone that keeps all of the different input that you’re going to get around portfolio decisions from just being noise and putting you in this place where action is hard to achieve, putting new things in is hard to achieve, and certainly getting rid of things is hard to achieve.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:55] Yes. Without that touchstone of strategy, every request can sound reasonable and even equally important. It gets hard to prioritize. But when you are referring back to the strategy, when you have that strategy in place, when everyone’s using it as that touchstone, then decisions get easier. It becomes clearer to everyone involved why one idea gets the go-ahead, and another one gets sidelined.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:22] This is the foundational part of everything we said about communication earlier—the strategy has to be clear, and it has to be clearly communicated to the people who are participating in the thinking and the decisions around your portfolio. If that’s not there, then you’re operating on shifting sands from the get-go.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:46] To say that again—because it’s an obvious but such an important observation—before you can be clear about any of your portfolio decisions, you need to have clarity around what your learning business is trying to do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:02] As we wrap up our discussion around portfolio management, portfolio governance, we want to offer some questions that can assist you in getting clarity around the right approach to the governance of education for your learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:20] We have a handful of questions to suggest. If you answer these questions, it’s going to give you the lay of the land. It’s going to help you understand how things are currently operating in your learning business. Who is currently seeing the full learning portfolio?

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:36] It may be nobody. You need to make sure somebody is. If they aren’t, then obviously you need to address that right away. The second one is who is responsible for gathering and synthesizing the relevant information, the data that you need to make good portfolio decisions?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:54] Where are ideas generated, and how are those ideas validated?

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:58] Who has the authority to decide what gets created, maintained, or sunset?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:05] Which decisions belong to staff, and which belong to volunteers or committees? Answering those questions is going to give you the current lay of the land. Then you want to re-ask those questions with a future orientation, with an eye to what would result in stronger offerings, a stronger learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:28] The first would be who should see the full learning portfolio? Hopefully, you have somebody who currently does, but is that the right person? Is that the right set of people going forward?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:41] Who should be responsible for gathering and synthesizing the relevant information, input, and data?

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:49] Where should ideas be generated, and how should they be validated?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:54] Who should have the authority to decide what gets created, maintained, or sunset?

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:00] And then which decisions should belong to staff, and which inputs belong to volunteers or committees?

Celisa Steele: [00:23:06] Again, back to a point that we opened with—decisions about your education portfolio are being made.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:12] Obviously.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:14] The question is whether they’re being made consciously, coherently, and by the right people. That’s what we’re encouraging you to assess and to evaluate.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:31] When the roles, responsibilities, and decision rights are fuzzy, your education portfolio usually falters.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:39] Addressing governance issues around your portfolio should not shut out useful input from volunteers, committees, or subject matter experts. Cleaning up your governance should ensure that input is connected to a clear process for turning information into ideas, ideas into decisions, and decisions into action.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:58] And it should ensure someone is seeing the whole portfolio and making coherent decisions about what gets created, maintained, improved, or removed.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:16] And, if you find the Leading Learning Podcast valuable, please consider sharing this episode with a colleague or co-worker who’s wrestling with portfolio decisions or education governance issues.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:26] Thanks for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Who Decides? Bringing Sanity to Managing Your Learning Portfolio appeared first on Leading Learning.

Many associations struggle with pricing their education offerings. Should education be bundled into membership? Sold à la carte? Packaged as a subscription? And how can learning businesses set prices in a way that reflects the value they provide and supports financial sustainability?

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti, founder and CEO of Pricing for Associations. They discuss value-based pricing, the growing use of bundling and subscription models, and why to test pricing before building products. The conversation also explores governance around pricing decisions and how associations can balance mission, market realities, and revenue when pricing education.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Pricing is one of the most powerful levers a learning business has for revenue. Yet many organizations still rely on tradition, guesswork, or incremental adjustments when setting prices.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] Our guest in this episode, number 475, is Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti, founder and CEO of Pricing for Associations and author of the book Pricing for Associations. Michael specializes in helping associations develop pricing strategies grounded in data, value perception, and long-term sustainability.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:47] In our conversation, Michael shares his approach to value-based pricing and explains how associations can use data, value analysis, and testing to make better pricing decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:58] You and Michael also talk about whether and how to bundle learning offerings with membership or create subscription-style offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:05] Yes, and Michael and I get into opportunities and risk—from protecting pricing power to making sure education’s contribution to the organization’s revenue and mission remains visible.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:17] If you want practical insight into pricing strategy, subscriptions, and how education fits into a sustainable association business model, then stick around for this conversation with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:35] You’ve been on the Leading Learning Podcast before, and we will most definitely link to that in the show notes and encourage folks to go listen to that. But, for those who may not have listened to that episode or have listened to it recently, tell us a bit about your general perspective on pricing, your approach to pricing. When you’re working with these organizations, what’s front of mind for you? What are you bringing to the table?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:01:58] For me, I usually say, instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall of what’s always been done, take a separate look at it. The big thing for us is value-based pricing—what is the perception of your product or positioning in the market, and what is the willingness to pay of your audience for that value and perceived value? It’s not about greed for us. It’s not about “Oh, they’re willing to pay 3x more; let’s charge 3x more.” It’s more of “Are you already at the top of the market? Can you go up? If so, what’s the strategic decision balancing mission and money?” That’s our high level—let’s get some data behind it, be a little bit methodical, look at the whole portfolio, and make sure it’s making financial and business sense for the association.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:46] Without asking you to give away your secret sauce, so to speak, how do you go about doing that? Because I’m sure listeners will be sitting here saying, “Well, that sounds great, but I don’t know how our members and customers value us. I would love to know that.”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:03:01] Yes, and I’ll give it away. I don’t care. There are three big buckets at high level. The first one’s data. Usually what I like to look at there is satisfaction metrics, surveys, all that. Second thing I look at in data is sales and what have they purchased. Third is engagement or user behavior. What I typically find is they’ll say in a survey they want one thing, but, when we look at what they buy and what they utilize the most within what they buy, it might look different, and so we synthesize that together. The second big bucket is value analysis. Associations already do that with all of their products. They’re already doing member surveys, all that, post-event, etc. It’s asking some key questions. Usually what we’re bringing to the table is a set of questions that you can embed into what you’re already doing to start benchmarking value and pricing, year over year. And then the third one is, once you’ve done that benchmarking and seen where they want to go and looked at the data for what are they even doing, then it’s figuring out, if we reimagine this in one of these few ways, what’s the willingness to pay? How does that adjust? And, therefore, what’s the best win-win for members in our audience, the business, and financial sustainability? So those are the three: data, value, and then price is our methodology.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:18] Where our worlds intersect is in education, in learning. We do a lot of advising around pricing with our clients. You do a lot of advising to associations around how to price their education portfolios. I’d love to hear what you’re seeing there. From our perspective, one thing I’ve started hearing in the last year—and this is the first time I’m hearing it, and it’s coming from CEOs—is some are wondering whether they should or can even be in the education business anymore because it’s feeling so competitive out there. Pricing isn’t the only issue, but pricing is an issue, definitely. They’ve got competitors who are underpricing them or putting free stuff into the marketplace, and they feel helpless in a way. Are you seeing any of that? Or what are you seeing in terms of pricing of education in the association world?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:05:13] That’s fascinating. I’m seeing something similar, but what I haven’t heard—and what strikes me in what you just said—was asking, “Should we tap out of education?” Because, inside, when you said that, my first response was, “No, you shouldn’t. You should be in the education business.” But what I am seeing alongside you is that market saturation of free or low cost (because that’s what a lot of for-profits are doing) and then, with AI and all the things, so there is heavy competition. But what I’m seeing is education is typically the best product as far as profitability goes. Events, as we know, are very thin margins or at a loss. I don’t know many associations that still have a real cost to serve down for membership to even know profitability. But education—specifically digital and even some in-person workshops—is the one area where I do see profitability. When you look at the whole portfolio, they need that lift to help with offsetting events. That’s crazy to me that they’re like, “Should we step out?”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:06:20] No. But it might be a matter of how does that look? And that’s what we talked about before our recording today too. “Do we bundle it into membership, or how do we imagine education?” I would say, “Don’t stop education,” but, for some associations, it’s how do we look at it? How are we delivering it? What’s the packaging around it? More than ever—and then I’m going to shut up on this one—associations are, in a way, a gatekeeper of integrity for information and education. Even though others are doing it and cutting in at low cost, they’re not always doing education with the same level of integrity. It’s like Wikipedia back in the day; we couldn’t use it as a source when I was in college because it wasn’t always good information. You still had to go to the library and quote from a book or a published article (peer-reviewed). That’s how I look at associations. I don’t think they should back out, but we do have to respond to the market. We don’t live in a bubble.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:21] As you can imagine, that’s our response too. Not only is there an opportunity, there’s a responsibility, I think, on the part of associations to be those educators with integrity in their marketplaces. I want to come back to what you said about potentially bundling education and membership, but, before we get there, your comments raised a couple of other questions for me. One is around that question of integrity and, along with it, trust, credibility, authority—all the things that an association wants to represent in their marketplace. How much does your work with associations intersect with that? You talked about value before, and part of the value perception of an association is going to be are they seen as having that integrity, having that trust, having that authority? How does that factor into your work? What are you seeing associations do to try to bolster that when they need to?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:08:11] A lot of it. The maturity for that value prop is low. The only strong thing that I see right now is saying something to the effect of “We are the authority/gold standard,” something like that. That’s a good starting place. I’m not knocking that. There’s also—what I see from clients—a lack of willingness to go there competitively and make a clear statement. One local bar was like, “We know the state bar is not doing this.” Even association to association, they didn’t want to say, “Oh, we’re including this as well, and they don’t.” But I’m like, “There could be a way to say, ‘We’re the only local to the state or area or tri-state area that offers this,’” without saying they don’t. Associations have always been a little bit afraid to act like a business, but we have to; otherwise, we’re not going to exist, period. We need to get a little bit more emboldened. There’s a way to do it without disrespecting or comparing, but making statements of who we are, that’s important. And, at some point, that will also go away. Value props change over years and decades, but, right now, leaning into being peer-reviewed, having a body of ethics, a body of work that’s over decades. Some of the value is I can go to associations I’m a member of and search, historically, archives from the last 30 years.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:09:43] It’s not right now, quick, hot content that’s getting pushed out. I can look and see trends and benchmark, and there’s value in that. Capturing those stories is important. But the last thing, with value props, two types: quantitative and qualitative. That’s more of the qualitative. Quantitative is how many articles, or what does the repository look like? The qualitative is, “I know I can go to this association, and, when my boss has a question on my area of expertise, I can find the answer, and it’s the right answer.” That’s the story we need to tell, not just “We’re the best” or “We are the standard” but telling those stories of “We’re the trusted source, and here’s what that looks like; here’s a story about us being the trusted source” over and over again. That’s way better than going to Claude or ChatGPT or a for-profit partner who we love but is just pumping stuff out as a marketing thing, not education. They’re not looking at outcomes. They’re looking at lead generation. And that is different.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:48] Yes, we’ve gotten increasingly focused on how do you tie your education back into that trust, that credibility, that authority because that stands you out in the marketplace if your education is seen as deeply tied to that. You’d mentioned that education is often what’s profitable in the associations’ portfolios when you look at it. Something we found—and I’m wondering if you find this too—is, in many cases, organizations don’t actually have a good understanding of their education’s profitability because they don’t know the whole underlying cost structure. Staff may not be accounted for properly across products and that sort of thing. So there’s an exercise to go through around “What is the profitability here? What might it be if we really look at the data and get at what is possible here?” How much are you seeing that kind of thing?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:11:36] I’m seeing that quite a bit and also deeper conversations, getting a bit more technical in a good way, such as looking at the cost of subject matter experts, these one-time high costs. If it’s something deeper, like a course—not just a quick learning—what are the costs of that spread out over the years and recouping and all that? That’s something I’m seeing as well. The other interesting thing—this goes more to the comparative against the competitive landscape that’s moved beyond just associations—is the cost to serve, I think, for a for-profit is way cheaper because they’ve got in-house SMEs, in-house production, video, all that. For them, there is a cost, but they’ve already got it set up in a way, and it’s cheaper. It’s a bit quicker. One thing that I would encourage associations to think through is instructional design one million percent matters. I think back to doing my doctorate—one of the phrases that we used a lot in the dissertation phase was “Done is better than perfect.”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:12:40] Some are also like, “Oh, we have to be flashy, like we need…,” and I know we don’t want talking heads with a deck, but sometimes we get too focused on the glamorization of education. And it’s like, “Listen—is it right? Is it current? And are we keeping it updated?” To me, that matters a little bit more in outcomes. Maybe I’m a direct person. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter at all, but we could also focus a little bit more on…again, it goes back to integrity of the product. That matters a lot more than trying to do too much too quickly. We almost have to be agile because, education, there’s always new topics…. We’ve been through a global pandemic, recession, so much in the last few years. We’re always having to pump out information. Let’s get it out in a good, clean way. Write information that they trust. Get them sticky with us—to trust us to keep doing that and keep it moving. The shelf life is not going to be ten years, so let’s keep it moving a little bit. But that’s the long answer—my two cents.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:43] We agree. We continuously see organizations get themselves wrapped around the wheel a little bit too much around design and bells and whistles and things like that. And you’re right that you don’t want just a talking head with a deck. But the fact is, even a talking head with a deck can be done better. There are good versions of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:01] You’d mentioned it, and we’d had some e-mail about this beforehand—I definitely want to make sure we focus in, somewhat, in this conversation on the idea of potentially rolling education—particularly digital education, as it can be a little more complicated with face-to-face, though I have seen it done—into membership, potentially to justify or to bolster membership value and/or potentially creating what you’ve called an “education pass.” I’ve heard organizations call it that, where it’s a bundle or your subscription that you’re going to upsell to your members or sell it to non-members, if that is, in fact, a part of membership. Can you talk a little bit more about what you’re seeing there? What’s driving those kinds of decisions for organizations you’re working with?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:14:47] Yes, absolutely. I’ve seen it done many ways. We’ve literally done this at least five to ten times in the last year or two with clients, probably ten times in the last two years easily, and it all looks different. Every time it’s a slightly different outcome. Some of them are saying, “Okay, we’re going to pick certain digital education, not everything.” It might be quicker things that are under an hour. But, if it’s a multi-session, that’s not included. Or in-person, not included. Some of them are rolling that in a membership and then upping the cost. They’re doing what I call the “peanut butter spread,” where, let’s say, ten percent of members were taking that education, and average spend was only $100 across each of them. If we up membership by $10 and give it to everyone, it’s the same profitability, and that’s a no-brainer for members. Usually, we can raise it by $20, and now we’ve doubled revenue and probably quadrupled profitability, and it’s still a win-win to members. So that’s a way. But, in that case, we’re looking holistically at education and membership.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:15:48] Other times I’ve seen it, one client—the one that was competing with the state—included digital plus any in-person that was up to three credits, meaning more like a lunch-and-learn, but not a full day. More like quarterly little things. They included those as well because it made sense, but, for others, it doesn’t. And then, for other orgs, we’ve done it as an upsell, sometimes to members, sometimes non-members only, sometimes both, where we, again, pick what’s included. It’s usually not everything, but it’s a good chunk, maybe some basics, and we say, “Okay, when you renew your membership, for an extra $99, you can buy and get access for the year.” With others, maybe it’s already included in membership. But, for non-members, it’s a way to get that annual recurring revenue through a subscription model, without them becoming members. Maybe they don’t want to spend $500 a year on membership, but they’ll spend $100 or $150 a year, even for ancillary. We’ve done this with medical organizations as well, for a physician organization, for example.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:16:48] Maybe PAs, nurse practitioners, they can’t be members according to the bylaws. They’re already buying à la carte CMEs, but now we create this bundle where they get access to some basics to help them in practice. We’ve done it a lot of ways. It works well. One of the big things, though, is, operationally, you still need to line item those wins for education—and this is something we talked about a little bit in our change e-mail. I don’t think that means that the portfolio gets absorbed into membership because, all of a sudden, it’s like, “Well, membership’s doing great, but education doesn’t really have revenue. Why do we have an education staff?” Because the bolster in revenue is because of them, not because of membership! It’s important to figure out—and it can look a few different ways—okay, education is still a standalone department, and usually they still have a lot of products to sell and in-person to do and all that, but knowing this percentage of membership is allocated back to education’s win and to that staff.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:17:54] When you’re doing KPIs, metrics, and evaluations, you’re not getting lost, and then, five years later, someone feels like, “Well, we can cut the education staff.” And it’s like, “No, you can’t.” The other thing too is products change. It’s like an accordion. For a few years, you might bundle; then you might de-bundle or come up with new premium education offerings. Again, they can still be non-dues revenue. It’s not always the right answer for everyone. But, for a lot of organizations, sometimes it’s been really successful because, again, what I mostly see is them coming to associations for education, not membership; events, if they can go, but there are so many budget restrictions, all that. Digital education is the win-win right now for associations, and it will be for this decade, for some years to come. So those are some of the things we’re doing. Are you all seeing that, or is it still more à la carte? Not to flip it back on you, but I’m curious to hear what you guys are seeing as experts as well in the space. Are you seeing anything with that?

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:55] Yes, we talk about this constantly—not that a la carte can’t be viable anymore, but it’s a much harder game, so to speak, to do things purely a la carte. We’re seeing subscriptions much more, particularly in that business-to-consumer model. If you’re selling to individual members, subscriptions can work very well. For example, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association—Jack Coursen has talked about that, at our events and on the podcast before. He’s even taking that now into the business-to-business model, and health systems are buying. And then, in that business-to-business model, David Upbin from the Mortgage Bankers Association spoke at one of our recent events, and they package their education up into bundles. They call it “Education Advantage”—if I’m remembering the name of his program—and it’s tiered.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:46] I want to ask you about this too—how you approach the pricing—but tier one is on-demand digital. Tier two is on-demand plus live digital, and maybe at that point they start to insert one or two face-to-face seminars. Tier three gives more of the face-to-face. And then they have a custom level for their big customers—they’re selling to banks. They have this whole structure for how to price it as a really compelling offer to the banks for why to buy into education in this way rather than on a more ad hoc model. We’re seeing a lot of success with that, definitely.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:20:25] That’s good. And that ties in because one other thing that I’m noticing, especially when we talk B2B—whether it’s trade versus individual society or if it’s still some kind of organizational purchase—with purse strings tightening, in a lot of organizations, it’s getting harder to get ad hoc purchases approved. You’ll get membership approved, but then throughout the year, when you want to go to something outside of one big conference, it’s hard. When you bundle it and can sell it at the same time, one touchpoint a year, they can more easily budget, buy it, set and forget. It’s also helping with customer experience. It’s making it easier on the member, but it’s also, again, helping to get more revenue in.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:13] I’m wondering what you see as potential dangers or areas where organizations have to be cautious about this. You already raised one around making sure that the role of education isn’t discounted in this whole process, that there needs to be accounting for what education is contributing to the overall business model for the organization. I worry about the potential erosion of pricing power with more ad hoc offerings. If you’ve got all this stuff packaged up in a subscription that people can get access to, and they’re not necessarily equating the price with the content they’re getting, but you still want to sell some ad hoc stuff, does that have a downward pressure on that? How do you communicate effectively to members and customers to make sure they’re seeing the value of what they’re getting in these different packages and pricing scenarios?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:22:04] This is where the accordion mindset comes in. It can cannibalize, yes, but I don’t think it’s as easy to cannibalize as some people think. There was one scenario with a client two years ago where we tested this, and the answer was no—stay a la carte. That was one out of 40, 50 projects in the last few years, and probably a third of them looked at this type of model. Again, it’s rare, but there can be cases. But here’s the thing—because associations only have so much money and research in the business area, look to for-profit. For-profit is moving to subscription models and more one-time, one-and-done. I’m looking at buying a new car right now. I was looking at the 2027 Highlander, which I’ve written off my list now because I don’t like the third row, but I noticed that they have a subscription model for so much of the tech in the car. Car dealerships tried with prepaid for your oil changes, all your service for the first three years. A lot of organizations are moving to that model, which means that, in general, across the landscape, we as human beings are being conditioned to subscribe, either at smaller incremental amounts or once a year. I pay for my car insurance twice a year. I don’t do monthly. I just like to know it’s done. We’re getting conditioned to that in the world, not just in the association space.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:23:33] Again, we’re much pickier with ad hoc purchases. Could it cannibalize? It could if you never create anything beyond that. If you put everything in, and that’s it, and you leave it that way for 20 years, then, yes, you probably have screwed up. The way that you don’t is by, number one, defining clearly what is included because it’s usually not all of your education; it’s some of it. You make a name for that; you bundle that in. You still sell non-dues pieces, but now it’s more premium. Then, maybe after three years, you start to introduce, like, “Oh, here’s a three-hour ‘How to Prompt Engineer Better’”—I’m sure in three years, AI, it’ll be a different topic. And then that’s a lower cost, like a $100 or $300 online thing. You still sell other things, but we’re trying to bolster…. It’s like we’re lifting the legs of the table—there’s education, membership, events, sponsorship, publications, all these legs. We’re trying to bolster all of them and lift the financial viability of the organization. Right now, the easiest lever is working with education in some way. Membership’s only going to go up so much in price. Events are only going to go up so much in price. Again, margins are slim on all those. Publications? Forget it. Events? Forget it.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:24:55] Digital education is where we can really pull some levers and get the lift that we need while serving our members well. They want that from us. How do we do that? That’s where the strategy comes in. And the answer is not one-size-fits-all, but the only way that you cannibalize is if you’re also the type of organization that doesn’t raise membership dues for 20 years. If you’re asking this question…it’s like parenting. Those of us who are like, “Am I being a good parent?” Therapists will say, “If you’re asking that question, you’re probably a good parent.” It’s the same thing. If you’re asking, “How do we not cannibalize?,” you’re probably not going to let it cannibalize. It’s not as if your head’s in the sand. I think they’ll be okay, but still offer non-dues education products. I’m not saying don’t. I’m saying it might be a way, whether it’s subscription outside of membership, embedding it, or whatever that looks like. Even in upselling events, it might not be membership; it might be “Come to the event,” and then there’s an upsell pass for the digital. And then you get to see the breakouts that you missed when there are concurrent sessions. That’s a way to do a subscription and think about it and then sell it for a higher price to those that didn’t even come to the conference. There are many ways you can slice the pie.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:05] You referenced all the different types of products and opportunities that an association might represent. And something that’s become more and more a part of our work lately is looking at governance around education product decisions. Because, in associations, a lot of times it’s dispersed out through different committees. There’s no coordination. There’s a significant governance issue at many organizations. Part of that discussion, though, is pricing. Who should own pricing decisions in an organization, particularly when education is there with a bunch of other products that are in the organization’s portfolio? Who makes those decisions? And a related question is when should those decisions be made? Because a lot of times we see an organization build a product, and then they’re like, “How should we price it?”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:26:50] Yes! I love you for these two questions. I’m going to answer the second one first because it’s quicker; then I’ll go to the first. For when you should decide on pricing, the best practice is to test pricing when you’re at the conception stage, before you’ve built the product. As a consultant, if I say, “I’m going to consult on pricing for associations” but then find out that the associations are only willing to give us $1,000 but expect a six-month engagement, that’s not financially feasible. It’s not a business. You should, to a degree, be testing new products before you build them—with education, with anything. But education’s the main area where this exists because that’s where we’re pumping new products right now. You should be testing the concept in advance. If you do it after—I’ve had clients do this. They’ve built a product, hired us to price it, and I’m like, “I have a gut feeling here.” And they’re like, “No, just see what they say,” and then they don’t even….

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:27:50] One client built it in the wrong platform. They built it as a Word doc plugin, and then their users were like, “We don’t have Office-enabled devices. We use PDF. We would like it if it were a PDF extension. But this we would never buy.” The willingness to pay is zero. And I told them that. When that happened, they were sitting in on the focus groups, and I’m like…. So, before you build the product, you should price. The other thing, though, as far as governance, decision-making…. I don’t care who it fits with because associations are all nimble and different and have different organizational setups. I do think there should be best practices—a pricing governance committee where it’s department heads, especially with education. To your point, Jeff, because sometimes there’ll be the digital education team that works with SMEs and all that. Then there are the events, which is still education. Then there’s in-person workshops. I’ve worked with that, with medical orgs, and there’s a triangulation that’s happening. And they’re like, “Well, we can’t charge this because they’re only charging this.” I’m like, “We’ve got to get on the same page. The customer doesn’t give a damn what your departments are. They’re buying products from the organization. You’ve got to be cohesive here.” The leaders of departments should be meeting, talking.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:29:17] We have a governance template, for free, in our book. You can get it for free on the Web site. It’s on Amazon. But there is, at the end, a governance template. Or, if anyone wants to message me, I’ll send them the Google Doc of it for free. It basically outlines these decisions where, every year, the committee should meet and discuss, “What are our plans for the next year? Who’s going up in price?” All that. It should be data-backed. You should be looking at data, value, and pricing. And you’re not making big changes every year. Usually, it’s cost of living-ish. But every three to five years there might be that accordion—like it’s time for membership, or it’s time for events, or it’s time for sponsorship to do an accordion stretch or tie back in; we’re going to repackage a little bit, adjust pricing more substantially, test some new things out. But you don’t do it all in one year across everything, or you’re going to give whiplash.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:30:09] One year might be membership, the next year might be sponsorship, the next year might be events, the next year might be digital education, whatever, and you cycle through. But every year you should be meeting and saying, “Here’s what we’re doing. How does that impact the customer journey? And how are we working together?” Again, maybe education isn’t rolled in, but there is an upsell option direct on the membership renewal, a pass, or whatever. How do we document? What’s the process? How are we making this easy for people to say yes and spend money with us because we’re the right solution? That’s my two cents. It shouldn’t just sit with one person like a CFO. It should be the heads of products coming together and saying, “Here’s what we want to do. Here’s what you want to do. How do we all want to proceed?” And the CEO should be heavily involved in that; CFO too. But it should be more of an internal staffing committee wherever the bylaws don’t require the board to vote, which is usually only membership if they do. Outside of that, usually staff is empowered to make all pricing decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:11] One last thing I’ll ask about, and I’ll start with the observation that pricing is a very dynamic field. People who don’t deal with it a lot may think, “Well, it’s just some set of rules I need to follow” and that sort of thing. But, no, particularly with AI coming along, it’s thrown a huge wrinkle into pricing. This is a little bit of a double-barreled question, though—you personally and what you would recommend to others. How do you stay on top of how pricing is evolving? How do you educate yourself and keep learning? And, for somebody who’s listening, who does not understand pricing all that well and wants to educate themselves as much as possible?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:31:53] Two thought leaders that I really love personally are Ron Baker and Ed Kless. They are both accountants by trade, and they focus on value-based pricing for accountants as a service. And so, same thing, instead of hourly, project-based, value-based. I love them. I’ve met them through getting the CPP, and they’re literally great. They have simple examples, not specific to the association space but good general knowledge. Another book that I love is called Value as a Service. I’ve read many pricing books. I have over 800 books, and at least 10 or 20 are on pricing. There’s a lot, but that’s a good one as well. There’s another one. I can’t remember the exact name, so I’ll find it and send it to you for the show notes, but it’s something like The Psychology of Price—that’s another good one. Most of pricing is not math. People can think, “Oh, it’s just the number.” I would say 80 percent of pricing is psychology and marketing, and then 20 percent is finance. It’s what will you pay, but it’s what will you pay based on…?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:33:05] The reason I pay $8 for a Starbucks coffee is because it makes me feel a certain way. It’s the qualitative value and the quantitative. But I can buy a coffee for two bucks at the gas station or a dollar. What’s the difference? I don’t give a damn about the beans. I feel some kind of way—status symbol—holding a Starbucks coffee cup, and you’re part of a club in a way. That’s where being a member, being a part of a community—it’s the psychology. My best advice is study psychology on consumer behavior, decision-making, behavioral economics. Florian Bauer is really good at that as well—behavioral economics. He’s over in Europe. I know him as well. Fantastic guy. Super smart. So those are some people, some books, some resources that I love, that I follow, that I learn from. Otherwise, I like to read anything on pricing on LinkedIn, honestly. Like when Wendy’s was doing the dynamic thing with their boards. I like seeing those B2B and B2C examples and then figuring out how does that play into associations? I look at it more like I’m a translator.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:17] That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti, founder and CEO of Pricing for Associations, but stay with us another minute to catch our recap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:27] You can get a free copy of his book Pricing for Associations, as well as access to hundreds of articles on pricing.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:48] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it. That helps more people find the show and benefit from the conversation, and it supports the work we do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:56] In our conversation, Michael emphasized that effective pricing starts with understanding value and looking at data on engagement, purchasing behavior, and customer perceptions to guide decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:09] He also talked about the growing shift toward bundling and subscription-style models for education and how those approaches can strengthen both the customer experience and the financial sustainability of the organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:21] At the same time, organizations need to be thoughtful about governance and timing—testing pricing concepts before building new products and making sure education’s role in overall revenue remains visible.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:34] Lots to think about if you’re responsible for pricing, packaging, or positioning learning products in your organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:41] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Pricing Association Education with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti appeared first on Leading Learning.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb wrap up their three-part look at reach, revenue, and impact by focusing on impact—often the least clearly defined and measured of the three pillars.

Celisa and Jeff explore how impact looks different depending on whose perspective you consider—that of learners, employers, and the learning business itself—and why measuring impact doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. When learning businesses treat impact data as strategic intelligence, it can inform key decisions about what to offer, what to improve, and what to retire.

They also discuss how evidence of impact strengthens marketing, improves learning design, supports smarter portfolio decisions, and deepens business development conversations.

When reach, revenue, and impact reinforce one another, learning businesses are better positioned not just to grow but to thrive.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Learning businesses need to consistently perform in three areas: reach, revenue, and impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] In the last two episodes, we’ve revisited reach and revenue as part of that larger interconnected system. In this episode, we turn to impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:32] Impact is what ultimately tells you whether your reach and revenue will be sustainable—it’s where your assumptions get tested.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:40] Reach tells you who you’re getting in front of, revenue tells you what the market is willing to pay for, and impact tells you whether your work is making a meaningful difference—for learners, for their organizations, and for the field or industry you serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:55] Impact is often the least clearly defined of our triumvirate—reach, revenue, and impact. Learning businesses tend to value impact, but they can still struggle to articulate or measure it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:08] Today we want to unpack impact—what it means, whose perspective matters, and how it connects to reach and revenue.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:17] When we talk about impact, there is an immediate question: impact for whom? Because there are a variety of perspectives on impact. Impact is not one thing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:29] We’re going to look at those multiple perspectives: the learner; the employers who are hiring those learners in the field or industry you’re serving; the learning business itself; and then, ultimately, that profession, field, or industry that you are serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:45] From the learner’s perspective, impact is going to tie into things like increased confidence or new knowledge and skills and the ability to apply the new knowledge and new skills on the job.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:58] And it factors into career mobility. Is the learning that you’re delivering helping that learner to get a job, to get promoted, to expand the responsibilities that they have in their job? And is it reinforcing or helping to establish and then reinforce their professional identity?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:18] Impact, from the learner’s perspective, is going to very often be largely self-reported—but we think that’s entirely legitimate.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:29] Definitely. Confidence and perceived usefulness matter. You want the learner to feel confident. You want them to feel the perceived usefulness from learning experiences. Those are things that will drive continuing engagement, which is so important to learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:46] A big part of how you’re going to be able to get at the learner’s perspective on the impact will be through asking them to self-report on various measures around the learning experience. One of our go-to thinkers around measurement is Will Thalheimer. He has a great way of rethinking the smile sheet so that you’re trying to get at more than just “Did you like the food at the conference?” and get to “Are you actually applying what you’re learning?,” for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:17] And this goes to that confidence question. Are you more confident in doing your job? Are you confident that you learned things that are going to help you do your job? We won’t go into detail around Will’s thinking here because we’ve talked to him a number of times, and we can point to some of those episodes for folks to take advantage of. But he does have an approach to evaluation, to feedback you get from learners that is much more structured and much more targeted than what you get through those typical smile sheets that you were referencing, Celisa. Another approach that we think has great value is the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:54] Yes, and I got to speak with Rob Brinkerhoff, so we can link to that episode in the show notes for this episode. That’s where you look at who are the learners who are truly benefiting from what you offer. And then you begin to look at what contributes to that success so that, then, hopefully, you can deliver that same success to other learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:15] Those are some great resources around that reporting by the learners and how you can capture that reporting effectively, whether it’s through a strong evaluation like what Will Thalheimer advocates for and provides the guidance for doing or whether it’s something like the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method. That’s the learner perspective on impact. We also want to take into account the employers’ perspective—the people who are giving jobs to those learners and are hoping that their performance is going to improve through learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:47] Impact from the employers’ perspective very often is taking into account the capability of the workforce. They’re looking for is this learning experience helping the workforce be more capable? Is it helping to reduce any errors that might happen on the job? Or is it helping to improve the performance of employees?

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:09] This is a big one. We hear this a lot in the news today around employers, their perception of the readiness, the capability level of the workforce, particularly the entering workforce, the early-stage workforce coming into a profession. But, all along, how is your learning contributing to raising the bar at the employers where your learners are working? Is it helping to speed up onboarding? Is it helping to increase performance? Is it helping with retention? That’s a big one. We know, particularly if you buy into the generational perspective on workers/on employees, younger generations in particular seem to highly value having education and training experiences as part of what they’re provided in their working environments.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:54] You want to be getting the employers’ perspective on the impact. Are you asking employers what changed? What are the managers noticing once the learners are back on the job? Is that something you’re actively trying to gather data around?

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:11] We find most organizations are not. It is something that needs to be instituted. It can certainly factor in if, for example, you’re trying to do business-to-business selling—selling directly to employers. You want some impact data to be able to help make those kinds of deals possible. But, even if you’re selling to individuals, if an individual learner is able to demonstrate, if the employer can see that the impact has been there for the individual learner, it’s going to make it much more possible for them to make the budget arguments that they often have to make to be able to participate in professional development and continuing education experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:48] The third perspective on impact is the view from your learning business. What does impact look like for you?

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:56] A big one here is do people keep coming back? We talked about smile sheets (perhaps with a hint of disdain in our voices) earlier, but, if people feel like they are enjoying/benefiting from the experience, if you’re seeing that show up in those smile sheets, hopefully you’re seeing that the follow-through from that is that those people who gave you good evaluations show up again and again. And that’s probably because your learning is having some impact on those learners. They do feel like you’re helping them with their performance, with their advancement in their career, whatever their personal measure is of impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:36] If you’re getting those learners to come back, then any individual learner is spending more of their time, more of their money with your organization. That contributes to the lifetime value of learners to your learning business. It often too is going to result in referrals. If people are seeing the impact from a particular course or class, whatever the experience is, that word of mouth will help you find future learners, other learners to engage with.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:06] Yes, that’s very, very powerful stuff in getting customers and building your brand. It can help too if you are doing more business-to-business-type selling of your education. It’s going to help with those institutional renewals, keeping those business customers coming back. And, of course, if you are able to demonstrate impact consistently—have your learners, have your employers feel that impact, have those learners returning over time—then you’re going to be much more likely to have that sustainable net revenue that learning businesses seek.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:40] Revenue, particularly if a product has strong positive net revenue, can signal something that’s having impact, and that’s likely why you’re able to bring in those revenue dollars. But revenue alone is not necessarily proof of impact, so you want to make sure that you are actively looking at ways to measure the impact that you’re having, documenting that so you can use it in marketing and business-to-business sales situations. You want to have that kind of data because it’s really to help you as you serve other learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:15] We’ve talked about it before, and we will talk about it again: how revenue feeds into impact; impact feeds into revenue. It’s a virtuous cycle that exists among these three components of reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:27] The fourth and last perspective that we’ll touch on is the impact on the field, the profession, or the industry, whatever it is you target with your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:41] That could be things ranging from raising standards in the field or industry you serve. For us, this is a big part of leading learning. Are you leading the learning that’s happening in your field or profession and helping to raise the bar within that profession? It can contribute to shared language across the profession. A lot of language gets conveyed, transferred, shared through learning experiences (formal and informal) and can really have an influence on the direction of the field or industry you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:13] That shared language can also feed into identity—and we touched on identity earlier. When you have a group of learners who really feel like they’re part of a community, that can help elevate the mission of whatever that profession, field, or industry is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:29] This is definitely a case where the whole can be a lot greater than the sum of the parts. When you’re having all of those incremental impacts on individual learners, that obviously adds up and amplifies over time, and you begin advancing the entire field, raising the bar in the entire field, as we were talking about at the beginning of this, through collective growth and knowledge and skills and even the identity across your profession or field.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:00] We’ve talked about four perspectives on impact. Next, we should talk about what we essentially see as a myth. The myth is that impact is too hard to measure.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:14] Out of the gate, it feels harder than, say, reach metrics. You can tell how many people you have on your e-mail list or how many people enrolled in your courses. That’s pretty easy. It feels harder than revenue because you can run the numbers on your latest event and see how much you sold and how much it cost, and you’ve got a pretty good view into revenue.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:34] It can be a little bit harder than those reach and revenue metrics. It also can be hard as a learning business to feel like you can get direct access to impact data. If you take, for example, corporate L&D, where they have that captive audience, where they’re telling employees, “Go through this training,” and then they’re able to see on-the-job performance and track that very, or relatively, easily because they have access to the relevant managers, to the relevant data, and all of that. We understand that there is a legitimate difficulty for learning businesses in getting some of that access. But we don’t think that difficulty excuses inaction. You need to be looking at trying to get at some of that impact data. Because you still can.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:24] Hard is not the same as impossible. This is one of those great places to remind everyone that you don’t need perfection. You need progress. You need to get some data that you can work with, making it a regular habit to do some form of longitudinal follow-up with your learners to get some idea of what impact particular learning experiences may have had on them. If you’re not getting input from employers, set up some mechanisms for periodically getting the impact from employers, using some of the methods that we referenced earlier, like the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method, to get qualitative feedback in a way that helps to inform your decisions going forward. There are methods that may not be as precise as having a spreadsheet with revenue and cost figures in it, but you can get at data that does point directionally to whether your learning is having impact or not.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:24] Let’s segue into some practical ways to think about measuring impact. We have mentioned some as we’ve been going along, but we can talk about a few ways. We said at the beginning that a lot of the learner perspective on impact is likely to come through self-reporting, and we think that is entirely legitimate. Part of what you want to try to get in those self-reports from learners is data around application. Are they taking anything that they learned and applying it in their daily, weekly, monthly job duties?

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:04] And what has the impact of that application been? You can ask the extent to which your learners feel like the learning that they are experiencing with you is helping them to advance in their careers. And this is qualitative. This is self-reporting again, but it’s very helpful to have a sense of whether it is helping them advance or not. And, from employers, are they considering participation in your educational activities and, related, any credentials that come out of those activities, are they considering those in hiring? Are they considering those in promoting? You want feedback over time that that is in fact happening out in the field or industry that you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:43] You want to be asking about application. You want to be asking about any changed behavior. You want to be asking about changes in confidence and also asking about the learner’s intent to continue learning with you—a net promoter score, whether or not you use that methodology. Will people come back? Will they continue to learn with you because they saw some impact?

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:08] You can do these through interviews. These are things that can also be factored into the evaluations that you’re running after learning experiences. We do simple things like ask people to rate the return on investment that they feel that they got out of a learning experience. Or you can ask them at the point of exiting an event, “Will you apply this?” or “How will you apply this in the coming weeks/months ahead?” to collect some data through standard forms that you’re probably already using for evaluations after a learning experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:42] We find that immediately after a learning experience, that type of surveying tends to happen fairly regularly and consistently across learning businesses. What is often not quite as consistently enshrined is more of a longitudinal approach. If you’re only asking immediately after an experience, you don’t necessarily have the ability to really see the impact because it may take a while for someone to begin to apply their new knowledge or skills, and you want to be able to see how that impact is accumulating over time. And so we would encourage you, if you’re not already, to be thinking about, are there moments where you can naturally follow up again? Maybe you do it immediately after the event, maybe three months out, six months out, a year out, where you’re trying to, again, ask some of those questions and see what changes. Is there even greater confidence six months out? Is there greater behavior change? Any of those types of things that you were asking about, is it shifting over time?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:47] A couple things here. You can prime for this. Make learners aware that this is going to happen so that they are aware of this and being somewhat conscious of what they’re doing with the learning experiences that you’ve provided them. The other thing is this is the type of thing that can be automated at this point. You can put into your e-mail system, possibly even within your learning management system, communication system, the triggers—whether it’s one month, three months, six months, whatever it is—to automatically send that out with standard questions that you’re going to ask of learners. You’ve got to get that set up and get it running.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:21] You can automate it. You can also take a more manual/human approach and reach out and do more of a one-on-one communication. We know that Todd Slater at NIGP: The Institute for Public Procurement is doing some of this longitudinal assessment of learning. Those are through e-mails and interactions coming from him. He feels like he gets a higher response rate sometimes because people see, “Oh, this is a particular individual really interested in my perspective.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:50] The fact is you should be doing both. You should be doing some more automated quantitative—or quantitative-ish—collection of data along with this much more manual qualitative approach. You can balance those out according to your resources and what’s practical for you to do. But, with all of it, you’re looking for those signals of application, of actual behavior change on the part of the learner, of changes in the confidence level of learners, and of their intent to continue engagement with you. Putting that plan in place and putting the mechanisms in place to follow through on the plan over time, you can collect significant impact data that, in the aggregate, is going to give you a strong picture of how much impact you are having on the individual learner; how much impact it might be having within the employers; how much impact it’s having for your learning business, which may be the most straightforward in some ways; and, while it may never be crystal clear, at least some indication of the impact you might be having on the broader field or industry you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:56] In all of these lines of questioning around impact, part of what you’re getting is that deeper picture of the learner and what matters to them, what matters to their employers. All of this can be part of relationship-building with the individual learners, with the employers and businesses that you serve. This genuine curiosity and this follow-up can convey your sincere interest, and that can help then for the learner/the employer to trust you more, for there to be more of a give-and-take relationship, and all of that can strengthen your business development opportunities because you’re going to have a lot of conversation, a lot of background to draw on when you’re talking with anyone.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:45] This is the third element of our triumvirate of reach, revenue, and impact. We certainly need to talk about how this third element, impact, interacts with the other two.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:59] If you’re having strong impact, that’s going to fuel your ability to reach learners. It’s going to help with word of mouth. It’s going to help with spontaneous peer recommendations. It’s going to help with the social proof. It’s going to give you that organic visibility. It’s going to help with trust. If you have that impact, that’s really going to help ease the way to reaching more learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:25] Those are impact signals that draw people to you. If those signals are strong, if impact is strong, then your marketing is going to get much easier. You’re going to know much more about your market. You’re going to be more visible in your market. It’s going to be much easier to get people’s attention, so attention becomes easier to earn. Trust deepens significantly. Conversion becomes much easier. On the flip side, weak impact is going to increase your marketing friction. If that impact is not visible, if it’s not felt out there in the marketplace, you’re going to have to work harder to get people to you.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:02] In terms of impact and revenue, if we look at how those two fit together (we touched on this a little bit earlier in the episode), if you’re having strong impact, that is going to support your ability to bring in revenue because you’re going to have higher retention; you’re going to have repeat enrollments. If you have those institutional sales, those B2B relationships, the likelihood of that renewal will be stronger if you can show impact. And, if you’re showing impact, individuals are likely to be more willing to pay and maybe even to pay at a premium price because they can see the results, the impact of what coming and learning with you might mean.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:44] Weak impact can increase your churn. People come, but they don’t stay. They don’t keep coming back. It can increase price sensitivity. Basically, it can work against you from a revenue standpoint.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:56] This takes us back to what we started this three-part miniseries out with—that reach, revenue, and impact are very tightly intertwined. Because, if you have reach without impact, you might get that activity, you might get people there for that conference or course or whatever it is, but there’s not going to be any value there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:16] So you’re going to have a hard time getting them to come back. And that points to the next one—revenue without impact is fragility. It makes your revenue streams fragile because they show up that one time. The value is not there. They’re not coming back. They’re not spreading that good word of mouth to get others to you.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:37] Now, if you do have impact, if you are able to show results, but you’re not reaching all of the learners that you could or should be, then you’re going to be a best-kept secret because you’re delivering well, but not enough of the people that you could be serving are able to experience that impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:54] And then the final system-view aspect we’ll mention is impact without revenue—as too many organizations experience—is unsustainable. You have to have the revenue to fuel what you’re creating, what you’re delivering in terms of learning experiences in order to have that impact. If you don’t have both parts of that equation going, it’s going to be unsustainable.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:22] We see impact data as strategic intelligence for your learning business. Because our view of learning businesses is that you’re much more than a course provider. You are working in an environment, an ecosystem that is made up of learning, trust, and value. When you have impact data, when you’ve been measuring impact, that provides you with strategic intelligence to make good decisions about what to offer, what not to offer, when to stop offering it, what to start—all of those myriad decisions that go into running a learning business. Impact data is going to help inform and help you make those decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:04] If you’re getting good data about the impact that you’re having, it’s going to help you improve your marketing messaging, getting the right message out there to reach people and convert them; it’s going to help you refine your products, your learning experiences; it’s going to help you prioritize what goes into your portfolio; and it’s going to help inform business development conversations, all of which keep feeding back into this cycle of being able to reach more of the right people, being able to generate the revenue that comes from connecting with and converting those people, and then ultimately having that impact that keeps the cycle going.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:40] You want to collect impact data, but you also want to make sure that you’re thinking about it not just as data—that you’re taking action based on what you’re learning about the impact, that you’re using that data to strengthen what you offer. And you can do that because you have an evidence-based view of the real-world impact of what you’re offering.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:02] We’ll offer up some reflection questions here before we close out this episode, starting with this: Whose definition of impact are you using? Whose perspective does that definition prioritize, and is it right for your learning business?

Celisa Steele: [00:25:21] It gets back to the different perspectives that we talked about—the learner’s, the employers’, your learning business’s perspective, and that of the broader field, profession, or industry. Are you taking into account all of those perspectives on impact, or are you only prioritizing one or two of those views? And, if you are prioritizing a few of them, is it the “right” choice, or is it more of just that’s what you’re doing, but you haven’t necessarily been thoughtful about why you’re prioritizing that view of impact?

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:51] A related question in my mind is where is impact assumed rather than demonstrated in your learning business? You may be assuming you’re having a certain level of impact on the learners directly. Do you have evidence for that, or is that just an assumption? And, for these other perspectives we’re talking about—the employers, your business itself, the broader field or industry—to what extent are you just assuming that you’re achieving the impact that you want to? Or to what extent do you have some of that data we’ve been talking about that helps make the case for, yes, we really are having that impact?

Celisa Steele: [00:26:27] Because we are believers in the interrelatedness of reach, revenue, and impact, think about your approaches to reaching learners and to generating revenue, and what do those approaches reflect in terms of what you believe about impact? This point is around making sure that you are being thoughtful about reach, revenue, and impact and how they relate to one another.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:53] The proverbial bottom line on all of this is, when reach, revenue, and impact reinforce one another, learning businesses don’t just grow—they thrive.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:09] In this episode and two others, we’ve revisited reach, revenue, and impact as interdependent pillars of a learning business’s success.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:17] None of them stands alone, and each is strengthened when aligned with the others.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:29] If you found this episode or the three-episode miniseries helpful, please share with a colleague.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:36] Thanks again for listening, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast!

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

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The post Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Ending with Impact appeared first on Leading Learning.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb focus on revenue and why it—along with reach and impact—is fundamental to the success of any learning business.

If you’re unsure which offerings are truly pulling their weight, whether you’re leaving money on the table, or how to decide what to keep, cut, or redesign, this conversation can help. Celisa and Jeff explore why clarity about net revenue on a product-by-product basis is essential—not just for financial health but for strategic focus. Revenue data can reveal which offerings the market genuinely values, where your reach is strongest, and where impact is most likely being felt.

They also discuss how pricing, prioritization, and portfolio structure influence both performance and perception and why investing more intentionally in business development and relationship-building can unlock new growth opportunities.

If you want greater confidence in your revenue decisions and a clearer path to strengthening your learning portfolio, this episode offers practical strategic insight.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Learning businesses need to consistently perform on three fronts: reaching the right people, generating revenue to sustain their work, and demonstrating real impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] In our last episode, we began the process of revisiting reach, revenue, and impact, starting with reach. In this episode, we continue with revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:36] For learning businesses, even nonprofit ones, revenue is essential—without revenue, no learning business can do its fundamental work of helping individuals improve through education and learning, thereby benefiting society at large.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:49] Although we’re focusing on revenue in this episode, we can’t leave reach and impact completely out of the discussion. Without sufficient reach, revenue has a cap, and, without sufficient impact, revenue is unlikely to be sustainable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:04] So maybe we should turn to why right now revenue is, we feel, clearly top of mind for organizations in the Leading Learning audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:15] One clear indicator is our annual survey data. We conducted a survey in the last quarter of 2025, and, in that data, increasing revenue was a top strategic goal—either the number one or number two strategic goal for the majority of respondents.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:35] Put together number one and number two, and more than half said that increasing revenue was their top strategic priority. And then we heard about related issues as well. Capacity constraints stood out in the data. Capacity is often tied to revenue—if there isn’t sufficient revenue, then you aren’t able to have the capacity. You can’t hire the people you need whether as staff, contractor, or consultant. The revenue just isn’t there to support it.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:04] If the revenue is not there, you also can’t necessarily invest in developing the staff that you do have. Another reason that we know that revenue is clearly top of mind is because of increased competition, and that increased competition is not only from learning providers. There are even more learning providers now than a decade ago, but there’s also the competition for attention and time. We talked about this a little bit in our last episode, the fact that you have to compete not just with other learning offerings but with everything that any individual has to get done. You have to compete for their attention and time if they’re going to come and learn with your organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:49] A big result of this is that many organizations are seeing their revenue flatline or even decrease as a result of the environment that they’re working in now. We’ve noted before, 2025 was the first year we heard seriously from CEOs, particularly of trade and professional associations, the question of whether they should be in the education business because they were finding revenue to be such a challenging issue for them.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:17] Clearly, top of mind is this need for revenue. We also want to say up front that this really is a need for revenue. Revenue is how learning businesses become and remain sustainable. This is not necessarily about being profit-hungry or greedy. This is about making sure that you are bringing in the revenue you need to do the good work that you’re doing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:42] That’s right. We’re not trying to be Gordon Gekko here (for those who are old enough to get that reference). Organizations in the learning business need to normalize revenue as mission-enabling, not mission-corrupting. That goes even for for-profit organizations. Presumably, any type of learning business is going to have an element of being mission-driven. “No margin, no mission” is the way this often gets stated.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:10] Revenue is what allows learning businesses to continue. We’ve talked about revenue as the lifeblood of learning businesses in other contexts. And, of course, revenue is also the avenue towards potentially scaling impact. If you’re really trying to improve the individuals in whatever field, profession, or domain you serve, and you’re doing good work, and you’re making them more effective in what they do, and you’re having an impact, then you want to have that revenue there to help you scale and help you take those good offerings out to even more people.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:45] Revenue is going to have that scale. It’s going to help you produce better learning and help you to have that broader reach (if you’re in an organization that does more than learning) in supporting other activities that are non-revenue- or less-revenue-generating—say, advocacy if you’re in an association.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:02] Erin Pressley of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) was on the podcast about a year ago, and she said, “I love to make money for my association.” She has embraced this idea that to bring in money, as a learning business, is really good because it enables NRECA to do more, to deliver on its mission. That view is one that can be very healthy and perhaps empowering and freeing for organizations to embrace—that you want to make money because it allows you to do more good.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:40] And that can be a culture shift. That’s something Erin talked about as well, shifting the culture within her organization. We hear that frequently. When we talk about revenue—we’ve already alluded to this with the competition question—there’s a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth around the amount of free that is out there. There are so many free offerings, and it can feel impossible to be a thriving, revenue-generating learning business when people can just go to YouTube or any number of other places and get free learning resources.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:14] This is a place where you have to accept reality—there are free offerings. You’re not going to change that. So acknowledge that, yes, you are competing with free. But free is not necessarily the enemy. Free can be potentially leveraged in your own learning business, and it can also help you potentially take a hard look at what you’re offering. If something that you’re offering is competing against free alternatives, and it’s not succeeding, then that tells you something. It means you need to either get rid of that offering, or you need to think about how you can add value to it so that it will be more appealing and be valued by learners compared to the free offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:59] We have a tool for thinking through that—as we have so many tools for so many things—the Product Value Profile. We’ve had full episodes on that before, and we’ll be sure to reference that in the show notes. But that enables you to take a methodical look at products in your portfolio and determine what is producing the value in those products that could be the reason that people are willing to pay for them. If you’re not seeing enough of those value factors in a product, then you need to do some work on getting those value factors into the product.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:32] A key part of revenue is knowing your numbers because that’s going to help you make a lot of decisions. It’s going to be a critical factor in many choices that you have to make if you’re grounded in an accurate view of what’s happening revenue-wise with your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:51] This gets from talking about revenue in the abstract to getting down to concrete, operational-level discipline. We see again and again—because we consult with so many organizations and have conversations with so many organizations—that they all know their gross revenue, but they may not truly know their net revenue, factoring in staff time and indirect costs that you have to have visibility into if you want to know how products in your portfolio are performing.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:24] If you don’t really know how they’re performing, that can be very dangerous because you might be continuing to invest in something that’s losing you money, for example. You need to get that clarity at the portfolio level of what’s working and what’s not. There’s the overall portfolio view, but we think it’s beneficial too to get down at that product-by-product level or certainly product-line-by-product-line level understanding of, “Which of these are making money for us? Which of these are losing money? Which of these are breaking even?” Because you need that clarity to then be able to better assess, “What does it potentially make sense to continue to offer, even though it’s only breaking even, or even if it’s potentially losing some money?” You need to have that clarity so that you can make informed decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:20] Because this isn’t to say that everything in your portfolio needs to be profitable, needs to be generating a net positive margin, but, to the extent that something isn’t, you need to be intentional. You need to be conscious of it in the first place. You need to know that’s the case. And then, if you are going to subsidize it, you need to be doing that intentionally and looking at the trade-offs that you’re weighing in keeping that product in your portfolio. We’ve talked about this a lot in the context of the Mission-Margin Matrix, which is something that is in our executive briefing on conversations we had with association CEOs. How do you weigh how something’s performing at the mission level and how something’s performing at the profitability level, the revenue level? Ideally, you want it to do both—you want any product to be both serving your mission and producing a significant margin. But there may be situations where it’s not producing the revenue you want, but it is serving the mission very well, and you’re going to consciously keep it in your portfolio for that reason.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:20] We’ll make sure in the show notes to link to that executive briefing that draws conclusions from and shares insights from conversations that we had with a range of association CEOs about the role that education and learning play in their businesses, and that Mission-Margin Matrix is included in that executive briefing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:39] Tied up in this is the idea that revenue is data. Negative revenue is not necessarily a failure; it’s a signal. It’s a piece of data, and you take that data and make it useful to have discussions and to make decisions about what you do with the products in your portfolio going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:58] That view of revenue numbers as data and not inherently good or bad can be valuable because there’s a lot of pressure sometimes to hit specific targets. And, yes, it would be great if you set and hit targets, but there’s also no benefit in hiding from the fact if you’re not hitting goals. Be aware of that, and then let that inform your decisions, and try to then dig into “Why aren’t we hitting our numbers? Is it about the product? Is it more about the promotion of the product?” and assess more specifically.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:36] As we considered this discussion about revenue, we realized that we probably could not have this discussion without also talking about pricing since pricing is a fundamental lever in the level of revenue that you’re going to be able to generate from your portfolio.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:52] There are different approaches to setting prices. You can look at what competitors are charging and peg your offerings to those prices. You can evaluate your cost—if you know what it really costs you to create a product—and then look at marking that up with a bit of margin on top of it. Back to an earlier point, do you really understand your costs, and are you factoring in things like staff time and other sunk costs that might be part of what that product costs? Both of those are approaches—the competitor approach and the cost-plus. But I’d say that our favorite approach to setting prices is value-based pricing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:36] You always have to be aware of what competitors are charging. You want to be making a margin over your cost. You don’t stop paying attention to those things. But, in every instance, you ought to be forming a very strong and evidence-based theory of what the value you are providing with any particular learning experience is and what that is worth to the learners who are receiving it. If you’re helping your learners in a significant way with the experiences that you’re delivering, if it’s helping them get a valuable credential, if it’s helping them prepare for a valuable career shift or job change, that should be captured in what you’re charging for that product.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:19] Once you embrace value-based pricing, there’s also the need then to make sure that the products in your portfolio tell a logical story when it comes to pricing. This is a place where we have another tool that can help with that: the Value Ramp. Again, we have an episode dedicated to that tool, so we’ll link to that in the show notes. It’s a simple curve, and the idea is that there is a relationship between price and value—the higher the price, the more value you should be delivering; the higher the price, the higher the value. There’s this very clear connection there. Now, it’s a ramp because we do also account for the idea of needing to create some momentum, and so there is a place even for free, or at least low-cost, on the Value Ramp.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:13] Yes, it’s an important point. The exercise you go through with the Value Ramp—and usually you’ll do this not just as a single person—is, if you have any sort of team within your learning business, look at that together, and plot out either your portfolio or a product line within the portfolio along that ramp. And, as you were saying, Celisa, are you telling a logical story? Are the things that you’re offering for free or very low cost providing lower value than the things that you’re putting towards the middle or the top of your curve, where presumably you’re delivering very, very high value. And hopefully you got something up at the top of that curve that is really valued by your audience. You plot things along the Value Ramp in a way that, even if you don’t show it (because you’ll rarely show this to your end users), when they look at your catalog, when they look at your portfolio on your Web site or wherever, they get a sense of a logical value story and a logical pricing story to go along with it.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:11] Another aspect of pricing is changing prices, specifically raising prices. That’s usually the direction that you, as a learning business, want to be moving prices—upward rather than downwards. But, for the most part, be intentional in periodically reviewing pricing and making sure that the pricing still reflects the value that you’re delivering. Very often, you’re going to need to be incremental, periodically raising prices rather than going a decade without any price increase and then potentially being in the position of needing to radically increase the price to make it continue to make sense economically for you to offer that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:51] Yes, at a very minimum, build in inflationary increase in your prices over time because your underlying costs are going to be increasing as a result of inflation. Oftentimes your LMS and other services are going to have those costs built into them. You need them built into your pricing as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:09] Another aspect of pricing is you have the individual products, then you have the portfolio, as described, perhaps, along your Value Ramp, if you do that work to plot it out. You have the products, and then the products within the context of the portfolio, and that needs to tell a logical story. But then there’s also pricing for things like bundles, packages, or subscriptions—thinking about not just discrete units, but are there ways that you can create attractive groupings of your offerings that help incentivize deeper use of your products by those learners that you serve?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:52] That points to making use of what’s typically called choice architecture around your pricing, around your products. Different members of your audience, your different segments in your audience, want to take advantage of/consume your products, your learning experiences in different ways at different times. How are you making deliberate design choices in display of those options to your users in a way that makes sense to them and that’s going to appeal to those different types of behaviors that you’re seeing in your audience? Some people are going to want to buy the subscription. Some people are going to want to buy things that are bundled up, that make sense bundled together. Some are just going to want to be able to buy one by one when they have the need.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:34] Some other things to think about as you’re thinking about pricing and how you present pricing are psychological levers that you can make use of. There’s the concept of reference pricing. We’ve all seen this out in the real world. This is where you see a higher original price, and then you see that crossed out with the lower price, the sale price there. I’m a bit of a sucker of this at the grocery store. I’ll scan the shelves, and, when I see the thing that’s on sale, I’ll at least tune into that. That can help to create a sense of urgency. It can also help to create this sense of “I’m getting a bargain; I’m getting a deal here.” Your standard early-bird pricing for our conference is an example of this kind of reference pricing because you’re going to show them what the full cost for that conference is, but you’re going to say, hey, you sign up now, you get the early-bird rate, and that’s $200 cheaper—or whatever it is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:31] That also relates to the concept of anchoring, that the first price a buyer sees is going to set a mental benchmark for them. Higher anchor prices can make even moderately priced offerings feel cheaper by comparison. We often talk about the concept of putting a magnet in your market, and this goes back to the Value Ramp idea. If you’ve got something very high-priced at the top of your Value Ramp—in the world of learning, that might be highly consultative, customized, on-site, you-can-add-features-to-it learning experience or designed for that particular learner or even an organization—put that up there at a very high price tag, and, well, suddenly your annual conference—conferences are getting more and more expensive—maybe doesn’t seem so expensive in comparison to that because you’ve got that anchor there.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:25] Clearly there are a lot of ins and outs to pricing. We’ve just touched on some of the psychological plays and levers that you can make use of, but there’s clearly a lot more out there—asymmetric dominance effect, for example. If you want to Google that phrase, feel free. But, again, be thinking the role pricing plays in revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:49] We’re just scratching the surface here. Pricing is a very, very rich area. We’ve written a lot about it. We’ve held Webinars on it. We’ve done conference sessions on it. It factors into almost all of our consulting work, where we look at how pricing is happening and do some surveying, assessment, running tools like the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter to help clients get a real grip on pricing. Probably the last word on it is we believe pricing is very strategic. It’s a strategic lever to pull, so you’ve got to understand it. Back to our overarching topic here, it’s obviously a huge driver of revenue. If you’re able to raise price even a little bit, if you’ve got a decent volume going with what you’re offering, your gross revenue is going to go up, and your net revenue is going to go up.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:37] We’ve been talking about numbers and making sure that you’re clear on things like your net revenue and not just gross revenue, making sure that you understand which specific products are contributing strongly to your bottom line and which perhaps are a bit of a drag on your bottom line. We’ve talked about pricing. All of those are numbers. And a lot of what you’re doing, in what we’ve been talking about, is looking at what you’ve done—it’s a backward-facing, historical look at what you’ve done. That’s important because we do believe those numbers are essential to helping make informed decisions. But we don’t think looking back is enough.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:19] You want to look back as sort of a launchpad for looking forward, and go back to what we were saying earlier about discipline and looking at how products or product lines are performing. Once you’ve got a good view of what they’re generating with revenue, then you can also look at, if you’re in the learning world, enrollments and registrations. How many people are you bringing to those products? For example, an exercise to go through (we did this with a client recently) is to look at what are your enrollments on some of your key learning products, and then to be thoughtful about what should they be? If we were really performing at the level that we’d feel, for good reason, based on data, should be achievable in our market, what should we be hitting? Do a low end on that, and do a high end on that, and see how that compares to your current numbers. We did this with a client recently, where the numbers they were hitting were well below even the low end of what they thought they should be hitting, and they were a lot below the high end of what they could be hitting. And, just out of that set of products, they were leaving anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 a year on the table because they hadn’t been focused on and discipline about what those targets were and what levers they might then start pulling to actually hit those targets for each of those products.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:37] That is an interesting example because it is a use of data, and it’s a use of data to essentially form a hypothesis that you’re going then to test: “We think we should be able to hit these numbers, and we think, by pulling these levers, we will be able to hit these numbers.” So that does help you look forward. It helps you set some of those realistic targets and test those hypotheses that you are developing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:03] Doing that can, for example, clarify your discussions with marketing, assuming you’ve got a separate marketing team you’re working with. It can also start to open up how you think about business model opportunities/possibilities—what patterns you’re seeing. If you’re looking at those enrollment numbers, you’re looking at what sells but also who buys. And it may not just be individuals who are buying; it may be businesses are buying, or it may be the same individual is buying multiple products across your catalog, and you’re seeing a lot of individuals doing that, so that might be pointing to a subscription model, for example. Really paying attention to the numbers can start to open that up for you.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:46] When you’re looking at who’s buying, it could also be that, sure, it’s ten different people, but six of them are all from the same organization, which is then going to perhaps point you towards an institutional-level sale, a B2B-type relationship, where you’re approaching that organization and saying, “Hey, a lot of your learners are coming to us anyway. Let’s see if we can come up with a B2B approach that makes sense for us, for you, and for your learners.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:13] In doing that, you may find out that your marketing team needs to be doing something different in terms of how it’s positioning and communicating about your offerings, or you may need to be looking more seriously at direct sales roles, somebody who can pick up the phone and call people, maybe an inside salesperson or more general business development. We’re big fans of business development anyway because business development is not just about selling; it’s about building relationships, typically with employers and other large buyers and influencers in your marketplace. And, as you’re looking at where the revenue is coming from, you may see a clear path to we really need somebody thinking much more actively and doing much more on a day-to-day business around business development.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:58] In our mind, business development can serve the role of bringing together reach, revenue, and impact. Often people think about revenue when it comes to business development, but, as you were just saying, Jeff, it’s about relationship building. It’s about listening to the market. It’s about doing those things that can help you then expand your reach and expand the impact that you’re able to have. And so that role of business development—if you aren’t in a well-heeled organization that is able to have a dedicated business development position—is going to need to be someone, the learning business leader, who plays that role essentially and is thinking about how reach, revenue, and impact fit together, thinking about those relationships, thinking about “How are we listening to the market, and how are we translating what we’re hearing into product ideas that will deliver value?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:52] This isn’t just a nice idea on our part. We consistently see some of the most successful learning businesses we work with doing this. The learning business leaders may have a business development person on their team or have access to one through their organization, but they are also very focused on business development. We mentioned Erin Pressley earlier. She does this. This is something she thinks about. David Upbin at the Mortgage Bankers Association, who’s been on multiple events and spoken to the Leading Learning audience many times, definitely does this in his role at the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:32] Revenue is deeply connected to a learning business’s reach and impact. Clarity on net revenue on a product-by-product basis can provide essential data to help inform decisions about what to continue to offer, what to retire, and what to revamp.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:46] Revenue numbers can also serve as a proxy for value perception—your top performers are likely offerings that are valued by the market and are likely the products that will have the most impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:57] Top revenue performers are also likely to be the ones where you’re reaching a large swathe of your audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:02] So learning businesses need to think—and periodically rethink—about how they price and prioritize offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:09] And they should consider investing more intentionally in the relationships and business development work that help connect learning to real needs in the market.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:18] If this conversation sparked ideas or raised questions, we hope you’ll keep exploring them and discuss them with your team.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:31] And, if you find the Leading Learning Podcast valuable, please consider sharing this episode with a colleague or co-worker who’s wrestling with revenue challenges.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:40] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Continuing with Revenue appeared first on Leading Learning.

Reach, revenue, and impact are familiar concepts to long-time listeners of the Leading Learning Podcast. But they’re often treated as separate challenges. In this episode, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb revisit these three pillars and explore why they need to be approached as a connected system rather than isolated priorities.

Drawing on recent research, client experience, and conversations with learning leaders, Celisa and Jeff discuss why earning attention has become harder, why revenue pressures are intensifying, and why impact remains difficult for many organizations to measure and articulate. They examine common missteps and highlight how clearer portfolio decisions, better use of data, and stronger business development practices can help learning businesses move forward.

If you’re thinking about how to grow reach, sustain revenue, and demonstrate meaningful impact—without treating them as competing goals—this episode offers a strategic lens.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Learning businesses need to consistently perform on three fronts: reaching the right people, generating revenue to sustain their work, and demonstrating real impact. None of those challenges are new—reach, revenue, and impact have, in fact, been central to how we think about learning businesses for a long time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:36] They have indeed. They’re even part of the Tagoras tagline. But, while reach, revenue, and impact are familiar concepts, they’re not always treated as connected—and that disconnect is where a lot of frustration shows up.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:49] Marketing feels harder than it used to, revenue goals feel more urgent, and impact is still challenging to measure in meaningful ways and for learning businesses to articulate clearly.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:03] In this episode, we want to start a process of taking a renewed look at reach, revenue, and impact and why learning businesses so often struggle with them, and how those struggles tend to reinforce one another. We’re going to break them down in detail, not just in this episode but in future episodes as well. But, today, we’ll tee up the concepts and start digging deeply into reach and its relationship to the others.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] Let’s reinforce why we think revisiting these themes of reach, revenue, and impact makes sense now. The main reason is that we see them as foundational. We see them as these pillars on which successful learning businesses are built.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:49] Yes, they’re in the Tagoras tagline for a reason. In fact, they were not the original Tagoras tagline. We came to use them as a tagline because we saw them being an issue so often. They are perennial challenges. When we step back and try to name what it is we see learning businesses wrestle with again and again, year over year, it’s reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:13] These are not trends. These are, as you said, perennial challenges. That’s why we want to revisit them. They’re also especially top of mind because of some recent data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:26] That’s right. This is clearly stuff that people are continuing to think about. In our 2026 strategic outlook survey data, revenue was a top strategic goal—more than half of respondents indicated that increasing revenue was either their number one strategic goal or their number two strategic goal.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:46] In that same survey data, we also saw support for the idea that capacity is often constrained, that often learning businesses feel like they don’t have enough resources to do what they need or want to do, and that capacity constraints exist, especially around marketing and not having enough marketing resources, which ties very directly to the reach pillar.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:11] We saw it some in the survey data, but we continually see this in working with clients and in our conversations with organizations: a weakness in measuring and, just as importantly, articulating and communicating the impact that’s being made by the learning experiences that organizations are offering.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:33] Part of why we want to bring reach, revenue, and impact up again is because we’re hearing about each of them, but we want to bring them up together because, not only are these perennial challenges, they are perennial interrelated challenges. We don’t think that you can meaningfully address any one of these without also addressing the other two.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:56] That said, we do think it’s well worthwhile to go deep on each one of them and make sure you fully understand each of these pillars as we then start to draw the connections between them and how they function as a system and how learning businesses should approach their markets.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:15] We’re going to dig in deeply on reach in the remainder of this episode. But, again, keep in mind that everything we’re saying about reach has to be put into the frame with revenue and impact as well. We will revisit revenue and impact in a future episode.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:32] And we’ll probably keep repeating that throughout this episode anyway—we’ll sound like a broken record. You will not forget that these concepts are interrelated, we promise.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:40] Maybe we should briefly recap what we mean by these words: reach, revenue, and impact. We throw them around a lot. There is a lot that is immediately understandable in them, but they also benefit from a little bit more explaining. Reach is about being able to connect with the right learners. And by “right,” we mean not necessarily all possible learners—we mean having a certain clarity around who it is that can benefit from what you have to offer, who is it that you are trying to reach, and then how can you manage to connect with them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:20] Revenue is one result of that. If you’re able to connect the right learners with the right offerings and charge appropriately, you are going to generate revenue. For most organizations, you’re going to want that to be net positive revenue, even if you’re a nonprofit, because you want your business to be sustainable. You want to be able to invest back into the business and/or, if you’re part of a larger organization like an association, for example, to invest back into other parts of the business.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:47] Reaching those right learners also speaks to your ability to have the impact that you desire. You may have a stellar course or conference or whatever experience it is that you’re marketing to that learner, but, if they’re not really the right learner, then they may not see that impact. They may not be able to improve in the way that you’re hoping for. So, again, reach, revenue, and impact are tightly interrelated.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:13] Now let’s dive in more deeply with reach, the first one we always name, and talk about some of the challenges that we see around reach right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:26] For us, the key issue right now is attention.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:31] This isn’t just true for learning businesses; this is true in the world in general. Right now attention is one of our scarcest resources. We have so many demands on our attention. There are people who want to push information at us, people who want to extract data from us and be able to use that data in various ways. It can be difficult to navigate. It’s become true that the competition for learning businesses is very often other learning providers. But often they’re not the main competition. It’s everything else that’s competing for your learners’ attention, which is going to influence whether they’re even going to decide that they want to learn anything with you. They have too many other demands on their time and attention, and you may never be able to get them to engage with your learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:25] This competition for attention has ratcheted up increasingly over recent years. It gets to why reach can feel harder today because some of the things that worked successfully for learning businesses even five years ago, certainly a decade ago, aren’t as effective anymore. You take something like e-mail marketing that used to be pretty effective, pretty reliable, and now we have…. My inbox has become more and more stuffed. And so what used to work is maybe not working as well because of all those competing demands for attention that we all face.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:09] You think about it, and five, ten years ago, doing Webinars for lead generation was standard stuff. Putting up a lead magnet for somebody to sign up for and then downloading, standard stuff. Obviously, people still do that, but none of that works anywhere near as well as it used to because everybody and their mother has a lead magnet these days. That said, attention is still your top-of-the-funnel territory. You have to get attention if you want anything to happen, so you can’t ignore it.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:34] Because attention is what can lead to interest. This is getting into the AIDA model that we’ve talked about before. So you have attention (A), interest (I). D is desire—do they want what you’re offering? And then A—hopefully you get to action. Are they going to register for that course? Are they going to download the research report that you have, whatever it is? But, if you don’t have that first A (attention), you can’t hope to move them through and get them to the point of action.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:10] You need that first A before you’ll get that fourth A. We’ll talk about conversion some here in a little bit as well, but, as far as attention goes, the major prerequisite for attention at this point is trust. We hear this a lot: “You’ve got to build trust. You’ve got to be trusted. You’ve got to be the authority in your niche.” It’s true. Trust is the currency that allows attention to happen at all. So you have to step back, as any sort of business and certainly as a learning business, and think about “Are we building the trust that’s going to earn us the attention of the learners who we want to serve?”

Celisa Steele: [00:09:47] You could get lucky with a super clever subject line or something like that. Maybe you get someone’s attention for a split second.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:57] There’s so much cynicism around that stuff now.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:59] But, if you don’t have something that’s trustworthy, once they do tune in and decide to pay attention, then, boy, you’ve just squandered a lot there. What you need to make sure is that you do have trust when you’re communicating. And to have that trust, you’ve got to think about, like you’re saying, Jeff, what do people want to listen to us on? Why should they listen to us on particular topics? Where do we have deep expertise or authority? Make sure that you’re communicating that and that knowledge, expertise, and credibility underlie how you’re communicating.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:34] It’s a long-term project. It takes commitment. It takes intentionality. It takes persistence and investment. You’ve got to be willing to put in the time to build trust. It may take 472 podcast episodes to build trust with somebody for all we know.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:51] And so this idea of trust, the importance of trust, we coined a term in the report that we put out that goes along with some of that survey data we were quoting at the beginning: Credibility CapitalTM. These are the assets that you have that establish your trust.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:12] It’s a nice little turn of phrase, Credibility Capital. Every organization has this in one way or another. It is your value proposition, your unique selling proposition. For learning businesses, you may have standards; you may have credentials. If you’re, say, a membership organization of some sort, possibly it’s your ability to convene the right people at the right time and make things happen or your advocacy capabilities. These are all part of your Credibility Capital. Again, there’s a degree of consciousness and intentionality—recognizing, identifying the things that are your Credibility Capital and aligning your learning offerings tightly with those. Because that’s where you’re going to stand out in the marketplace. That’s where you’re going to have trust. That’s where you’re going to have authority and have the best chance of standing out and connecting with your prospective learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:13] As part of trust—because we keep talking about trust here—part of that is having respect for the audiences that you are interacting with or hoping to interact with. And personalization is a big part of how you show respect. Don’t send the e-mail about a particular course to everyone in your database. You need to be aware of which people in the database could benefit from it and are at the appropriate level to take that course. You need to be thinking about that, doing the due diligence on your part to make sure that you understand who you’re communicating with so that, when they do open that e-mail—if they do trust your name enough in their inbox to see it and open it—it’s going to resonate with them. Because, if you manage to get them to open it, and we’ve got such limited attention, and it doesn’t speak to them, and it doesn’t say something of value, again, just a big opportunity squandered there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:17] That’s a nice perspective on personalization. Because we tend to think of personalization from the standpoint of getting the right stuff in front of somebody, which it is. You want to do that. That’s part of what you’re using the data for. But you are also using that data as an engine of respect, as you’re indicating, and making somebody feel like, in their interactions with you, you have their best interest in mind, and you’re showing up with the things that are really meaningful to them.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:47] And too, with Credibility Capital, with establishing trust and being respectful, don’t think purely about your formal education offerings and your course catalog alone.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:06] This is an interesting aspect of reach that we haven’t talked about enough. We’ve talked about it some in places. In my mind, it comes down to the distinction we’ve made before between learning and education—there is a difference between them. Education tends to be the formalized, structured experience. It tends to be represented by the types of products that go into a catalog and requires people who are going to design and develop and produce and market and sell. When we talk about being in the learning business, a lot of times that’s where people’s minds go immediately—to the catalog and to the learning products that you’re going to sell. Of course, that’s a small slice of how learning actually happens. Most learning isn’t formal. It’s in the relationships we build, the conversations we have, the volunteer opportunities we take, and just the…

Celisa Steele: [00:15:00] The podcasts we listen to.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:01] The podcasts that we listen to. There are just so many ways that we’re learning, in any given moment, in any given day. Those are opportunities to reach our audiences and to serve our audiences. They may or may not be monetizable—or at least immediately and directly monetizable—but they are the path to building trust. They are the path to representing the value that we want to represent to the audiences that we serve. A lot of learning businesses—in my mind, this applies particularly to, say, membership organizations that are trying to serve an identified base of members—need to step back and think about what are those informal opportunities that are represented by learning. Are we paying enough attention to those? Or is everything we’re doing focused on the catalog concept? Because, if you’re only focused on the catalog, then you’re probably being too transactional. You’re not really thinking about the longer-term, more nuanced relationship that you need to build with your audience to have the trust, to get the attention, to be able to fulfill the reach that you need to as a learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:09] Silos can come into play here. If you happen to be in an association learning business where events happen under one umbrella and courses happen under another and then publications under yet another, it can be very segmented.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:27] You stop seeing the connections between them.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:29] You’ll have organizations where you’ll have a chief content officer. And, if you broadly think about all that content that you have, all that Credibility Capital that you have, which is almost always has the possibility for learning built into it because that capital is about knowledge and expertise. There may be some organizational hurdles that have to be addressed in order to think the right way about reach in your organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:06] We see increasingly that it does help to have somebody who has that kind of high-level responsibility and accountability for looking across the knowledge assets, the whole portfolio of experiences that an organization can provide. Shout out to Todd Slater at NIGP, the chief content officer there. He thinks about things that way. They’ve got their formal education portfolio, but the events, the publications, all of their interactions with their membership base and their prospective audience, he’s attuned to all of that and where learning is happening all along the way. It’s important to have that sort of perspective, that person. It’s also a governance issue too, though. We see this more and more as we’re going into organizations. We’re having to pull together representatives from disparate committees or parts of the organization that aren’t connecting the dots in the way they need to be for the organization to be delivering the learning value that it needs to that is only partially represented by a catalog, per se. But that requires everybody thinking more systemically, more about an ecosystem, and less about just a catalog.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:12] We’re talking about reach. We’ve gotten into this idea of some silos and some divisions and mental blocks that might need to come down. There is a marketing aspect to this too. For us, there’s always been a really interesting connection between learning and content marketing because content marketing is fundamentally about providing something that essentially helps whoever’s receiving that content marketing. So they’re beginning to learn something. They’re beginning to see some value there. And, again, thinking about even the content marketing as a learning opportunity—I’m not sure enough organizations do that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:53] No, and they’re not really connecting the dots from what they might do in terms of providing marketing content into, say, that catalog finally. Eventually, you do want to get people to that catalog or to that event because that’s where you’re going to be able to monetize, but you have to be thinking broadly about that. And, by the way, there’s AI out there now. The way that we’re now seeing individual learners engage with knowledge, content, and learning experiences, they’re going to be doing it more through a chat interface than through a course in many instances. We’re already seeing a lot of organizations think about that in terms of setting up the chat-type interfaces, the AI interfaces, into their knowledge and learning base. And making some of that public, so it essentially is a marketing mechanism while you’re empowering and enabling people to learn from your Credibility Capital—to go back to that term—but then eventually reaching a point where there is a paywall, that you do have to pay something to get to the rest of it, whether that’s becoming a member, a subscriber, or whatever the case might be.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:55] That’s a very natural segue into the next point. We started off by saying that attention is the fundamental issue with reach in many learning businesses. You’ve got to get that attention if you’re going to hope to have success with your reach. But you can’t stop with the attention alone. You do ultimately have to get to a conversion of some sort, to the action, if we go back to the AIDA model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:20] Yes, getting from that first A to that fourth A and providing that value along the way, whether that’s in the AI interface, the mini course, or whatever it is (however you’re engaging learners), where you are developing that interest in what you have to offer, you’re developing that desire, and ultimately getting them to that point of conversion.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:41] And that’s usually where revenue…

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:43] That’s where revenue comes in.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:44] Comes in. Back to the monetization part of this. Also it sets you up for the potential for impact. Because now you have a learner who’s signed on to engage in a particular learning opportunity, which is then hopefully going to lead to that impact that you want to have.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:05] And the impact is going to factor into the conversion. We’re now at this point where you can’t separate these things because they play into each other. But you’re generally not going to convert somebody if they don’t understand, can’t see what the impact of paying you some money to go further is going to be. And that can take a lot of forms. Social proof is very valuable. Testimonials, case studies, examples of what others have gotten from engaging in your learning experiences. Those typically have to be there. We’ve talked about this concept of signaling before and how, with your education, you need to be signaling something out to the marketplace, which is typically that, if somebody participates in this learning experience, it’s going to lead to X. And you want the learner to see that. You typically want the learner’s employer to see that. But that signaling is all about communicating the impact that you’re claiming and having evidence to substantiate that a learner is going to get it if they do commit to whatever learning experience you’re putting in front of them.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:18] That’s all part of making that argument for investment of further attention and time. You’ve had to get enough attention and time to even get to this point of trying to get them to conversion. That impact signaling is going to be a big part of someone saying, “Okay, yes, I’m willing to spend more time, more money to engage in this specific offering because I see the value for me.” And, again, this gets back to that personalization piece—you’ve got to know who you’re talking to enough that that message lands and lands appropriately.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:52] We’re at the point where we’ve been talking about reach for close to 25 minutes.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:58] We could go longer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:58] We’re not proud or tired. If you know, you know—“Alice’s Restaurant” reference there. We could go on and on. But we’re already seeing that reach is so tightly connected to the other two concepts, revenue and impact, and so we’re going to come back and talk about those more deeply in the future, but we thought it was worth dedicating some substantial time to that first R today.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:31] Reach, revenue, and impact aren’t separate challenges for learning businesses—they’re deeply connected. And yet we focused today on reach. But we’ll be focusing on revenue and impact in the future, so stay tuned.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:45] You can find show notes, a transcript, and related resources at leadinglearning.com/episode472.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:52] And, if you find the Leading Learning Podcast valuable, please consider sharing this episode with a colleague or co-worker who’s wrestling with reach.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:01] Thanks for listening—and we’ll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Starting with Reach appeared first on Leading Learning.

Most learning businesses are rich in content, but far fewer are intentional about which pieces of content sparks collective learning,

In this episode, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele explore the concept of social learning objects: shared artifacts that anchor attention, create common language, and turn individual consumption into collective learning. Social learning objects can take many forms—frameworks, visuals, podcasts, standards, events—but what matters is that they’re generative rather than inert.

Jeff and Celisa discuss what makes a social learning object effective, why simplicity beats complexity, and how questions, visuals, and intentional design can dramatically increase learning impact. They also consider what social learning objects make possible for groups, communities, and learning businesses operating in increasingly uncertain environments.

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Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Most learning businesses are content-rich, turning out resources and courses with great regularity. But how much of that content actually sparks collective learning?

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:28] In today’s conversation, we want to dig into the concept of social learning objects: the shared artifacts that anchor attention, create common language, and turn individual consumption into collective learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:41] Those artifacts can be process diagrams, other visuals, frameworks, podcasts, even events. The key is that they’re generative rather than inert.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] Our thesis, for your consideration, is that being intentional about social learning objects can dramatically increase the impact of your learning offerings.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:04] So let’s start by defining “social learning object” a bit more.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:09] In the early days of blogging, when people tended to talk a lot about social, and somebody picked up the idea that we were all focusing collectively, there was this idea of a social object. It might be a blog post. It might be a video. These days it might be a TikTok or whatever that everybody’s focusing on. I took that idea of social object way back then and translated it into the learning world.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:38] So you added the “learning,” the social learning object.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:42] That’s right. That was my incredible innovation. It seemed a pretty natural leap to make because, when you think about people learning, an individual learning is usually going to be focused on some form of content for that learning. Content in and of itself is not learning, but your interaction with that content is what creates learning. And then, if you think about groups, teams, organizations, societies…

Celisa Steele: [00:02:08] By society you’re thinking American society, French society, Swiss society, not professional societies like the Endocrine Society.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:17] I was using “society” broadly there, as in American society, but it also applies in the context of professional societies, trade associations, and membership bases. If there’s something common as a point of reference that meaningful discussion can be engaged in around, that becomes a focal point for learning. It becomes a social learning object.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:41] I’ll attempt to be a little bit more succinct and define “social learning object” as any artifact that multiple learners engage with for the purpose of learning. That’s what it is, but why do social learning objects matter for learning businesses?

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:01] Because, as a learning business, you should be thinking about how to get intentional about the social learning objects that you’re using with your audiences. What are you putting out and using in your online community, in a classroom, or wherever and however you’re engaging with an audience?

Celisa Steele: [00:03:20] Let’s talk about some things that are social learning objects. To your point, Jeff, as a learning business, organizations should be thinking about what do we have that is a social learning object? What do we have that could become a social learning object? What social learning objects might we create? And the idea is that a social learning object is a special kind of content.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:46] A social learning object as an artifact is content. But it’s content that’s geared towards a purpose, and that purpose is to get people to focus on and interact with it. People’s interaction around the social learning object is most likely to be a discussion, whether that happens in person or online, synchronously or asynchronously. People are going to be making meaning from that object, applying it to their situation, coming up with ways in which that object is meaningful to their situation.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:20] Let’s get even more concrete. One of the reasons that we’re talking about social learning objects today is because we ourselves aim to create this type of content. It’s the kind of content we use in consulting engagements and/or put out into the world more broadly, through a published report, a blog post, or through a Webinar or event. One specific example that may be familiar to a lot of our listeners is the Value Ramp.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:49] The good old Value Ramp. We created that many, many years ago to visualize the correlation, the relationship between price and value. As value goes up, price should go up, logically speaking. And all the Value Ramp is is two axes with a curve. The curve goes from low on the lower left to high on the upper right, and you can plot offerings in your learning portfolio along that curve. But, a big part of the value of the Value Ramp is that it’s not terribly complex as a visual or a concept, which makes it possible to put it on a screen, a flipchart, or a whiteboard and gather others in your organization to think about your catalog, your portfolio and see where your offerings fit within this simple concept.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:38] That plotting allows you to see if you are—or aren’t—telling a logical value story with your portfolio. It allows you to see where maybe there are some gaps along the curve. It lets you have conversation to uncover potential disagreement about where a particular product belongs on the Value Ramp.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:59] It’s true that an individual, a single learning business leader or professional can use the Value Ramp on their own. And they should. But the real power, from our viewpoint, is that if you put it up—whether that’s in a virtual meeting or a physical meeting room—and if you look at it together and start having a conversation about what’s on that curve, what should be on that curve, what’s not there, what do you need to change about it, that starts to generate new thinking, different thinking, learning that leads to whatever change you might make around how your Value Ramp is configured. That’s just a single concrete example.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:44] I want to verbally highlight a word that you just used, Jeff. You said “generate.” Again, that generative nature of the content is what makes it a social learning object. A more recent example of a social learning object that we’ve put out is a two-by-two matrix that we’ve called the Mission-Margin Matrix, so you end up with four quadrants.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:06] This has two axes: mission and margin. And you have low to high performance along each axis, which gives you four quadrants. Again, if you can get people in a room thinking about what in your portfolio falls into each of these quadrants, that can spark meaningful conversation and debate. What should we be doing more or less of? Questions about “Are you sure that’s the quadrant where that product goes?” It can be very eye-opening to have people realize, “Wait—what? That product is losing that much money?” Those sorts of things.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:44] The simpler a social learning object is, the easier it is to use. Because, if you can just quickly draw those two axes in a curve or put up four quadrants, it doesn’t take that long to explain the social learning object. You can just take two or three minutes, people get it conceptually, and that means that you can get to discussion and meaning-making faster. You can segue into thinking about the application to your specific situation quickly, and that’s the real value of the social learning object. That said, you can have more complicated social learning objects. Our Learning Business Maturity Model is a slightly more complex social learning object.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:28] It is a bit more complex, but even it is easily explainable at a fundamental level, and people can get it pretty quickly. It’s five domains and four stages (so we’re away from that simpler two-by-two matrix structure), but, when people see it, they get the concept of maturity pretty quickly. They understand that there would be domains. They understand that there would be stages of progression. Then, yes, you need to go deeper to explain what it’s all about, but, at its base level, the Learning Business Maturity Model is readily grasped.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:05] But there are some social learning objects that truly are more complex. I’m thinking of things like standards or competency models that organizations create, for example. Those can be social learning objects, but they may require a higher level of communication. And I think the less explanation, the better. Now you can’t always simplify. Some things are complex, and you have to respect and recognize the complexity of the subject matter. But the main thing is to not overcomplicate it. When simplicity is possible, go with simplicity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:40] And, if more explanation is needed, then the learning business putting that social learning object out into the world has to be very intentional in thinking about how does that get communicated well so it becomes useful? Because what happens with so much content is it’s inert. So think about how do we make things as simple as we can and no more complicated than necessary? And then how do we think about what’s going to help people create connections?

Celisa Steele: [00:10:12] Basically, how do you make it generative? A lot of content that gets put out is not generative. It’s declarative. It’s inert.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:20] The danger in complexity is that, when something is very complex, it drives it towards being inert because nobody’s going to engage with something that’s really, really complex. There’s probably some sort of social learning object to be made around that—simplicity versus generativity in your social learning objects.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:38] Probably. Maybe we’ll create that social learning object at some point. But, for now, our point is, as a learning business, be intentional. When you’re creating, whether that’s a course or a conference or a publication or even an e-mail to your list of learners, really think about what’s the purpose of this? What is the learning potential of this? How do we make accessing that learning potential no more complicated than necessary? What can we do to boost the generativity of it?

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:10] If it’s a set of standards, maybe there’s a set of questions that go along with the standards. Or something that you have to develop training workshops around—obviously social learning objects can be the center of more formal types of educational activities. You want to recognize them as such and build that right scaffolding, that right structure around them if they happen to be that complex and that rich and that deep. But you want to be thinking is there something you release along with that social learning object that helps the learning to happen around it?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:46] I was thinking about the role of questions. Questions will often be key to social learning objects and how they get used because questions are naturally part of dialogue, and discussion is what social learning objects are meant to prompt. If you continue with that example of standards or a competency model, where you’re delineating a lot, it can feel very declarative and authoritative. “We know what’s what. Here’s the official, sanctioned way to think about this.” All of that can make that content feel closed off and inert. There’s not necessarily an invitation to interact with it. But, if that competency model or if the standards came with some questions that help you interact with the model or the standards and think about how they apply to you, then there is that invitation to engage, to generate some ideas, and to think about application.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:45] That makes me think about learning theory. You just used the term “declarative,” and much of what gets put out in terms of content is declarative. It ties to declarative knowledge. No higher-level learning happens when there is no generative component to it. If you’re dealing with things that people really do need to be able to learn, and that knowledge needs to be transferred, then there have to be the opportunities for application. There have to be opportunities for engagement with the content. You can think of the age-old Socratic method, which is usually engagement around a particular question or problem, and that’s then surrounded by a dialogue to help elicit the meaning of whatever that problem or question is in the circumstances in which it’s being raised.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:33] One of the benefits of the more discursive approach to learning is that the value of discourse goes up the more you’re in a VUCA environment—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. Many of the industries and professions that learning businesses are serving right now are dealing with uncertainty. They’re feeling unsettled. Things aren’t super clear. And so there’s a bit of a question around what can you still offer that is supportive of the kinds of discussions that need to happen, even if you can’t offer an answer? A social learning object can help.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:16] I want to come back to the idea of a social learning object being succinct, and that it’s often visual. Social learning objects take the format of visuals a great deal of the time because, again, you can put it up on a slide, on a flipchart, and get people to understand it conceptually quickly, at a glance. There’s an invitation there for listeners to be thinking about what your learning business offers in terms of content. Where might you translate some of the key pieces of your intellectual property or core content into a process visual or diagram that helps convey a concept and helps to structure discussion?

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:00] A social learning object gives people that common point of reference that’s easy to access. A visual is one of the most obvious ways to do it. There’s a reason that your average consultant walks into the room and draws a four-quadrant matrix all the time—because that can easily illustrate a point and get dialogue going. But it doesn’t have to be a visual. It’s worth pointing out that we started the Leading Learning Podcast as a social learning object. It was a lead-up to the first face-to-face event we held many years ago—the Leading Learning Symposium—with the idea that we were going to have speakers who were going to be at that symposium, and we could do some pre-content. We were going to do some pre-content on the topics that we were going to be covering at the event, with the idea that attendees at the event would be able to listen to this beforehand and have a common point of reference, at least a small set of shared knowledge coming into the event.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:56] We were trying to level the playing field, or the learning field in this case. How successful that was, I don’t know—it’s been over a decade at this point. But it has led to this podcast continuing for many years.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:11] That’s right. You hear us say all the time, “Pass this on to your team. Listen to this with your team.” We get people who tell us that they have done just that. They have team members listen to a particular episode or parts of an episode and then have some dialogue around that, which is exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about a social learning object.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:33] And part of what we were trying to do with the podcast initially, in tying it to that event, was to help some with prior knowledge. We know, especially when we get into working with adults, that learners bring a significant amount of prior knowledge, differing levels of prior knowledge, differing levels of experience to a learning situation or, for that matter, any situation. And so there’s value in the social learning object providing some shared language and some shared concepts. That way, even if three people are bringing three different perspectives and three differing levels of fluency in a particular subject, if you put up that Mission-Margin Matrix or the Value Ramp, then whatever they know about portfolios, that social learning object is helping to frame the discussion. And that can be very powerful because otherwise sometimes you get a group together, and you say, “We’re going to talk about strategy,” or “We’re going to talk about portfolio makeup,” and everyone has a different way that they’re going to approach that. But a social learning object provides a frame that can help you focus together.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:37] Yes, a social learning object can change the dynamic. It changes the discussion in the room to introduce and then have something that can be a focal point, a common point of reference. Whether you’re talking about a customer base or you’re talking about a membership base, a lot of people who are listening and are representatives of the types of organizations that are in the Leading Learning audience, often you’re looking to build a sense of community. You’re looking to build a sense of cohesion and identity across an audience—or at least tap into that and help sustain that community in whatever profession or industry or whatever it is that you’re serving. And having these kinds of common points of reference is really helpful—I’ll argue essential—for that. If people don’t have enough or substantial enough points of reference, it can hinder their individual or smaller group learning, and then, across a broader body, the broader audience that you’re trying to serve, you don’t have enough commonality to really accomplish big things. So, if you want to lead learning in your profession or industry (which is what we talk about all the time), you have to have some baseline commonality to build around and to lead people forward from. The whole concept of a social learning object is incredibly important and central to this whole idea of leading learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:02] And we can take this out to a broader societal view as well. There are plenty of social critiques out there right now that say a lot of what’s happening in the United States is because we lack cohesion at this point.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:17] Right. We’re getting deep and philosophical now. We used to have a lot more commonalities societally, in these social objects that we were all focused on. Some of us can remember back to three TV channels and the evening news. People were focused on the same body of content and stories and had the same points of conversation. And now, today, the whole media landscape, the whole social object landscape is completely fragmented.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:44] There are obviously upsides to that surge in options. People can do what they want to do, you be you, all that sort of stuff. There’s a lot positive to that. But what goes along with that is that there’s not that same amount of social cohesion. There’s not the shared prior knowledge that people can bring to discussions. The result is that you end up with a lot of people talking past each other or getting angry at each other.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:10] So there are bigger, broader philosophical and societal implications to this whole concept we’re discussing. But bringing it back down to just serving a specific community or set of people, that’s much more manageable, and you can be intentional about this and focus on social objects that are going to be meaningful in terms of helping to generate learning and helping to generate change in whatever audience you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:39] And one last point that I’ll call out is attention. We’ve talked about focus, we’ve talked about shared frames of reference, and those hint at attention, but I want to call out attention specifically.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:53] We try to reflect this in our gatherings and events. I feel like the best events I attend and the organizations I see that are most successful with gatherings are very intentional about how they’re focusing attention when they bring people together. Because a lot of this really is about focusing attention. Whether an event is organized around a concrete and actionable theme or there are actual artifacts that are the focus of the event, if you’ve got those there, and if you’re particularly focused on doing things like getting teams to events, if you can get teams from an organization to an event and have them focused around those same points of reference, those same social learning objects, your events can have an impact that ripples throughout the field and industry you’re serving and the organizations within that field or industry.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:52] Social learning objects don’t have to be elaborate or expensive. What matters is that they give people something shared to think with, talk about, and apply.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:03] And that requires intention. It means asking not just what content are we producing, but how are we focusing attention, and what kind of interactions are we inviting?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:15] Whether it’s a framework, a visual, a podcast episode, an event, the key question is always does this object generate learning?

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:24] If you can design more of your learning offerings to be generative rather than inert, you don’t just increase engagement—you increase the likelihood that real learning and real change actually happen.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:36] Be sure to visit leadinglearning.com/episode471 for show notes, a transcript, and options for subscribing to the podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:44] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share this episode or another with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:54] Treat it as a social learning object, and discuss it with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:57] Thanks again—and we’ll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Social Learning Objects: From Content to Collective Learning appeared first on Leading Learning.