Leading Learning

Associations have long played a role in supporting learning and education, but they may be overlooking the full extent of their potential. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele explore why associations are education’s sleeping giant and how they can awaken to the opportunity before them.

They discuss the distinction between learning and education, examine what’s often holding associations back, offer concrete ideas for moving forward, and highlight the wide-ranging impact that embracing associations’ role as major providers of learning and education can have on members, learners, employers, and society at large.

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] We want to talk today about something that’s been on our minds since coming back from ASAE Annual 2025 in Los Angeles: the role of associations in learning and education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:30] If your learning business is part of an association, this conversation is especially for you. Associations have a unique role to play in educating the workforce and in supporting lifelong learning. It’s a role that may be more important now than it’s ever been.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:46] We’re calling this episode “Why Associations Are (Still) Education’s Sleeping Giant” because associations’ role is sometimes under-played, and, when it’s played, it may go under-recognized. The potential is there, and the power is there, but too often it’s dormant. Our goal with this conversation is to help us all be awake to this potential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:08] We’re going to explore how, while associations are a major player in learning and education, they haven’t always been recognized as such or played the role authoritatively, how they can change that, and the impact that doing so could have—not just for associations but for learners, employers, and society as a whole.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:30] And because this is fresh on our minds from ASAE Annual, we’ll also pull in some examples and themes that we heard there that underscore why this matters.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:40] Before we go any further, we should pause to make sure we’re clear on what we mean when we say “learning” and “education” because understanding that distinction shapes how we think about associations’ role.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:55] In episode 397, Jeff, you and I talked about the difference between learning and education, and we’re going to link to that episode in the show notes for this episode in case any of you, dear listeners, want the fuller explanation. But we’ll offer a CliffNotes version now. Learning is the broad category. It’s the umbrella. Learning encompasses formal education but also informal experiences, like mentoring, peer-to-peer sharing, problem-solving on the fly, or even reflecting after a project is done.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:30] Networking at a conference, for example. Education is a subcategory of learning. Education is structured and organized. It’s designed to lead to a particular set of outcomes, and it’s often packaged as a course, program, workshop, or credential. It has defined parameters—who participates, what’s covered, when it starts and ends.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:53] All education is learning, but not all learning is education. Learning can happen anywhere. It can be that conversation in a hallway or at a conference, as you just said, Jeff. It can be troubleshooting a problem at the office with one of your colleagues. It could be reading a book or article.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:10] We’re not just splitting hairs here. This learning-versus-education distinction is critical. When leaders think about their association’s role, they have a tendency to default to formal education: the annual meeting, online courses, or certification programs. Those are important, but they’re only part of the picture.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:32] Associations can also play—and most already do play—a huge role in fostering informal learning. They create the spaces, connections, and resources that allow members to learn from each other and from the broader community.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:47] In today’s world, the lines between formal and informal learning are blurring. They’ve been blurry for quite a while now. A learning experience might start as a structured course but then spill over into ongoing discussions in an online community or spark a peer mentoring relationship.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:05] That blurring might be what’s going on with my eyesight. I seem to have more trouble seeing things now.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:10] You must be learning a lot then.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:11] That’s what we can hope. When we talk about the role of associations in learning and education, we are talking about both the structured, planned offerings and the more organic, less formal opportunities.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:26] Keeping both in view allows associations to think much more expansively about their impact and to see themselves not only as education providers but as learning catalysts.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:38] Next, let’s look at why this moment feels so right for associations to lean into their role in fostering learning and education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:48] To start with, there are big-picture forces at work—forces shaping careers, industries, and society in ways that make lifelong learning essential.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:59] Yes, shaping and reshaping those careers and industries and society. The nature of work is changing faster than ever. We have automation. We have artificial intelligence. We have global competition. We have new technologies that are shifting what’s required in nearly every job, from entry-level positions up to the executive level. Reskilling and upskilling aren’t just nice to have; they are essential for staying relevant and employable in today’s job market.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:29] Careers are no longer linear. Many professionals will move across roles, industries, even switch entire fields multiple times. Every shift requires new knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking—in other words, new learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:46] At the same time, we have trust in traditional higher education and in the value of traditional higher education eroding. Enrollment numbers are down. People are questioning the cost, the time involved, the return on investment, and whether or not what’s taught is actually aligned with what’s needed in the workplace.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:07] That opens the door for new thinking and for other credible providers. And associations are uniquely positioned to step through that door.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:16] Associations tend to have deep and sustained relationships with their members in the fields that they serve. Many associations have been around for decades. That longevity can build trust. Trust, in the context of learning businesses, is really important, has real value, is a real currency. In a session at ASAE Annual, Denise Roosendaal, the executive director of I.C.E. (the Institute for Credentialing Excellence), cited an Independent Sector finding that associations are bucking the trend of distrust in many institutions. We have pretty high levels of distrust among U.S. citizens in things like government, big business, and media. About 57 percent of Americans report high trust in nonprofit organizations, including associations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:09] Associations are mission-driven, existing to serve members and their fields. That alignment can make learning feel like a shared investment in the profession’s or field’s future rather than a simple transaction.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:23] Associations usually have unparalleled subject matter expertise. They can tap into thought leaders, innovators, and practitioners in ways that often other learning providers can’t match.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:36] They also have built-in communities of practice. Members aren’t just passive consumers of education; they’re potential mentors, collaborators, and co-creators of knowledge.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:47] And, unlike higher ed institutions, associations can move more quickly because they’re not bound by semesters or lengthy curriculum review processes. When a new regulation comes out or a skills gap emerges, associations have the potential to respond in months and sometimes even shorter timeframes, weeks.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:08] In that same session where Denise Roosendaal mentioned associations’ trust advantage, Letty Kluttz of APIC (the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology)—that’s hopefully the last time we’ll have to spell out the acronym—talked about three microcredentials that they’ve launched in 2025. Three in one year.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:32] Associations are uniquely positioned to combine the rigor of formal education with the relevance and immediacy of workplace training. Those three microcredentials from APIC that you just mentioned definitely fit that bill.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:46] We’re seeing really smart approaches, things like microcredentials tied to emerging competencies or created to address skills gaps and partnerships with employers for career pathways.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:59] Associations have credibility not just with their learners—they tend to be trusted also by employers, by regulators, by policymakers. They can bring relevant stakeholders together to help ensure that the learning has real-world value and is recognized in the marketplace.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:19] Several ASAE sessions focused on how associations can help with workforce development. Associations can also be part of workforce policy. Which dovetails nicely with education. If you’re influencing standards, you can align your offerings directly with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:35] The opportunity is big, it’s multifaceted, and it’s here right now. But the important part of today’s conversation—or an important part—is that it’s not entirely new. This potential has been here for decades.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:50] That raises a question. If the potential has been there all along, why hasn’t it been fully realized?

Celisa Steele: [00:09:57] That’s what we want to talk about next because understanding the barriers is going to be key to making sure that this sleeping giant doesn’t roll over and hit the snooze button again.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:10] If this opportunity for associations to be recognized as big players in the education and learning space has been here for years, decades even, why haven’t associations fully stepped into it?

Celisa Steele: [00:10:24] I don’t think there’s a single reason why, but culture and identity definitely come to mind as potential barriers. Some associations still primarily identify as conveners or communities—places to gather, network, and share—but not necessarily as learning providers. That mindset can limit then how much they invest in education as a strategic driver.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:49] Another big barrier is internal. Many associations, especially larger ones that have departments, have silos that keep education disconnected from other parts of the organization. Education staff may work largely apart from membership, marketing, advocacy, or technology teams.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:08] And that separation can lead to missed opportunities. If your membership team isn’t feeding insights about member needs to your education team, you risk developing offerings that are out of sync with what’s needed and what’s most relevant. If your education team isn’t telling membership about what it’s developing, then the education offerings, even if they are in sync and relevant, might be underused.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:31] Another factor is resources. Even when leaders do see the opportunity, budgets and staff capacity can be stretched thin. When you’re juggling an annual meeting, member services, and advocacy work, education can become one more item on a long to-do list.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:47] Then the default often becomes sticking with what’s familiar: the same annual conference format, the same Webinar approach, the same template for online courses. Without innovation, what you’re offering may not meet evolving learner needs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:02] There’s also the pull of legacy formats and models—things like credit-hour requirements or long-standing curricula that are slow to change because of external accrediting bodies or internal governance.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:15] Another challenge is that many associations are product-first in the way that they think rather than audience-first. They design the course or program and then go looking for people to fill the seats in that offering, rather than starting with that deep understanding of learner needs and then building educational products or learning opportunities from that deep understanding of learner needs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:40] In some cases, associations have simply underestimated their own value as educators. They might think, “We’re not a university; we don’t have a campus. We can’t compete with Coursera or LinkedIn Learning.”

Celisa Steele: [00:12:52] But the reality is associations don’t have to compete on those terms. Their value can lie in niche expertise, in credibility, in community—advantages that big, generic providers like LinkedIn Learning can’t easily replicate.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:09] And one more point. Sometimes there’s a lack of data—or a lack of the right data—to make the case for investing more in education. Without metrics that show the connection between learning and member engagement, retention, or revenue, education can be seen as a cost center rather than a growth engine.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:28] That ties back to the silos that we mentioned earlier, Jeff. If education and marketing and membership aren’t talking meaningfully and regularly, you probably can’t see the full picture of how learning drives membership and advocacy and vice versa.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:42] So the bottom line on why this opportunity has often been missed? It’s a mix of structural, cultural, and strategic barriers, but they’re not insurmountable. That said, they do require intentional effort to address.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:57] Which is where we’re headed next: What associations can do to better seize the opportunity to be—and be recognized as—major providers of learning and education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:08] We’ve talked about the opportunity in front of associations and why it hasn’t been fully realized. The next part is arguably the most important. What can associations do to seize that opportunity?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:21] Every organization’s situation is unique, but there are some common approaches that we’ve seen work. They’re not particularly complicated, but they do require commitment. We’re going to talk about six things that we think associations can do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:37] First, elevate education and learning in your strategy. That means making them central to your mission, not just a byproduct of events or a line item in the budget. If you’re an association leader, explicitly name education and—probably even more importantly—learning as strategic priorities.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:57] This can be as concrete as including learning-related goals in your organizational scorecard or more broadly ensuring that your mission statement reflects your role in developing your field’s knowledge and skills. The point—in either case or anywhere along that spectrum—is to make the role that you play in education and learning visible and to make sure that there’s some accountability around that role.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:22] Second, take an audience-first approach. That means starting with a deep understanding of your learners—their needs, challenges, and aspirations—before you design anything.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:36] That can mean investing in formal needs assessment. It can mean investing in member surveys. But it also probably means listening in informal ways: paying attention to discussion threads in your online community, debriefing with volunteers after events, asking open-ended questions in one-on-one conversations or at the end of a course evaluation. As with so much these days, AI can probably help you. It can help you find trends and common threads in the data that you have, both quantitative data like Likert ratings of courses and qualitative data you might get from phone interviews.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:15] I’ll stress that none of this means that you’re just being reactive to your market, that you’re taking what you’re hearing and turning around and producing based on that. It’s your job as an association, as a leader, to lead learning. That’s what we’re all about here at Leading Learning. You’re taking that data, you’re taking that information, but then you’re infusing that with your own knowledge, your own vision, to set the pace for your profession or your field with the learning experiences that you’re helping to catalyze and facilitate. Remember that your audience isn’t just individual members, even if you are an individual member society. Employers, industry partners, regulators are part of your learning ecosystem too, and understanding their needs can help you design offerings that are valued by learners and, importantly, in the marketplace.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:06] The third thing we’ll suggest is consider partnerships. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Partner with employers to co-create training that addresses specific skill gaps. Collaborate with universities on credit-bearing programs that might connect with your niche expertise and connect that to a broader academic credential. Work with vendors, and maybe embed some of your learning resources into tools that your members are already using. Maybe you can work with other associations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:38] Partnerships can also help you scale. If you’re resource-constrained—and so many associations are—leveraging the marketing reach, brand, content expertise, or technology platforms of a partner can let you do more without overextending your team.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:53] Fourth, we’ll suggest that you invest in the infrastructure needed for education and for learning. I’m using “infrastructure” to refer to systems, processes, and frameworks that make your educational offerings sustainable and adaptable. I’m thinking about content governance, data strategy, competency frameworks.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:16] For example, a solid competency framework gives you a blueprint for aligning all your learning—from Webinars to conferences to certifications—so that everything builds toward clearly defined capabilities in your field.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:30] Content governance means that you know what you have. You’re going to then be able to—based on that knowledge of what you have—keep it current. You’re going to be able to tag it and organize it so it can be potentially reused, remixed, and delivered in multiple formats. And then, when the time comes, it can also be sunset and retired from your catalog.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:51] A data strategy ensures you can measure not just participation but impact and use that insight to improve and to make the case for further investment. We’ll include links in the show notes to some past episodes on measurement and evaluation—in particular, conversations with Alaina Szlachta and Will Thalheimer.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:14] Fifth, embrace flexibility in format. The days of one-size-fits-all education are over—if there ever really was a day when one size fit all. Be thinking about shorter, modular learning alongside potentially offering some deep-dive programs. You want to make it possible for learners to engage on their own schedule and on the devices that they use every day.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:38] To be clear, we’re not saying you should abandon your in-person events or longer programs. It means thinking about the total mix—how your offerings work together to meet different needs and preferences. Think about how your offerings compare to other options your learners have. Online and shorter options may stand out if your learners are comparing those to semester-long, on-campus courses, for example.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:04] Sixth and finally, advocate for learning inside your organization. Sometimes the biggest barrier is getting your own leadership or board to see education and learning as essential to your mission and sustainability as an association.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:21] We feel it is fundamental to member value to be cultivating and facilitating learning. That’s what people are looking for these days. And that’s where your data, stories, and learner feedback come in. Share examples of how learning—whether it’s formal or informal—has helped members advance in their careers, how it’s influenced policy, or how it’s driven revenue and retention for your association.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:47] Because, when you connect the dots between learning, member value, and organizational success, you’re making it easier to get the buy-in you need to be able to grow the impact that you’re having with your education and learning offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:01] Of course, you don’t have to do all of this at once. Start with leverage points—the changes that can create momentum in multiple areas. For some associations, that might be building a competency framework. For others, it might be piloting a partnership with an employer.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:16] The key is to start. Waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect plan means that you might let opportunity slip by.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:25] And, when you start, you begin to shift culture. Which is so important. You shift from seeing education as an obligation or a side benefit to seeing it as a core way you deliver on your mission.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:40] Which brings us nicely to the final part of our conversation: What happens when associations fully seize this opportunity? What’s the impact for the association, for learners, and beyond? Let’s talk about what happens when associations step into this role fully, when they make learning and education central to their mission and strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:05] The most immediate impact is usually on the association itself. Learning becomes a driver of member engagement, loyalty, and retention. When members see clear value in your educational offerings and the broader learning that you’re making possible—whether that’s helping them advance their careers, meet requirements, or solve real-life, day-to-day problems—they have a stronger reason to stay connected to your organization. Scott Wiley, the CEO of CoreNet Global, told me that he believes, “The future of associations lies in flipping the script—from leading with membership to leading with learning. When education becomes the front door, membership walks in naturally.” Well put, Scott.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:51] Yes, I like that idea of education being a front door—that’s very nice. Seizing this opportunity also diversifies and strengthens revenue. Education can become a reliable income stream that supports other parts of the organization. That helps reduce dependence on, say, a single big event, exhibit show, or membership dues alone. Erin Pressley, senior vice president of Education, Training & Events at NRECA (the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association), was at ASAE Annual. She’s been on the podcast before, and she loves to say that she loves to make money for her association—because that money feeds mission. It allows NRECA to better deliver on its mission and better serve its members.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:39] And there’s the reputational impact. Associations that lead in education and learning are seen as thought leaders and as the go-to resources in their fields. That can translate into stronger advocacy influence, better partnerships, and greater visibility with funders or sponsors.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:56] For members and for the learners, the impact is personal. They get access to trusted, relevant learning opportunities that help them do their jobs better, that help them advance their careers, that help them adapt to changes in their industry.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:11] And, because associations can combine formal education with informal learning opportunities, members can build skills in ways that fit their lives—whether that’s a structured program, a peer mentoring relationship, or a quick just-in-time resource.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:25] Of course, employers benefit too. They get a more skilled, adaptable workforce. That can mean higher productivity, fewer mistakes, better compliance with regulations, and a stronger talent pipeline.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:39] When employers see that an association is helping solve real workforce challenges, they’re more likely to support their staff’s involvement—through memberships, event attendance, or sponsoring educational initiatives.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:52] Lastly, we would be remiss if we don’t mention the societal impact. Think of fields like healthcare, engineering, law, public safety; in those fields, better learning and education directly affect public well-being. Even in less obviously high-stakes industries, stronger professional competence benefits the communities that those professionals serve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:17] In other words, when associations seize the opportunity and embrace the important role of being providers and leaders of education and learning, they’re not just serving members; they’re serving the broader public interest.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:30] And all of this reinforces the association’s mission, making it more resilient, more relevant even as the world changes rapidly.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:45] We’ll finish in just a moment with a recap of what we’ve discussed in our look at why associations are (still) education’s sleeping giant.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:06] 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: [00:26:16] We covered a lot in this episode, starting with the distinction between learning and education, then looking at the opportunity associations have right now to more fully embrace their role in leading learning and education, some of the barriers in terms of why they haven’t been able to fully realize that potential, and then what to do to help them better realize that potential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:40] To recap, we believe associations are uniquely positioned to lead in both learning broadly and education because of their credibility, community, and potential for agility. The opportunity is here, but it’s been missed or not fully realized in the past due to silos, resource constraints, legacy models, and a product-first mindset.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:04] To better seize the opportunity, associations can elevate learning in their strategy. They can make sure that they’re taking an audience-first rather than a product-first approach. They can partner wisely. They can invest in infrastructure. They can embrace flexible formats. And they can advocate internally.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:23] And, when they do, the benefits ripple out, from stronger member engagement and more revenue to delivery on mission to employer partnerships and societal impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:34] Thanks again—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Why Associations Are (Still) Education’s Sleeping Giant appeared first on Leading Learning.

If you know your learning offerings need to evolve, but you’re not sure where to start or how to bring others along, this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast can help. Whether you’re struggling with risk tolerance, engagement, or relevance, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to figure it out alone either.

Mary Byers is an association consultant and author of the books Race for Relevance and Road to Relevance. Co-host Celisa Steele talks with Mary about how learning businesses can evolve through consistent innovation; what it means to adapt in uncertain times, without upending your core mission; practical ways to increase risk tolerance; how every threat is also an opportunity (AI being the case in point); and how comfort and complacency are the biggest threats.

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] If you know your learning offerings need to evolve, but you’re not sure where to start or how to bring others along, this episode can help. Whether you’re struggling with risk tolerance, engagement, or relevance, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to figure it out alone either.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] This episode, number 459, features a conversation with Mary Byers. Mary is an association consultant and author of the books Race for Relevance and Road to Relevance. She’s been on the show before, and she always brings grounded, practical insights for learning leaders.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:50] This time around, Mary and I talk about how learning businesses can evolve through intentional, consistent innovation. We explore what it really means to adapt and improve in uncertain times—without chasing every trend and without upending your core mission.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:06] Mary shares thoughts on evaluating programs, increasing risk tolerance, and making change part of your culture, not just a one-time event.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:16] And we get into trends—from microlearning to AI to peer learning—and how learning businesses can respond in ways that keep them relevant and valuable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:26] There’s a lot here to learn from and act on, so here’s the conversation with Mary Byers.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] You’ve been on the Leading Learning Podcast before, and I thought it could be interesting to start with a phrase that you used the last time that you were on the podcast: “go-forward strategy.” I would be curious what “go forward” means to you now, and I’m thinking especially of so much uncertainty that we’re dealing with. It feels like there’s political uncertainty, economic uncertainty. There’s upheaval in the technology space. What do you think about now when you’re thinking about a forward-focused strategy for associations and other learning businesses?

Mary Byers: [00:02:14] Go forward, to me, means looking out the windshield and not the rearview mirror. It means looking at trends, anticipating what’s going to happen. There is a lot of uncertainty now, but the reality is there’s always uncertainty. We might feel like we have certainty—maybe it’s because things are a little less volatile—but the reality is we’re always working in an uncertain environment. When we think about that, it’s really helpful to go back to our north star. For associations, that means going back to your mission and your vision and letting that guide you. I believe that lends clarity to decisions that need to be made, and it, in some cases, may also lend clarity to things that are no longer serving the association or your members in the same way. One of the things that was a silver lining in the pandemic for associations is we took a leadership role in helping our members figure out what they could and couldn’t do, what they should and shouldn’t do, and that helped us have a definitive value proposition. Our north star also will help us with a definitive value proposition, and the associations that are really thriving have a strong value proposition. The ones that are just surviving really don’t, and it’s something that we need to take time to articulate and think deeply about.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:40] I’m hearing in your response there that go forward is about looking out the windshield, not the rearview mirror, and, to a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how uncertain the times feel. That’s what we should always be doing—looking ahead but referring to our north star, our mission, our purpose, the reason we exist.

Mary Byers: [00:03:58] I think that helps simplify the environment that we’re currently working in. I’m not suggesting that we don’t have uncertainty or volatility and that we shouldn’t be asking what that means for the association and our members, but, to a certain extent, the best strategy is to focus on what you can control, and a lot of what you can’t control are the things that create uncertainty in the first place. From a strategic standpoint, simplifying and asking yourself, “Is this something we can control?,” and our mission and vision is. It’s our reason for being, and doubling down and focusing on those areas and making an impact in those areas that are your reason for being to begin with.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:43] You’ve talked about the need for evolution and continually evolving. I’m curious to get your thoughts around what it looks like to be an innovative organization versus an organization that’s saying, “Yes, innovation is important,” without necessarily doing a whole lot to support real innovation.

Mary Byers: [00:03:40] It can be overwhelming to call yourself an innovative organization because that conjures up creating something from nothing or having the next big hit. When I talk about innovation, I like to use this very simple definition: doing something differently. When I think about being an innovative organization, I think about making a small percentage commitment to doing things differently going forward. The way that this applies to learning companies is a lot of times we use the exact same format for our learning and education that we’ve always used. If we’re having an in-person meeting, we might change the date and the location but keep the format. There’s an invitation for us to change our format, to make things a little different, interesting in a new way, unexpected, surprising our audiences—even though we know they also like the similarity and the comfort level that comes along with attending events. The best way to do it is simply to say, “We’re going to change 10 percent of what we do every time we do it”—10 percent of your blog posts, 10 percent of your Webinars, 10 percent of your in-person meetings. Small changes over time lead to evolution, and then it doesn’t become a thing that you have to do. It becomes a practice of who you are.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:38] I’m guessing that 10 percent is more of a guideline than a strong recommendation. The point being, you don’t have to change everything but some significant portion, which might be in that 10 percent range, and, if you’re doing that, then you become accustomed to that as an organization, that this is something we do. We don’t just always do everything 100 percent the same way.

Mary Byers: [00:07:02] It helps your board too to recognize that this whole idea of continuous learning is part and parcel of what makes an association relevant. If you wait and have big innovations on occasions or infrequently, then it’s a higher hurdle to get your board to go along with. But, if you are constantly asking for money for your own CE on staff or money for some innovations, and that becomes part of what you do…. Many organizations have an innovation budget, or they have a percentage of their reserves set aside for innovation. If that becomes part of your habit, and you do it reflexively, then it’s built into the culture of the organization rather than having to be a heavy lift, which, a lot of times, innovation is. We decide we’re going to be innovative, and so now we’ve got to put together a team; now we’ve got to figure out what we mean, and we make it harder than it has to be sometimes, honestly.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:06] Talk a little bit about how you see things like pilots, experimentation feeding into this continuous evolution that associations should be aiming for.

Mary Byers: [00:08:16] What I love about the education space is that it’s easy to try things and place small bets, to do things a little bit differently, and then get people’s feedback. It’s not that you have to redo the entire meeting or totally change educational format. You can launch a Webinar that tries to do things a little bit differently than you’ve done before and get some feedback. With that feedback, you can recalibrate. Keep some of what you like; get rid of some of what didn’t work—understanding, though, that sometimes we have to try things more than once before we can get true feedback. I was on a call with a client yesterday who was talking about a meeting he had been to, and he said, “This is what I liked about what we did, and this is what I didn’t like about what we did.” Immediately I thought, “That is the kind of feedback that is essential to meeting planners, education planners, curriculum developers.” Sometimes we just send a survey. We hope people will fill it out. It’s really nice to talk to people as they’re coming out of a meeting or following up with them and saying, “Hey, do you have 10 minutes? I’d love to get your thoughts.” The in-person conversation, like we’re doing now, can be its own market research and is really valuable.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:40] Another thing that you often encourage organizations to think about is sunsetting things that aren’t doing what they need to do any longer. With an innovation lens on that, is sunsetting a way of being innovative sometimes?

Mary Byers: [00:10:00] I think so. A lot of people don’t look at it that way because they look at the loss or the change that goes away with whatever you’re sunsetting. But I believe that sunsetting opens up time, money, and expertise to do the innovation that you need to do. I’ve worked with some associations whose certifications have been on the downward trend for 10 years because perhaps another certification came up, or states no longer required the certification. And I asked the question, “If this is costing you money every year, why are you still doing this?” Or, “If you have three certifications and only two of them are doing well, why are you doing the third one?” “What about meetings that used to draw a lot of attendance that are no longer doing so?”

Mary Byers: [00:10:49] I don’t think it’s a matter of sunsetting; it’s a matter of asking, “Is there something that we could be doing differently that would help us refresh this meeting or reengage attendees? Is our marketing what it needs to be? Are we providing proper incentive? Is the timing of the meeting good?” There are a lot of things that we can be asking. Sunsetting or purposely abandoning programs and education might be what you end up doing, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. You might start out with the idea that you’re making a decision about keeping or not keeping, but, as you do your discovery, you might decide that there are some things that you could do that could help promote the program or service and give it a new life.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:38] Particularly in the association world, sometimes there’s tension that can come out of mission and feeling like you need to be everything to everyone. As you were giving as an example, maybe there’s a certification that’s no longer as strong as it used to be. Talk a little bit about how you think about or help associations think about that tension and when to balance the revenue that might come from an educational offering versus what it might mean to the mission overall.

Mary Byers: [00:12:11] It’s a challenge when there is a program that is a cash cow that might not be perfectly mission-related because that revenue coming in then does ultimately support mission and vision because it enables you to operate, and, in covering your operational expenses, then you can meet your mission. The best-case scenario is when you have a program that provides revenue or sometimes purposely breaks even—that can be part of your strategy too—that also meets mission. It needs to be an overall conversation and a conversation that is association-wide, not just in the learning department but in all of the departments that provide programs and services. It makes sense to take a holistic look, although each individual department can have its own conversation as well.

Mary Byers: [00:13:10] I’ll also say that there’s no one right way to do this. The main thing that I advocate for is being intentional and deliberate and questioning year to year, month to month, week to week perhaps, our activities that we’re providing to members. Sometimes we’re trying to do so much that members end up tuning out everything we do because it’s just too overwhelming for them. We call it “communications clutter.” If your legislative activities are competing with your education activities or competing with your charitable activities, it can be overwhelming for members. If we’re not careful, they tune us out altogether. And I hear that all the time from clients: “How can we get members to see the value of what we’re doing?” Part of the question is, “Are you trying to communicate too much?” And so they’re hearing nothing.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:07] Sunsetting programs, particularly ones that maybe if they’re not doing particularly well but are valued by a vocal subset of folks, that can feel risky. Risk is something that can inhibit evolution and innovation, experimentation—a lot of these things that we’ve been talking about. How do you think about talking about risk when you’re dealing with associations? Is there a way to reframe it and make it be a little bit less scary to staff or boards or other stakeholders who might be contemplating something that they think is risky?

Mary Byers: [00:14:46] One of the ways that I’ve done this with clients is to have a risk conversation. If I’m doing it with the board, I’ll ask the board, “On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being very conservative and 5 being willing to take risks, what number would you give yourself in your personal life, in your professional life, and as an association leader?” We ask everybody on the board to give themselves a number in each of those areas, and then we get an average. What we often find is that people are more willing to take risk in their personal life because they have full control or in their professional life because they’re paid to take risk. But, when they walk into the boardroom, they may feel risk-averse because they don’t want to be embarrassed in front of their colleagues. They want to do a good job for their colleagues.

Mary Byers: [00:15:43] Often board members will tell me, “Well, it’s the members’ money that we’re spending, and so I feel risk-averse to doing that.” It’s a great conversation for staff to have together as well, either departmentally, senior staff, or association-wide. You need to have a balance—people who are willing to ask questions, who are curious, who are willing to run small pilots, and balance that with people who are watching the bottom line and making sure you’re not getting out too far over your skis. But, if we don’t have those conversations, and we don’t know how risk-averse we are, then we don’t have a sense of what’s possible for the organization and how we need to balance experimenting. How many pilots are we doing simultaneously? What kind of expectations do we have over what they will show? Are departments working together? Are committees working together?

Mary Byers: [00:16:41] It’s so much easier to talk about innovation than it is to actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit it. But that risk conversation, and having it on a regular basis as your staff turns over, and your board turns over, being able to say, as one of my clients did, “On a scale from 1 to 5, we’re at 2.7. And we aspire to add to that. We aspire to be a 3+.” We had a great conversation about “What would it take to add a little more comfort to you as a board?” Some of it was simply as easy as having more than one proposal to look at. One proposal was more risky. One was less risky. They wanted to have an opportunity to look at both rather than having to vote one up or down. A very small shift, but it made a huge difference for the organization.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:35] What are you keeping your eye on today in terms of engagement—engagement in learning, engagement with associations in general? In particular, you maybe have some thoughts around the younger generations and professionals that are coming into work and into potentially being members of associations.

Mary Byers: [00:17:56] We know that microlearning has been a trend since TED Talks began—the short opportunity to learn. Anecdotally, I’m hearing that new dentists are going to YouTube to find out how to do procedures, which could be good, and it could be bad. But, if you think about just-in-time education and the opportunity for associations—“I’m stuck. I need some help. Who do I turn to?” If I know I can turn to my association, there’s value then in the membership. I was working with a nursing group—it was pediatric nurses—and they were talking about when very few nurses are on the floor, and it’s late at night, and a nurse has a question about something that’s going on, where can they turn to get that information? This was years ago, before artificial intelligence. Now, artificial intelligence is, I think, both an opportunity and a threat for associations, especially as we talk in terms of younger generations. If I can go on to Claude, Copilot, or any other AI platform and get an instantaneous answer without having to log on to my association Web site or search the association Web site or go to the association online community, ask the question, and wait for answers, that’s a real threat to associations. Very similar to social media and how it changed the game for associations.

Mary Byers: [00:19:33] I also think it’s a wonderful opportunity because we have the opportunity to teach our members how to use AI, to talk about ethics, to talk about how it’s going to change in the workforce. Many associations that I’m familiar with now are building their own bots. I can go ask my association the question, very specific to my industry, not a general question, but a very specific question—that’s an opportunity. I know of some organizations that are building AI study buddies. So, if I am studying for an exam or a certification or simply have a question, I can go to a vetted source that I know has been updated, and it’s using the current material that I need to know—the rules, the laws, the regulations, the requirements—and I can find it from a reliable resource, and that is my association, again, that has value. So I’m really looking at microlearning. I’m watching what AI is going to do, but I believe that everything that’s a threat to an association is also an opportunity.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:44] That partnership between associations and AI that you were pointing towards does hold a lot of potential because when you marry up that instancy of the AI, but you have that vetted content that associations can usually bring to bear and have all the subject matter experts having it up-to-date, then that’s a very, very powerful combination. Then we get additional tools too that can then serve up that content. It doesn’t have to just be a text chat with a bot. You can have podcast-style content generated on the fly for that learner. It’s really interesting and exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing where things head over the next few years.

Mary Byers: [00:21:27] I am curious what you’re seeing in your environment, from the AI standpoint. There are the aids that help us, but, if you are an association or institute of higher learning, and you’re providing continuing education, where would you say we are in the process? I think we’re still very early. There’s a lot of interest in watching, but do you see a lot of people jumping in?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:53] You’re right to say that we’re fairly early on. Back to what we were talking about earlier, there’s some experimentation and some pilots going on, and people are trying to figure out where things will land. Of course, that is further complicated by the fact that these tools are changing so quickly. What’s working now in the current pilot or current experiment could be very different from what’s possible just a few months from now. That is an added layer that is interesting to follow. But one of the things that particularly an association learning business has to potentially capitalize on is community. When you want the human interaction, that human mentor, yes, to a certain extent, a chatbot can simulate that or give you that feel. But, if you really want that connection—it may be a cohort of learners going through an experience together, supporting each other, not only with content but emotionally—then that’s an area where associations certainly have a head start over something like a more generic AI tool—ChatGPT, Copilot, or anything like that.

Mary Byers: [00:23:07] I’m glad you brought that up because I think peer-to-peer learning is an opportunity, and I don’t know that we do enough of it in associations. I’ve had the privilege of facilitating a couple of mastermind groups, and I love the ability to take a cohort, meet monthly, quarterly, and do deep dives in topics of interest and to challenge each other and to learn from each other. Frankly, I don’t understand why more associations aren’t starting their own masterminds. We’re certainly seeing for-profit companies do it. Consultants do it. Vistage does it. EOS does it. A lot of groups are doing it, and yet we have the subject matter experts in our associations. We have the ability to organize. We have the ability to pull together. That’s a real opportunity for associations going forward too, especially in the impersonal environment of AI.

Mary Byers: [00:24:08] But, as you said, that whole opportunity to learn together with colleagues, to learn with and from, but also the peer-to-peer learning aspect of it too, so it’s not just a sage on the stage, but it is an opportunity to hear some learning, then to personally decide, “How does this affect me?” and then to talk with colleagues and debate with colleagues to decide, if this is good information, how we can use this information. “What’s the takeaway from this new learning that we’ve done together?” There are real opportunities for associations there. And that’s not the typical learning that we’ve done before.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:50] We’re in the process of talking with a number of association CEOs about the role of learning—the broad umbrella of things that go into learning—and also the role of education, so a little bit more narrowly, more of the formal experiences, but the role of learning and education in the association’s value proposition. You work with association boards, association leaders, and so I would love to get your perspective. How often does learning and/or education come up as an aspect of that overall association value proposition?

Mary Byers: [00:25:28] If you look at association mission and vision, you’ll see it baked in. I was working with a CPA organization recently, and their vision says they want to be viewed as leaders in professional competency. The only way that you can be a leader in professional competency is if you are providing education and learning on an ongoing basis for your members. Their mission also says they want to contribute to the success of their members. I don’t know how you contribute to the success of your members if you’re not educating them, helping them learn, helping them look at what’s ahead. Many medical organizations, part of their mission is to improve patient outcomes. I don’t know how you improve a patient outcome if you aren’t helping your physicians with their continuing medical education requirements and emerging best practices when it comes to specific illnesses or diseases. I think it is part and parcel of who we are, and sometimes, if we haven’t specifically stated it, it’s worth recognizing it because, if it doesn’t say “education” in your purpose, we have to recognize the value of education in helping us with our mission and purpose.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:51] That’s definitely consistent with what we’re hearing. It is usually baked into the mission at some level—the importance of learning or education—which then points to the association’s need to help provide that learning and that education. You’ve been doing this for years at this point, so have you noticed any change in the relative value or importance placed on learning or education over the time, or has it been pretty much consistent in your time working with associations?

Mary Byers: [00:27:20] It’s been pretty consistent. Perhaps—and this is a blanket statement—the revenue opportunities for education have shifted. I know for a fact that the competitive environment has gotten more challenging for organizations because associations used to be the primary way that members were educated, but now we have competition from sometimes the association’s consultants. Sometimes the organization that the member is part of itself is doing more in continuing education. We have for-profit companies that are offering certification and education. There is more competition than there ever has been before, and I think that’s challenging associations because part of our question is, “Do we have the capacity to keep up with the rapidly changing environment?” And, as you just said, what we’re looking at with AI now is going to be different in a matter of months.

Mary Byers: [00:28:25] In some ways, it feels to me like the train has left the station, and we are running after the train trying to catch it. That’s why we need to be looking through the windshield and not looking at what education was yesterday but where the possibilities are going forward. The landscape has changed. I don’t think the importance has changed. We’re more revenue-challenged than we’ve ever been before. Some discussions about that. If your education provided a profit, and now it’s providing less of a profit or break-even, there’s value for a discussion. If it’s part of our mission to educate, then maybe break-even is okay, maybe smaller revenue is okay, and, as we talked about, maybe there are some programs that need to be sunset so that we have the necessary expertise, capacity, time, and financial resources to invent the future of education for our profession or industry

Celisa Steele: [00:29:26] We’re talking about the learning that associations can provide. You yourself exist in the world, and you need to continue to learn and evolve. I’m curious to hear about how you approach your own lifelong learning, Mary. Are there sources, habits, or practices that you go back to?

Mary Byers: [00:29:43] I have an education process map that I use annually, and I’m happy to share it with you, and you can share it with your listeners. It helps me identify each year what I need to learn and takes me a step further and asks, “Where can I learn that? Is it something I can learn in small bites in a little bit of free time in my office? Would it make more sense for me to go do a deep dive? And, if I’m going to do that, who am I doing the deep dive with?” At the beginning of every year, I set some learning goals. I’ll confess I haven’t hit 100 percent of those learning goals, but I hit more than if I wasn’t setting any goals to begin with at all. For me, it’s very intentional and deliberate. Where do I feel like I’m falling behind? What do I need to know? For me, I’m asking, “Where are my client’s being challenged, and how does my education need to change so that I can help them in those challenges?”

Celisa Steele: [00:30:47] Would you be willing to give us a glimpse of what you’re focused on this year in terms of what you’re trying to learn?

Mary Byers: [00:30:54] Absolutely. Just for fun, I’ll let you know that I set professional goals, but I also set personal goals. One of my personal goals is I would like to learn to surf next year, so that’s in the future. For me, AI continues to be an important piece of my learning, partly because it is changing so rapidly. I help facilitate a mastermind, and that is how I am reaching that goal, by leading that mastermind. I’m not the subject matter expert, but I’m being exposed on a monthly basis to learning in that area, so that’s how I’m meeting that challenge. Another thing that I have identified as being important is looking at how for-profit companies are developing strategy and making sure that, as I help associations with their strategy, what we can learn from for-profits is coming into the not-for-profit arena. But also I’m challenging myself to make sure that the process that I’m using is as up-to-date as possible. And, as I see an opportunity for improvement and change, then I’m borrowing from what I’m learning in the strategy environment. I’ve taken two different strategy classes this year. It’s been interesting for me in affirming that I’m where I need to be there, and sometimes that’s the purpose of education too—it’s not to learn something new, but it’s to affirm what you already know, and I think there’s value in that too.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:25] We’ve covered a fair amount of ground in our time together. If you were to try to pull out one to three things that you are hoping listeners might take away from our conversation, what would you highlight?

Mary Byers: [00:32:38] I would go back to focusing on innovating in small percentages, whether it’s 10—a number that I just pulled out of the air because I thought it was doable. For some organizations, it might be 5 percent. Other organizations who’ve gotten behind, it may be 30 or 40 percent. If you innovate small percentages regularly, that naturally leads to evolution, and that’s healthy for organizations. The second thing I would say and repeat is that threats are also opportunities. I mentioned the threat of AI, but there’s a teaching opportunity there. We can use AI for things like study buddies, help with certification prep. Anywhere that’s a threat, take a step back, and look at where the opportunities are. And then the last thing that I would say is that comfort and complacency are associations’ biggest risks, both on the leadership side and on the membership side. When members have become comfortable and complacent with our programs, services, and offerings, and they’re not taking advantage of them, that’s not good for the association. And, if our leadership, either on the staff side or the board side, has become comfortable and complacent, and they’re not innovating, and they’re not doing pilots or placing small bets, then that is a surefire way to become irrelevant very quickly. It’s really important to make sure that we haven’t gotten too comfortable or complacent and that our members haven’t.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:30] We’re not done quite yet—keep listening for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:33] Learn more about Mary’s work at marybyers.com.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:43] If you got value from this episode, please share it with a colleague or leave a rating and review. Those things help others find the show and support the work we’re doing on the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:55] Mary shared a lot of helpful advice. One point that stood out for me is that innovation doesn’t have to be flashy or a big breakthrough epiphany. Small, consistent changes can add up to real evolution.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:09] She also made the point that every threat also presents an opportunity. This is why so much strategy work focuses on really understanding the situation, so that threats can be seen, and opportunities teased out. As you and Mary discussed, AI, for example, may be a challenge, but it’s also a chance to better serve learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:31] Lastly, I’ll echo Mary’s assertion that comfort and complacency are real risks, for leaders and for learners. Staying relevant requires intentional action and sometimes uncomfortable change.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:46] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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If you’re a leader navigating change, shifting expectations, or questions about your organization’s identity and future, this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast is for you. It features Lowell Aplebaum, CEO of Vista Cova. Lowell works with association leaders and boards on visioning, governance, and strategy—and he brings a thoughtful, deeply human approach to the challenges facing organizations today.

Co-host Celisa Steele talks with Lowell about how identity has to come before strategy because you can’t lead effectively if you’re unclear on who you are as an organization. They also delve into bravery, stability (even in volatile times), empathy, and curiosity. And, while those might sound like highfalutin topics, Lowell translates them into practical advice.

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] If you’re a leader navigating change, shifting expectations, or questions about your organization’s identity and future, this episode is for you. Whether you work in an association or another kind of learning business, chances are you’ve felt the weight of uncertainty and are looking for a way forward that’s both grounded and strategic.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:37] Our guest for this episode, number 458, is Lowell Aplebaum, CEO of Vista Cova, and a previous guest on the Leading Learning Podcast. Lowell works with association leaders and boards on visioning, governance, and strategy—and he brings a thoughtful, deeply human approach to the challenges facing organizations today.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:58] Absolutely. Lowell talks about how identity has to come before strategy—how you can’t lead effectively if you’re unclear on who you are as an organization. He also talks about bravery and stability—about showing up with conviction even in volatile times.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:15] And it’s not all high-level philosophy—Lowell also shares practical advice. He talks about how to structure board agendas, how to equip volunteer leaders, and how to rethink learning design so it’s not just rigorous in content but meaningful in experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] We also get into empathy, curiosity, and AI, and we wrap up with Lowell’s perspective on lifelong learning, both professionally and personally.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:42] There’s a lot in here, so let’s get to it. Here’s the conversation with Lowell Aplebaum.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:52] When I think about the world right now, it seems like we’re continuing to be served up a lot of uncertainty. We’ve got political uncertainty. We’ve got economic uncertainty. We’ve got a lot happening in the tech realm with AI. I’m curious to know, Lowell, what do you see as some of the most pressing implications of this moment when you think about the work that associations and other learning businesses do, from that strategic standpoint of what it means to do their work and exist in this world of uncertainty?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:02:24] I’m going to parse uncertainty into two frames. In the early 2020s, with the onset of COVID and what that did to our rate of change, that unto itself caused an uncertainty. There was forced innovation that had to happen if you were going to adapt to survive through a terrible time of challenge. But also that time of challenge, the forced adaptation, gave us some base level of skill sets from an organizational standpoint of how to be more adaptive. And so, at least when I’m working with organizations, whether it’s through the idea of a changing generation and learning context or an overall organizational direction, that rate of change is not new—we’re five years into that. And, even before, that was moving quickly. There’s an uncertainty that comes with we need to be able to quickly adapt, perhaps not who we are but how we are living, who we need to be, that we’ve had a handful of years to come up to speed, whether or not organizations have embraced being quicker in that adaptation in the face of uncertain times.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:03:36] What I’d point out here—by the time we’re having this conversation—is this year’s been interesting because the uncertainty of an ever-increasing rate of change has now intersected with volatility. What I mean is that, even as things developed and changed—new technology—some of those bedrock places of foundation and stability that were the basis upon which organizations and their leadership could base their conversation and their projection have really been shaken. Whether you look at that through the lens of threats to nonprofit tax status and potentially having corporate tax rates on membership and learning and everything, whether you look at grant-funded organizations and what that’s done, whether you look at so many of my beloved scientific organizations, pick the things that were tried, true, tested.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:04:35] If you could live in D.C., how many people thought they were safe in their jobs for the rest of their lives? How many of your colleagues, friends, and family are now experiencing job upheaval? Uncertainty—I think we’re at the intersect of these two contexts, Celisa. We’re at the intersect of a society that now is experiencing rapid evolution, shift, and change, and we’re doing so now in this time and age that has not slowed, but the pieces, the bedrock of stability that perhaps gave us a place to stand to navigate that, are teetering. And, if you know any change management theory, you know the slope that change is hard because, when you experience change, you experience loss—the loss of stability of what you once knew was true, the abandonment of the processes that brought you success—and you have to come out the other side of seeing wins and returns, that the change was worth it, until you build a new platform of stability that, whatever you change to now, is better and is working.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:05:38] That’s the long way around to get to the answer to your question, which is the opportunity I see in this moment for our organizations is to try to find those places to create (even if it’s short-term) stability, short-term bedrocks of knowledge, of convening, of community. Together there’s a greater whole that, through volatility and uncertainty, there is still stability in who our profession is, who our community is. And perhaps the work we have to do has to change—the problems we have to address, our priorities still need to be navigated. But, if we have clarity on our identity, then I have a deep-seated belief that the nonprofit organizations that we serve are the beacons of hope and light in a time of universal uncertainty that can gather people, gather industries, gather professions together to navigate that uncertainty through the strength of unity and community.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:35] Part of what you’re saying there does make me think about the fact that, when you were on the podcast last—not too long after COVID had hit—one of the points you were making was around the need to shift from the crisis mindset in dealing with the immediate upheaval and uncertainty to a strategic mindset. Which still feels very relevant in this moment. Do you agree that, in this moment, there is still a need to shift from crisis to strategy? And, if so, then what does that look like practically? What are some of the ways to get to some of that bedrock that you were talking about in your answer to that last question?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:07:18] There is still a continual need for a strategic mindset. What that means for this moment in time has a different lens, at least from my point of view. A strategic mindset for where we are in the mid-2020s heading towards the late 2020s means two or three critical pieces. Number one is a clear, crisp understanding of identity before you get to strategy. From an identity perspective, if you take a group of leaders and say in a sentence or two, what makes this organization unique in what it brings to community and society, either because of what it can do that no one else can or what it does better than anyone else that makes a positive impact for its community and for society? But you make them do that in the context of what would that have been ten, twenty, thirty years ago? What is that today? What does that need to be in five to ten years?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:08:17] The articulation of identity—especially present to future—gives a core basis upon which you can build strategy. A volatile and uncertain world should not change your identity. It should change how you utilize that identity and the impact that you make and what you advance. But I have found a muddying of the waters, and, in the face of so much uncertainty, identity is based off of past instead of future-focused context. I use that as one lens of strategy, of a strategic mindset. The other is this balance of a place of, as I referred to earlier, being able to put in places of stability. What can you depend on us for? No matter what happens, what will we be here for? As well as a place of bravery. If truly you are driven by mission—and money drives mission; organizations need to have political relationships to advance mission—there are many factors of what you need. But the ostrich philosophy of “Let’s hide our head in the sand, and hopefully these things pass by” is simply going to lead to you drowning in the sand.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:09:34] Where do organizations—if they are clear on their identity—choose bravery to be the voice and the standpoint, to be the champion of their mission, of their purpose? To do so in a way that hopefully is a place of unification, recognizing there are many diverse parts of their community, and they have to be the platform, the bedrock for all of those? But those places of unity should be places that they are loud, proud, and the leading voice of. And I think a strategic mindset for the place we are in the mid-2020s has a clarity of identity, has recognition of where we bring stability to our community, has the bravery to be the strongest voice, the champion, purpose and mission, and the ability to convene and bring together, build bonds between the community that is going to rally around that purpose and that mission in a way that, in the world where we’re all too divided, our organizations are places of strength together.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:41] Looking back and then looking at the current moment and then looking forward, I really like that because it helps, I think, a group of leaders or those involved to see the evolution and how that does shift slightly over time and then gives you the permission or the ability then to think about the future and imagine where we might go from the present moment. Part of what’s on my mind is, if this is a group of people and this idea of coming to a shared identity, it seems like that can be somewhat messy. What does that look like to get to agreement around “This is our identity; this is what people can count on us for, so that then we can speak with this loud, proud voice about the work that we do and how we’re going to serve”? Talk a little bit about how multiple voices come to coalesce around an identity and what that looks like in practice.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:11:32] The opposite of messy, if you’re talking about neat, has to it a finality. If everything is neat, ordered, and structured in its box, then you have a hard time moving things to a new structure. And so I think you need a little bit of messiness. But the messiness I would think of is the mindset of the identity of an organization has clarity but malleability for a continual evolution. And that means that inherently leadership has to be emboldened, strengthened, recognize the obligation, and be trained to be champions, so that the identity of the organization and how it embodies its community is not something done to the community but with the community.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:12:18] And that means, as we think about the duties we look to our leadership to fulfill, a primary one that has emerged is that we don’t do the job that we should in terms of training our volunteer leaders to be this. When we think about them being champions of the organization, there needs to be a continual place of effort and proactive outreach for dialogue and input with the many components and pieces of a community—not that the loudest voice changes direction because you always get the bell curve of the loudest voices on one end and the loudest voices on the other but that there is a continual dialogue and a place of input, a place of “What are the trends, the themes, the perspectives that we’re hearing? How do we, as an organization, steer—not from our place of purpose and mission and turn 90 degrees but navigate what makes our unique identity true, through the waters of what we’re hearing, as the challenges that are being experienced?” That’s where you get the messiness—the continual evolution of the solution, design, and application to ever-shifting challenges without losing the identity.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:31] We’ve often talked about strategy—and a lot of people talk about strategy—as a framework to help make decisions. How do you wrestle with collective decision-making around what is the right decision based on the strategy?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:13:45] A strategic framework is a good reference point if you want to point to it in terms of decision-making, but it’s meaningless if you haven’t incorporated it into practical ways of how you’re living it. There’s a multi-tier incorporation that has to infuse the organization if it’s something that’s actually going to guide the organization. If I’m designing ideal board agendas, 10 to 15 percent of the time is consent agenda with all the committee…. No one got on the board because they want committee reports read at them. So get all that stuff done there. And then 40 to 50 percent is about the business of the organization—the idea is those things are directly correlated back to connect to what we set as our strategic focus and priorities and the things we’re trying to achieve. There are things that are the business of the organization that don’t correlate to those things. They become glaringly obvious if that’s part of your routine. That direct correlation unto itself creates a fluency of leadership that where we invest our resources is designed to connect to what we said are the critical places we need to focus, and so there’s an answer to the responsibility therefore.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:15:08] By the way, there’s a 25- to 30-percent piece of that agenda left for generative and futurist conversation. From all these conversations, what’s coming that may need to shift some of that? But that’s just one piece of it, Celisa. If you really want to see strategy guide an organization, besides a direct integration with how leaders spend their time and agendas, how is every committee of an organization’s charge refreshed? I have a phoenix philosophy that every committee should be sunset every strategy cycle, and then you rebirth the ones that you need, demanded by operational strategic priority, with charges that directly align to those strategic or operational priorities. With what they’re trying to achieve, correlate it to that, with clear, mini-strategic plans. “What are we going to achieve this year? What’s our scope of work there?” So their work can be celebrated for the achievements. But the story of strategic advancement from this framework is not just at the central organization; it’s every arm of the organization.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:16:09] The committees, the same thing with the components, the chapters, the task. So what you see is a hub-and-spoke model of strategy. The strategy itself guides the organization as an absolute of identity but as a malleable place that many hands contribute to how it advances. From there, the singular framework of “We make decisions based on our strategy” If we started from a place of uncertainty, you have to recognize that, if you are any organization that experiences efforts in the advocacy realm, in the learning realm, in grant-making realm, the world right now does not look like the world nine months ago. I don’t, however, think that that means frameworks that design what we’re trying to accomplish are necessarily moot. It may have shifted how we accomplish it. It may shift what groups we need to accomplish it. It may shift how we communicate it. It may shift who we convene and how we convene.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:13] Part of what you’re talking about with who we convene, how we convene, how we do the work—to me, that feels related to an importance you place on things like empathy, listening, and curiosity. Because that’s part of how we’re going to diagnose, in the moment, what needs to happen and how we can serve the community we’ve set out to serve. Talk a little bit about things like empathy and listening, their role in an organization strategy, and potentially even how one might operationalize something like empathy—if that doesn’t already sound like a contradiction to operationalize empathy.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:17:52] Of the three books I’m writing right now, my favorite is titled Curiosity Driving Mission. Play with me in the sandbox if you will for a moment, in the space of an organizational mindset and framework that was driven by curiosity and how that would have to change how we function. Curiosity inherently means that all of us need humility—what we know today is insufficient. We are continually looking to expand perspective and horizon because curiosity means exploration. What does that mean for leadership? When you get elected or selected for a critical role in the organization, much less an officer role, it’s not because your wisdom is sufficient; it’s not because your experience and the length of your CV are all that’s needed. A curiosity-driven organization is going to select leaders that all the more so are seeking the many voices that will continue to enhance.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:18:53] Staff-driven—if we think about that as lens and context, what is the difference? If you think about customer service and experience of what we’re trying to provide for our community, from a curiosity-driving mindset, “Password reset?,” “Okay, here’s your answer. And what else are you curious about? What else should we know so we could serve you better?” Are we proactively reaching out so we can understand the experience you’re having? A curiosity mindset shifts that. And, in our communities—you talked about empathy—if we were more interested in hearing others’ voices than hearing our own, how would that shift the sessions we put on, the learning we design, the meetings we convene, the communities that we create, and the opportunities we provide for every single member to have deeper-set relationships with one another?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:19:45] Because what we’re trying to introduce to them is that, yes, we need your shared wisdom, your individual lived experiences contributed, but the opportunity you have is not in those contributions; it’s what you hear from one another and the relationships that are going to inform the stronger community we’re going to have. A curiosity mindset that becomes part of the cultural foundation of an organization demands empathy because you’re in the service of another and hearing what they bring to you, and there’s a care for someone who is bringing you insight and willing to share of themselves with you. If we think about powerful organizations that are able to rally many voices behind causes, it’s because there’s a driving need, but there’s also a community that sees in one another connection and a greater coherence that comes from an empathetic “We’re going through something together, and we will get through this together if we are together.”

Celisa Steele: [00:20:48] I like the emphasis on curiosity, and I think there’s also the benefit for the individual. Personally, if I’m curious about my work, then that tends to mean I’m more interested; I’m more engaged. It’s not just checking things off the to-do list; it’s me really enjoying the work that goes into doing whatever task is at hand.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:14] We’re talking to association CEOs, and we’re talking about the role of learning broadly and education more specifically in their organization’s value proposition. You’re not an association CEO yourself, but I know you work with many and work with boards, and so I would love to get your perspective on how often you hear learning and education come up as an aspect of that overall association value proposition—what role you see it play.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:21:45] Nine times out of ten, it’s one of the strategic pieces of identified priority and identity of an organization. There’s a real universality there in terms of what organizations and nonprofit associations bring to the table, that, once someone has finished with their formal education but needs to continue to learn to get better in their career, the role that associations have played and have the potential to continue to play in terms of supporting a workforce. What I unfortunately see that goes in tandem with that, though, is that the learning approach and methodology and even many times the platforms that are being presented are based off of what learning has been in terms instead of more modern and current not just theory but application of how adults learn. If what we are looking for in any sort of upholding of certification is credit units, then I can sign in for a Webinar, have it playing on my third screen, answer five true-and-false questions at the end that these organizations let me answer as many times as possible until I get it right, we have to assume best intent and hope that they’re learning. But let’s be honest.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:02] You’re right. Not a lot of rigor there and not necessarily a lot of learning.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:23:07] And there could be great rigor in the quality of the content, and that is where organizations traditionally used to shine—if we bring rigor to the content we are providing, we have fulfilled our obligation of bringing best-in-class learning. I would posit that is insufficient for what is needed for workforce development in the world today. You do not need less rigor in the quality of your content. I’m not saying diminish that. But, in terms of the experience of the content in terms of the acknowledgement of the multimodal learning that different learners need, the idea, in this time-strapped time, that people are able to dedicate a full hour versus, can things be broken down to smaller bites and segments so they can do sprint learning?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:23:56] I was talking with one organization whose members often go back and take MBAs, and they were talking about some of the programs emerging, that you can do literally all the learning for your MBA on your phone—listening to lectures, answering the things on your phone. You don’t need a computer. The idea of not just a certification or a certificate but a degree. That concept of meeting the learner where they are at is a gap that I don’t see as many organizations as I would like adapting to. In part because you have many of those in leadership that went through tried-and-true traditional methods of learning, and so that’s the context they have for what learning looks like. The tolerance for a subpar learning experience, regardless of the quality and rigor of the content, there’s less tolerance for that. So organizations that have chief learning officers that think not only about the rigor but about the design and the experience are heads and tails ahead of those that only think about the rigor.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:09] You’ve begun to talk about it some, with things like the MBA that you can do completely on your phone or the need to evolve and look at the different modes and ways that we can engage learners. When you think about learning that’s happening now and what associations can do to serve those learners, are there particular changes that maybe you haven’t talked about that come to mind? Or issues that you see that are hampering individuals’ ability to learn? Which, of course, then opens up the opportunity for organizations to help address some of those issues that might be hampering learning.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:25:47] One that’s not new but still not done well is to help learners right-size the level of the content to the level of their knowledge, experience, and career. Someone who is five years into their career versus 15 versus 25 versus 35 has a different inherent potential learning place, depending on what the nature of the content is. The need to set a baseline of introduction is needed. And so organizations, I have seen more of them try to be like, “This is introductory or advanced.” There’s been some effort to it, but what I do not see is the follow-through that holds the instructor accountable to what they say the level of their content is. That’s one place that I think there is an opportunity.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:26:40] The second, if I’m being very blunt—I apologize to my many meeting professional friends out there—is stadium seating in learning settings is terrible. The rows of sitting cramped in. You have Socrates at the front giving you their wisdom that you are going to absorb through osmosis. I’m not saying there’s never a place for it—I understand in a keynote. But that, as default, puts so many barriers in the way of having the space to be creative. The only person you’d be in dialogue with is who’s at my shoulders. The only place to capture, create, write, or draw is whatever I can balance on my lap. There’s no space to be an active learner when you’re in those sessions.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:27:37] Third is that there is a difference between a subject matter expert and someone who is a learning expert that understands the many modes of designs of learning, and there’s a difference between someone who’s a learning expert in a virtual environment—it is rare to find one person that does all that. And none of them are negatives. You don’t have the other pieces. But the truth is you want all the pieces if you’re really thinking about the holistic learner experience. Organizations are trying to explore in their learning design the recognition of the strengths of who they’re bringing to the table and to supplement those who don’t have those strengths.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:28:16] If we care more about this being a workshop so it’s really about the learning design and experience, we need the content to be rigorous, but can we have someone who’s an expert in learning design and supplement them with someone who can provide them with the data, the facts, the knowledge, the research they can design off of? This is more of an intensive learning about content. We still want some good activity and thought. Can we give the subject matter expert a learning consultant to help frame and how to shape the actual class and maybe even facilitate some pieces of it? There’s a real opportunity for organizations to think about the holistic learning experience and these different competencies of what you want designed to supplement the sessions you create, not assuming that one person has everything that you need, but that the organization takes on the responsibility of giving them the structure they need to design the best learning experience possible.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:15] What are you seeing or thinking about in terms of AI?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:29:19] My answer today will be different three months later, nine months later, two years later. What I’d say right now is that, when I am running sessions, the frame that I try to give to those in my sessions—and, I’ll be clear, for me, every session is a learning session. Strategic planning is a classroom, and all you are constructing is a place for the learners to also be teachers so they can learn from one another. And, if you use the mindset that every session you do is an opportunity for learning, as a classroom—whether or not you state it that way—then AI is both a tool that can help enhance the learning experience as well as potentially another learning contributor. The frame is where do you incorporate AI capacity and capability to supplement the learning experience so that someone who wants to express something but doesn’t have the right words can say, “All right, give me three or four ways to express this idea”?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:30:24] If you’re thinking about a collaborative learning moment, the group can come up with, “What do you think? What do you think? What do you think?” AI: What does the collective of this look like together? There’s not a deferment of the responsibility of ideation or of conclusion-making to AI, but it’s at the table with you for a place of input, refinement, and possibility. So it expands what you could potentially think about. Where AI comes in is from a place of expanding perspective, refining possibility for directions, but there’s not the abandonment of the human ideation nor the human assessment, refinement, and conclusion. It’s in that middle piece that, when it comes to learning, at least from my perspective right now, AI is at its strongest in an active learning setting.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:31:23] In a separate learning setting, if you look at ChatGPT today and use its Deep Research button function, there’s a whole lot of possibility in terms of clicking that on and saying, “Here’s the topic I’m about to do a session on. Deep Research, give me a whole bunch of background sources.” You need to check them. But you want 20 different citations about the curiosity mindset and how it’s impacting nonprofit organizations? You can’t tell me that it doing that in five minutes and coming back, that I can’t scan those articles and be like, “These three would be good pre-reads,” and that’s not going to enhance my session. So there are possibilities in preparation as well. There are possibilities in refinement at the end. “We have 20 different vision/missions. What would be the different places?” At current capacity, I do find that AI is better in an analytical than an aspirational space.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:32:28] If you’re trying to come up with citations and data or you’re trying to access the gajillion different references out there, you’re trying to take ideas and synthesize and come out with possibilities—“Is there logic to this? Give me different places.”—those analytical directions, AI is a great tool for. “This concept is incredibly important, and we want to make sure the next generation coming into our profession not only understands the concept but feels inspired by it because the concept is going to be one that potentially gets them to decide that this is the profession for them,” I find there is less expertise at this moment for the empathy, for the emotional element. AI will still produce that. I just don’t see what it’s producing to have as much heart as it has brain.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:18] Tell me a little bit about how you approach your own lifelong learning.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:33:22] The most important thing in my life is my children. By nature, I’m a lifelong learner, but I’m a big believer that the example that we set is at least going to be a memory upon which future generations make decisions. Learning doesn’t just feed my brain; it feeds my soul. But, as much as I feel like the work I do is my dedication and investment to building a better world for my children to inherit, I believe the learning I do is the same thing. Finishing a degree, I had friends and family tell me I was not allowed to start another for at least 12 to 18 months, so I’m on my mandatory hiatus period. I have a few different paths. I continue to seek structured learning because I find, whether it’s a certificate or a certification, it’s not about the letters, but one-off learning, for me, doesn’t leave as much of a memory. It could be good for a singular skill set acquisition.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:34:35] In terms of shaping my mindset, shaping my attempt, structured learning with segments and accomplishment. I look for what certificate, certifications, and programs would align to that. LinkedIn—who’s posting what, and who’s learning what, and how should I think about that? A degree is always out there, but, being in a doctoral program for three or four years, I’m a voracious reader, as are all the members of my family. But, for three or four years, my reading was pretty much towards the doctoral program, and so, when I got out of the doctoral program, my brain was like, “Feed me.” I read probably between seven to nine books a month and listen to two or three. I’m on a flight every week, and I’m a big believer in sacred spaces. Saying good morning to my kids, saying good night every night even if I’m at a board dinner are sacred spaces. I leave the board dinner for 15 to 30 minutes—these are things that will not be touched. For me, takeoffs and landings on flights are sacred spaces for reading. They’re not for working. They’re not for watching things. They’re for reading. And so that influx for me.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:35:51] I struggle a little bit with audiobook versus podcast because I love both and fluctuate back and forth there. But, for me, it’s this balance. I always am between four to eight books at a time. I have a book or two or a podcast or two I’m listening to. Usually if it’s gone 30 days without me being in some kind of small, structured learning, I need to find another one. It’s like, “I can’t sleep. Let me work on this a little bit.” And then I’m always playing with the thought of “What’s the next degree?” Again not for more letters but because as humans, if we’re not growing, we’re atrophying. So it’s important that my kids see that learning is lifelong. And it’s important for my own health as much as exercise is. I think exercise for your wisdom, your intelligence, and your perspective is just as important. Muscles grow because you stretch them, and that’s not only true of your physical muscles.

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:56] We’re not done quite yet—keep listening for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:00] Connect with Lowell Aplebaum on LinkedIn, and learn more about Vista Cova.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:10] If you got value from this episode, we’d appreciate it if you’d share it with a colleague or leave a rating or review. That helps others find the show, and it supports the work we do.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:20] Before we end, let’s hit a few of the big takeaways from the conversation with Lowell.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:25] First, strategy has to start with identity. If you don’t know what makes your organization unique—and why that matters—you’re going to have a hard time navigating change with purpose.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:36] Speaking of change, Lowell emphasized the role of curiosity and empathy—both in how organizations learn and in how leaders lead. Those qualities help create space for dialogue, evolution, and community.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:52] He also challenged the idea that rigor in content is enough. As learning businesses, we need to be thinking about design, experience, and engagement too—not just the information we’re delivering.

Celisa Steele: [00:38:04] I liked the metaphor that he used—”Muscles grow because you stretch them, and that’s not only true of physical muscles.” That’s a good reminder that learning isn’t always easy, but it is essential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:38:17] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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If you’re leading a learning business right now, you’re almost certainly navigating uncertainty—political, economic, technological. It can be hard to know how to lead well, plan strategically, and stay responsive without burning out.

Our guest in this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 457, is someone who has spent years helping association leaders. Seth Kahan is the founder of Visionary Leadership and the author of the books Getting Change Right and Getting Innovation Right. Co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Seth about his Disruption Playbook and the seven elements he sees as essential for leading in uncertain times.

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: [00:00:17] If you’re leading a learning business right now, you’re almost certainly navigating uncertainty—political, economic, technological. And, in the face of all that, it can be hard to know how to lead well, plan strategically, and stay responsive without burning out.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] Our guest in this episode, number 457, is someone who has spent years helping association leaders. Seth Kahan is the founder of Visionary Leadership and the author of the books Getting Change Right and Getting Innovation Right. He’s also a long-time friend of the show—we’ve had him on four times before. Jeff, this time around you talked with Seth in June 2025, a moment of volatility in U.S. politics.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:00] Yes, indeed. And Seth opens with how that’s affecting the associations he works with, and he shares what leaders can do to stay effective when the ground keeps shifting.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:11] You and Seth talk about his Disruption Playbook and seven elements he sees as essential for leading in uncertain times. You also talk about the role of learning—for staff, members, boards, and leaders.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:25] And we get into AI—how Seth is using it personally and professionally as a tool for curiosity, not just efficiency.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] If you’re looking for ways to think more clearly and lead more intentionally, dear listener, then this conversation is for you. Here’s the interview with Seth Kahan.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:48] Seth, you’ve been on the podcast several times now—we’re up to four at this point. Each conversation has felt very of the moment. There’s been something afoot every time it feels like, and there certainly is right now. What’s been most on your mind lately in the work that you do with leaders and organizations?

Seth Kahan: [00:02:06] I’m watching the fallout from the new administration. A lot of my clients are really suffering. They’re suffering from research being cut, truncated right in the middle of things. That has a huge impact on not just funding but morale, and so many people are in survival mode. A lot of my work—in the mental health space, I’m leading a grand challenge called Stop Stigma Together—includes working with organizations like the CDC, and there’s been a lot of uncertainty with people not being allowed to attend meetings, not allowed to contribute professionally. That’s probably the biggest thing of the moment—that we’re waiting to see how far this is going to go.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:45] We’ve talked in the past about your work with grand challenges, which I think is so interesting in this current environment. Can you say a little bit more about the grand challenges you’re working on? But also is this a time when leaders are open to taking on grand challenges?

Seth Kahan: [00:02:59] I don’t think so. I think a lot of leaders are in survival mode. They’re contracting, and so they’re going back to basics. A grand challenge is something that you do when you’ve got the desire to contribute largely to the world and to work with other partners on a big framework, take on problems that people have shied away from in the past, and a lot of times now organizations are asking, “How do we push through this time and survive? How do we not lose ground in the space that we’re in?” In general, I see people backing off of grand challenges. However, grand challenges are unique. And people who go after them or organizations that go after them, some of them are doing well. There’s still going to be a grand challenge here and there. It’s not going to go away. In general, the appetite is focusing much more on change and innovation. How do we create new products and services? How do we create new value? How do we get our staff to embrace being proactive in an environment that feels like it’s very choppy? And how do we get people to take the good kind of risks? That’s what I’m seeing.

Seth Kahan: [00:04:03] The two grand challenges I’m working on right now—I’ll just do a quick summary, and, if you want to, we can dig in deeper to them. Stop Stigma Together is about eliminating the stigma around mental health and substance use disorders on a national scale—bias and prejudice, trying to get that away, and trying to treat mental health the way we do physical health. A big word that’s used there is “parity.” Mental health should be on parity with physical health, and that comes down to the common understanding of it, so that we don’t look at somebody who has a mental health challenge as having a character flaw, but we see that you can have a mental health challenge just like you can get diabetes. The other aspect of it is laws and compliance—do we reinforce the stigma unintentionally? So that’s Stop Stigma Together. And we’re working with the Ad Council. We have a seven-year campaign called “Love Your Mind.” It’s going very well. I can talk about that. And we’re working with a lot of partnerships. We have about 300 organizations that are working together to eliminate that stigma.

Seth Kahan: [00:05:06] The other grand challenge is working with the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. They were birthed out of radiology, X-rays, physics. And X-rays, oh my God, we could look inside the human body with these things 75 years ago, and that has evolved. There are all kinds of ways of looking inside the human body—medical ultrasound, many different types of radiology now. Then there are therapies, and the therapies are literally putting radioisotopes in pharmaceuticals and delivering them in the body, mostly around cancer. Cancer is the number one area. The other area that physicists contribute to in medicine is AI. They are the original creators—the physicists—of the artificial intelligence in terms of code, understanding how to make it safe, large language models, and all of that. There are a lot of physicists in the medical space who are zeroing in on how do we develop AI in medicine?

Seth Kahan: [00:06:04] I was just reading the other day about how, in Europe, they’re already using AI to make decisions around, for example, cancer treatment. What’s most effective? They’ve reached a point where they’re comfortable relying on it. I don’t think Americans are there yet, mostly. We’re doing a summit in early 2026, where we’re identifying the biggest breakthroughs in physics and medicine over the next ten years. And we’re bringing in multiple stakeholders—not just the physicists but the FDA, all the different organizations that need to participate for those breakthroughs to happen.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:34] We’re always following your work with great interest, reading your newsletter, trying to keep up with what you’re doing, and it’s always great to have you here on the show. What made you pop on our radar screen this time was we noticed in one of your newsletters, not too long ago, you talked about a Disruption Playbook that you had put out, and you were just talking about AI there, which obviously is a disruptor. We were like, “Well, we’ve been talking about uncertainty. We’ve been talking about disruption.” And the last time you were on the show, we talked about disruption.

Seth Kahan: [00:07:01] Yes, we did. I remember that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:03] So it’s apropos to have you back again. You put out this playbook for executive leadership in turbulent times, and you’ve characterized this or said it’s “a guide for executives ready to lead with foresight and integrity through political volatility, cultural shifts, and systemic uncertainty,” all of which we’re certainly feeling right now. What compelled you to say, “A playbook is what we need for this. I’m going to put out a playbook here.”? What are you hoping leaders are going to be able to take from this playbook? Which we’ll, by the way, link to in the show notes.

Seth Kahan: [00:07:37] It’s already being used, so it’s been nice to get the response from CEOs, saying, “We’re using your playbook.” The environment was just so disruptive. First, you had—as we’ve already spoken about—the truncation of grants, research, people losing their jobs in the federal government, which impacted science, healthcare, and other fields as well—even manufacturing, which I know they’re trying to promote, but I’m not sure it’s going well. And I saw that the CEOs were scrambling, the ones that I was in touch with. They were getting hit in so many different directions simultaneously. They were a bit in shock, and they weren’t sure how to move forward. Of course, this is not the first time that we’ve been through massive disruption, and so I drew on my experience from the mortgage crisis, from the pandemic, and also the knowledge that I accrued studying disruptions during those disruptions. I thought, “Okay, this would be a great time to put out something that’s simple, that’s concise. It’s not too prescriptive, but it gives you a lot of different ways to look at what’s going on and to think about how you should best respond here.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:38] You talk about seven elements in the playbook, and these feel pretty perennial to me. As you said, you drew on experience from the past. They’re going to apply now. They’re going to apply in the future, I’m certain, but I’ll tick those off: situational awareness, strategic agility, stakeholder alignment, value-driven decisions, visibility and voice, culture of adaptation, and systemic foresight. Like I said, those all sound like areas that leaders need to be focused on continually and perennially. Do you find that there are ones that CEOs and other executives are struggling the most with right now? Do any of those stand out more than others in what you’re seeing?

Seth Kahan: [00:09:21] Yes. I would say that there’s a strong commitment in CEOs in general around strategic agility and stakeholder alignment. There is certainly this ongoing desire to make value-driven decisions. Nobody would say that we’re making decisions in any other way. Those are three where I think there is strength. They’re not super threatened by the current environment that we’re in because people are already doing that. But some of the others—situational awareness becomes extremely important right now because things are happening so fast, and they’re multidimensional. It’s too much for one person to keep track of all that’s going on. Having a weekly briefing or convening a diverse round table of people that can say, “Here’s what’s happening in my space” can all add so that you get a holistic picture, like a hologram. Everybody speaks up in a short period of time, and you start to see a general trend, or you start to see synergies or places where forces are combining in a not good way that could impact your space. Situational awareness, whenever there’s a lot of disruption, becomes more intense and requires a shorter periodicity. Whereas before I might convene this group once a month or once a quarter, now weekly briefings might be in order. What are we learning in real time? Or ad hoc briefings.

Seth Kahan: [00:10:38] Strategic agility—most people pledge allegiance to strategic agility, but they’ve still got their strategy, and they’re hunkering down and working on the tactics to execute it. This is a time where you suddenly need to be able to say, “Where should we be pivoting, and what does that look like?” You were asking me—in an e-mail that you sent me—around the difference between agility and speed. Agility is that flexibility to do something that’s different. Speed is how fast you respond to it. And you want both, to the best of your ability. But a lot of times speed with what you’re currently doing is not too hard to achieve because you get really efficient. You focus in on it. It’s like the race car that pulls off the track, and they’ve got to change the tires and do all the maintenance, and they’ve got seven seconds to do it in. It’s like you can run drills. But agility is different because then you say, “Okay, we’re not going to change the tires. We’re going to turn this into a tank. Or, “We’re going to turn this into a bicycle.” It’s like, “What?” That’s a whole different ball game. So strategic agility becomes important here.

Seth Kahan: [00:11:36] The visibility and voice is an area that requires an increase because your usual communication channels don’t suffice when there’s a lot of disruption. People get scared, and they want to know now, “What are you doing for me? How are you helping me out?” And there’s always a tension. Right now in the mental health work I do, there’s a tension between where can we work with this administration, or should we work with this administration? There are staff and customers who say, “Take a stand. Tell them we’re not going to do that. Push back.” And then there are others who say, “Let’s be more practical. There must be some place where we can work with them. Let’s just ignore the places where we can’t, and let’s join hands where we can.” That can become a real tension in this day and age.

Seth Kahan: [00:12:17] For example, in the mental health space, I convened the top leaders from 15 major mental health organizations in the United States in April to talk about how we work together under the current administration. Some of those big organizations, like the American Psychiatric Association or Mental Health America, were really about finding where can they shake hands with the administration and where should they stay away from it. But there were organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and Black Girls Smile—much smaller organizations—that have a target on their back with this administration. There’s no place they can work with them. You can see the tension there. “What are you going to do? Are you going to take a stand in my favor? Are you going to protect me? Are you on my side, or are you going to try and work with these people who are trying to take me out?” Visibility and voice is where you say, “This is who we are. This is what we’re doing.” And you stay in touch. You stay in touch with your members, with your customers, with your vendors.

Seth Kahan: [00:13:09] Culture of adaptation—just like what I was talking about before—I talked about agility, but now it’s like, can we really morph what we’ve got? Can we take it to a different place? How do we adjust? Let’s look at all the variables, and which one should we adjust? And the last one I’ll mention before we’re done is systemic foresight. Again, just like the briefings, you want to start engaging more deeply in it because, suddenly, you’ve got dramatic changes with short-time horizons, and that’s a different environment. You have a lot of talk in the press about uncertainty and how much the business world does not like uncertainty. That’s where this stuff comes in, dealing with that, so you’ve got to build your chops.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:47] Really knowing your situation well, having a grip on it, feels fundamental to having the confidence to be able to be agile, to be able to have that visibility and voice that you may need in this situation. What’s your perspective on that? Often organizations move too fast in saying, “Yes, we understand our situation. It’s this, this, and this, and we’re going to move ahead from here,” when they should dig in and come out of that with strong confidence that “We know what’s going on here, and here’s how we’re going to respond.”

Seth Kahan: [00:14:21] Yes, that’s a great question. What I find in my consulting practice is that, in some ways, you could take a lens and say, “I’m going back to basics.” Rather than doing grand challenges, I’m focusing on change, innovation, and leadership. Those are perennial, to use your word. However, it’s 2025, and all those things are done differently and with greater depth than ever before. For example, you can bring AI into the picture and start using prompts to help you dig down deep and to discover where you’re weak whereas your understanding is not as strong as it is in other places. Are there partners that we should be identifying for future fit that it doesn’t necessarily seem like we would be partners, but maybe there are rising or emerging opportunities that would bring us together? There was a great Pepsi Cola document on the Internet about how to develop strategic foresight, and they talk about some of the new products that they were able to come up with using strategic foresight—this is 20 years ago—and they had teams of people doing things that AI can do now. God knows how many hours they put into that, and now it’s probably measured in seconds or, at most, minutes that you can get some of that same information. We’re in a different world, and we want to make use of all the tools that we have. While you might be doing basics, we’re talking about doing it at a whole different level.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:44] And coming back to that idea of systemic foresight because everybody’s looking for some foresight right now to figure out how they’re going to adapt, where they’re going to take things, how do you help organizations (I’m assuming it’s primarily the executives and the board) really get that foresight that they need. And what are the characteristics of the leaders who get that and are able to implement that in their organizations?

Seth Kahan: [00:16:09] The characteristics of the leaders are that they’re hungry, they’re smart, and they understand strategy. Those are really the characteristics, and those fit many of the leaders on boards and many of the CEOs who are out there. Then you’ve got to feed them something that operates at the level that they’re capable of operating. For example, I was just watching a keynote speech for Inteleos, run by Dale Cyr, who does certification and medical ultrasound and radiology in many areas where we’re looking at imagery using technology, and he’s bringing in keynote speakers that are at the cutting edge of, for example, AI. In fact, he’s got one on his board. He’s vibing what’s the latest thinking out there? AI is one of those fields that’s growing exponentially. It’s too fast for any of us to keep up with. So he found experts in AI who are genuinely interested in the future of education and certification. He’s really importing that knowledge. That’s one of the things that you see CEOs doing. They’re out scanning the environment for thought leaders who understand their space, who can help them see, “What does this new emerging opportunity look like for us? What should we be concerned about? And what are some of the things that might be counterintuitive?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:22] That’s the looking forward part of it, but looking back is also something that you need to do. One of the actions that you recommend, which, again, is a perennial thing—you need to come back and do this on a consistent basis—is identifying a legacy practice or assumption that needs to be questioned. We both do a lot of work in the association and nonprofit worlds. I’d like to focus there. What are some of the most common assumptions that you see associations or nonprofits clinging to? What’s the downside of doing that? Why do they need to get rid of those things and jettison them to be able to move forward?

Seth Kahan: [00:18:02] One of the most dangerous things that I see is when you’ve got an organization that is eminent in its field, and people start to say, “Look, we already know what we’re doing. We’re number one. Let us do it the way we do it. We know this space.” That can be really challenging. If I walk into a market leader, and they’re telling me about all the weird stuff that they’re looking into that’s on the horizon, then I relax. But, if they’re telling me that they don’t need to go digital or that they can still do things the way they did them ten years ago because that’s what got them to where they are, then, to me, that’s a major danger sign. We all know that being eminent in anything does not ensure your future success. That’s a perennial issue too. You can look at Clayton Christensen’s work on The Innovator’s Dilemma—that’s what that’s all about, in part.

Seth Kahan: [00:18:49] When I’m working in an organization, one of the first things I’ll do is go in and start interviewing people. I’m always especially interested in interviewing people who are seen as sticks in the mud or are naysayers, apathetic, antagonistic because often they’ve got something real to say, and I’m all about finding the gem in that. It’s like, “What’s going on here? Why is this person holding on so tight to this?” And then sussing out, “What’s the issue?” Is the issue that the organization is not looking at something, or is the issue that there’s a sacred cow that the organization is not willing to sacrifice? Or is the issue that this person is truly living in an organization 20 years ago? And, mostly, it’s not the latter, I find.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:27] To tie a bow around the Disruption Playbook—and, again, we’ll definitely link to this because it’s a valuable resource, whether you’re an executive or at any level of the organization, looking at what’s laid out in the playbook is valuable. But, if you want to get started with that or you want to get better at leading through disruption, what’s one thing that a listener could potentially do today to start shifting their mindset or their habits?

Seth Kahan: [00:19:52] You want to shake yourself up in a constructive way, and the way that I always do that with myself is I try and find someone who’s talking about the thing that I’m interested in and is pretty far out—but not so far out that their feet leave the ground. It’s like I want someone to open up a vista for me that I hadn’t been seeing before. I set out to intentionally get shaken up. It can have far-reaching consequences because it can reach into every other thing that you’re doing. But that’s okay. We’ve got YouTube now at a whole different level than we’ve ever had it before, and you can find thought leaders on pretty much anything. You can also ask your buddies about it because I find, in any collection of leaders, CEO communities, a group that goes out to lunch together or that has a distribution list, that you can say, “Who’s talking about something that seems extremely exciting to you and far out, and tell me why?” That’s one thing that you can do right away.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:48] I’ve been engaged in a project myself recently and talking with association CEOs—I know you do a lot of work with association CEOs—and I’ve been specifically concerned with the value of learning in the association value proposition and how CEOs look at that. Learning broadly, not just formal education and events and things like that, but learning more broadly, how is that driving the value of associations? I’d be interested, particularly since you work with change so much—and change requires learning; learning and change go hand in hand—how do you see association CEOs thinking about learning as part of the value of associations for their membership, for society, thinking about it in strategic terms? I’d love to hear your perspective on that.

Seth Kahan: [00:21:44] There’s learning for the staff. There’s learning for the members. There’s learning for the interrelated sectors that you’re operating inside of. There’s all of that. So ask yourself, “Where is the value proposition now? Am I having more challenges with my staff? Is it with my members? Is it with the people that I’m trying to excel out in the world with?” And, in any one of those areas, if you feel that you’re being constrained, then obviously that’s an area to focus on. I have an engagement right now with a large organization where the majority of the staff are not taking a proactive view towards learning, and that’s a problem, and we need to figure out how to resolve that, how to get it to catch in the organization. You really want it to catch—the traction, buy-in is critical for something like this. It’s not something you want to push on someone; you want them to be seeking it out. For one thing, with the evolution of things like ChatGPT, we’re all capable of highly customizing our own learning and excelling at it.

Seth Kahan: [00:22:39] For example, some organizations are giving ChatGPT to their staff, and then they can’t stop there. You’ve got to give them at least a couple of classes. They can be short and powerful, but you’ve got to teach them what’s possible out of this thing, and there’s a lot that’s possible out of it. We want that organization in particular to get hungry for learning because we want them to stay at the head of the pack, which is where they are. So that’s staff. Then members—obviously there’s a value proposition for learning around members. In fact, I was cautioned about this in a meeting I just came out of, which is that we were looking at things that were way out on the horizon, and the CEO said, “We’ve got to make sure we don’t leave our members behind. They’re feeling a sore need right now. We need to create some breakthroughs that they’re feeling the pain of. We need to make sure that we’re doing that.” Then you get into learning and teaching the members about what are the constraints? How do you create a breakthrough? Getting change right—I have a formula for a breakthrough. It’s not the only formula, but it is a formula, and you can apply those in the organizations.

Seth Kahan: [00:23:40] And then you get into learning. This gets into stakeholder alignment, ecosystems, learning with your partners, and exploring things together. That’s not just you sending them stuff; that’s getting into the trenches together and looking together at what’s out there? What’s possible? How is this going to change our field? Where are the opportunities for us? To me, learning is core right now. In the ‘90s, it was like a new discovery, the learning organization and all of that. To me, now it feels like it’s got to be embedded in the foundation for a healthy organization, and, if it’s not, then that needs immediate attention, just like other core issues would.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:17] One of my perspectives—and, again, I’m biased because I’ve got a hammer, and everything is a nail with this particular issue. I feel like what we’ve seen happen over the past five to ten years is workforce development, talent pipeline, lifelong learning, upskilling, reskilling—all of these things have become mainstream, commonplace. You read about them in The New York Times, when you never used to ten years or so ago. And associations obviously play an incredibly critical role in supporting people from entry into a particular profession or field and then throughout their career. In your work with association CEOs, do you feel like there’s a consciousness of the association playing that role in whatever field or industry they’re serving?

Seth Kahan: [00:25:03] Yes, I do. One of the ways that I see that consciousness manifested is in frustration. For example, having a board that is not looking towards the future. They’re more interested in managing the mundane aspects of the organization or more interested in flywheel spending by doing the status quo. When I go into an organization, one of the first things I look at is the relationship between the CEO and the board—that tells me so much. In those organizations where it’s really humming, those are the organizations that I see flying and succeeding. I’m trying to suss out are there problems? Are there challenges from the CEO’s angle with those board members? And how do you work with difficult board members and all of that? When I see a CEO who’s frustrated because his board won’t take on something that’s going to carry the organization forward, that tells me that there are some learning issues—assuming that the CEO’s doing well—with the board, and then we get into how do we create some learning experiences for the board? How do we get them out of their comfort zone? One of my favorite things is something experiential. Let’s take a field trip. Let’s go to an organization that’s got this down. Let’s walk in and see what it feels like when you’re in an organization where people are excited about the future and actively retooling their minds so that they’re more capable, more equipped to deal with what’s going on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:22] Our conversation has obviously turned to learning, which is appropriate here on the Leading Learning Podcast.

Seth Kahan: [00:26:27] Yes, that’s right.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:27] I would love to hear a little bit about your own learning right now. What’s something that you’re learning right now, whether it’s about leadership, change, or anything else? Because I know you’ve got wide and varied interests that you’re very kind to share with the people who follow you. What are you learning about that you think others should also be thinking about right now?

Seth Kahan: [00:26:48] I’m taking deep dives into my client spaces. You’ve probably seen my podcast where I’m interviewing people who are physicists in medicine, for example. I just learned about the use of digital twins at a population level, and I got a much deeper introduction to digital twins. A digital twin in the healthcare space is a mirror image of you with all your healthcare information fed into it. Right now, we still talk about the lack of coordination of care. If somebody’s got diabetes and they’ve got congestive heart failure, some human being that’s in their family has to take accountability for making sure that those two doctors know what the other one is doing and that they’re not issuing contrarian advice and so on and so forth. With the digital twin, you can feed all the information into a computer simulation of a human being, and you can see immediately if there are challenges. How does congestive heart failure interact with diabetes, for example? And it can be a healthy person too. It doesn’t have to be someone who’s suffering. But you create a digital image that has all of the health information of a human being, and then you can do things to it, and you can watch how the whole system changes.

Seth Kahan: [00:27:52] Now, all they have is healthcare information, so it may not know what color my eyes are or what kind of clothes I prefer to wear, but it will know what my blood pressure is and things like that and the medication that I’m on. And then extrapolating that…. This, by the way, was from a podcast with Dr. Ehsan Samei in North Carolina, who is doing this work, and he’ll create copies of these digital twins, so he has entire populations. He could look at 20,000 people who have a lot of different characteristics and ask the question, “If such-and-such a virus were to come loose in this environment, who’s likely to catch it? What kind of symptoms are going to be the most severe that we need to treat? Who should we go after first in terms of vaccinations?” Things like that. That’s all me doing a deep dive into physics and medicine, and I start learning about digital twins and stuff like that. I love to learn more about the clients that I’m working with, and I do a lot of work, as do you, in science and healthcare, and that continues to feed there.

Seth Kahan: [00:28:48] Of course, I’m studying AI. You can’t be alive these days and be operating and not be studying AI. I’m pulling in books. I’m looking for references. I’m following people on LinkedIn. I’m watching videos and trying to understand. And I’m using it myself. That’s another thing I should say—everybody in my family is using AI. My daughter, who’s in college—she’s a freshman in college—said, “Dad, I don’t need to use AI.” And I said, “Okay, I’m paying for ChatGPT for one month, and I’m coming back to you in 30 days.” I came back, and it’s, “No, don’t take it away. Don’t take it away.” Everybody should be trying it out and using it. I often hear in the news someone saying, “You have no idea what’s really going on in AI. The stuff that you’re using was hot six months ago.” I want to know, what does that mean? What are you doing? Educate me. Give me an idea. I’m very interested in how organizations and businesses are using AI, what they’re relying on it for, how they’re relying on it, and how do they keep the human at the helm while they’re doing all of this? Those are a couple of areas. I could go into other sectors with my clients, but it’s the deep dive with clients and AI, those are areas where I’m learning a lot. Let me turn the tables on you for just a little bit in this. What are you most excited about when it comes to leadership, learning, and AI?

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:07] With AI, where I’ve been trying to implement it, it’s how can I take AI and use it in the business in a variety of different ways, not just from a productivity standpoint, but how does it help me with analysis? How does it help me with brainstorming, strategic foresight, all those things that I need myself just as much as my clients need? Of course, I will bring it to bear. We do a ton of market assessment and things like that, so bringing it to bear, it’s like I can have almost a whole team of analysts with me to work through whatever the particular situation is. That’s incredibly fascinating. In my personal life, on the side, I’m a musician, and I’m starting to figure out how AI might be instructive there—what I would or wouldn’t want AI to help me with in terms of musical production and things like that. What’s possible is just truly fascinating.

Seth Kahan: [00:30:58] That’s an area that I’m interested in, what you just talked about with your music. With my ChatGPT, which I have a small subscription for, it caches all my stuff. I’m asking it about everything. I might say, “My daughter’s a vegan, and I need a recipe for dinner tonight.” I’m going on a camping trip. I’m trying to figure out are there any bugs or poisonous snakes where I’m going that I should be aware of. I’m a spiritual person, so I’m reading all these sacred texts that I find interesting and doing analysis, and I’ll say, “What are the top five copies of the Bhagavad Gita that are written by or that are commented on by someone who’s a non-dualist?” It’s like getting to the arcane stuff. ChatGPT’s got all of that. Of course, there’s my business. I’ll feed whole conversations into it and say, “I need a summary of this conversation. What were the most important points?” and stuff like that. Then, when I go back to it and ask it some generic question, it draws on all of that, and I’m surprised sometimes. It’ll say, “Because you’re interested in this, you definitely need to check that out.” And those are dots that I would never have connected on my own. There’s this holistic element when you utilize it for all the different areas of your life that it brings to the table. And I really like that element of it. I feel like there are often really good surprises in there for me.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:19] Learn more about the work Seth Kahan does through Visionary Leadership.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:31] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it with a colleague. That helps more people find the show and supports the work we do.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:39] Jeff, you and Seth covered a lot of ground, from the impact of political disruption on many organizations to practical ways leaders can strengthen their foresight and flexibility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:50] I think the elements he covers in his Disruption Playbook highlight how important it is to stay grounded in situational awareness. True, accurate situational awareness is something I’ve long seen as absolutely foundational for any strategy work.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:07] I appreciated Seth’s take on learning as a strategic necessity—learning is core, as he put it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:13] And I appreciated Seth’s personal take on AI, using it not just for productivity but as a tool for curiosity and exploration in work and family life.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:23] Thanks again for listening—see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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What will it take to keep your learning business relevant and thriving in 2030? In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele unpack seven strategic shifts that are reshaping continuing education—from personalization and AI to credentials and commoditization and more.

You’ll come away with ideas to apply now and questions to help you think more strategically about what’s next—and what will keep your CE responsive and successful over the next five years and beyond.

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 this episode, we’re peering into the not-so-distant future. We’re taking a look at 2030 and what continuing education might look like five years from now.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:27] Our conversation is grounded by a recent Webinar we led, titled “A Look at Continuing Education in 2030: Disruption, Competition, and Changing Expectations.” During that live Webinar, there was a lot of chat activity and some wonderful, insightful contributions from attendees.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:43] So much so that we hosted a follow-up online meeting that we invited Webinar registrants to attend. That meeting was less presentation and more conversation. By the way, that’s something we’re thinking we’ll do more of going forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:59] What we’ll talk about today comes out of the prep we did for that Webinar, the chat contributions during the Webinar, and then the discussion that happened during that follow-on conversation.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:09] Today’s discussion will, we hope, distill some of the most powerful and provocative themes that came out of all that we did to take a look at CE in 2030.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:20] If 2030 sounds far off, remember that’s just five years away. Think back to 2020—five years wasn’t that long ago, but so much has changed. Now’s the time to be thinking about how learning businesses will not just survive but thrive with their CE offerings in the years ahead, 2030 and beyond.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:41] What we’ll talk about today are seven strategic shifts—areas of change that learning businesses need to understand and act on to stay relevant, responsive, and sustainable.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:55] The first strategic shift is one we’ve seen building over time: personalization. For years now, we’ve heard organizations say they want to create more personalized learning experiences. While progress has been made, we’re still pretty far from truly personalized, bespoke educational offerings being the norm.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:16] There are organizations that are making strides by doing things like investing in segmented marketing, mapping out learner journeys, and more intentionally making use of behavioral data to refine their offerings. But many organizations also know that they’re still largely product-driven, product-first—designing a course and then trying to match it to a market—rather than truly audience-first and starting with a learner’s needs and building from there.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:45] One newer and more nuanced idea we heard in the follow-on discussion was around micro-personalization—the idea of creating small slices of learning that are tailored to learners’ immediate context and delivered at the right moment, that moment of need.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:01] Think of this like a Spotify playlist for learning. Instead of a monolithic course, learners get modular, relevant snippets—say, a quick simulation, a three-minute video, or a just-in-time reference guide—something that meets them exactly where they are in their day-to-day work.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:19] Of course, that kind of personalization doesn’t just happen. It depends on competency frameworks, self-assessment tools, and often artificial intelligence that can help make real-time recommendations. And building those systems, especially well-structured ones, can be complex and resource-intensive.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:40] But here’s the key—personalization is moving from nice to have to strategic differentiator. In a crowded, competitive market, the ability to say, “We know who you are and what you need” carries real weight.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:55] To be clear, personalization doesn’t always mean fully custom. It doesn’t have to be a fully bespoke offering assembled dynamically at the point of need for a specific learner. Sometimes personalization is as simple as suggesting a learning pathway based on that learner’s prior participation, job role, or some self-identified goal.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:17] It’s also worth asking, “Are you thinking about personalization only in terms of content? Or are you also personalizing timing, format, pacing, and support?” These are all elements that shape the learner experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:32] Jeff, I know that social is another element you like to think about or talk about in terms of personalization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:39] It is. Social is all about dialogue. Whether the learner is in dialogue with other learners or with a subject matter expert, it puts the learner in the position to ask about her specific concerns, needs, issues—whatever the broader topic is, to bring it down to that personal level for that particular learner. Social learning, cohort-based learning, community-based learning is one probably the oldest form of a no-technology-needed personalization experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:12] The second strategy shift we want to mention is point-of-need learning. This is one of those concepts that’s easy to get excited about (easy for me!), but it can be hard to operationalize.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:23] During our follow-on conversation, Gayle Claman shared an example from engineering. She pointed out that early-career engineers often turn to mentors or colleagues—not CE courses—when they face a new challenge. It’s informal, it’s fast, and it fits their workflow.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:41] That’s a critical reminder. For CE providers to be relevant at that point of need, we need to be asking, “Are we even in the learner’s consideration set when a problem arises?” And, if the answer is no, then we need to ask, “Why not?” Part of the issue may be this older view that we’re clinging to that learners need to come to us as learning businesses versus us going out to serve learners where they are.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:06] A few organizations are working to close that gap. Some are embedding microlearning directly into tools or platforms that professionals already use—think apps or project management software. Others are developing searchable resource libraries where content is tagged to real-world tasks or use cases. Some are leveraging chatbots or other ways that individuals can quickly locate the information they need in what can often be an overwhelming set of resources that a learning business has amassed.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:38] There’s also the potential for newer tools to help. NotebookLM is a Google AI tool, and it can be used to convert material—even dense, technical material—into digestible audio content. That makes the information more accessible and more usable in moments where time and attention might be limited.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:59] This kind of modality flexibility—text, audio, video, whatever fits—is central to point-of-need learning. But, to make that possible, you need well-organized content and clear metadata.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:12] A key question here is, “What would it look like if our learners didn’t have to come find us? What if we were already where they are, embedded in their moments of challenge or curiosity?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:24] That’s a provocative vision—and one that’s likely to become more feasible as AI tools get better at context sensing and content matching.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:34] Our third theme is a big one: the evolving credentials landscape. We’ve entered a time that we’ve called the credentials shake-up, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:47] Learners definitely want credentials, but they want them to be stackable, flexible, and visible—visible especially online. And many traditional systems weren’t designed with those values in mind.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:01] We know of organizations issuing digital badges for certificates aimed at younger professionals, for example. This is partly about market expansion—maybe reaching underserved audiences. But it’s also about adjusting to a world where learners want more control over how they document and how they’re able to communicate their expertise.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:21] This is where some friction can arise. Accrediting bodies aren’t necessarily keeping up with these shifts, and so some learning businesses can be constrained by things like seat-time requirements, older reporting systems, or other legacy issues.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:37] Employers aren’t necessarily keeping up either. We’re starting to see some transition there. But some learning businesses are innovating around the edge, creating offerings that offer real value but don’t necessarily count in traditional ways. That can be both risky and liberating.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:55] We also heard the view that younger professionals are less interested in credits and more interested in skills that they can show off, and that might be in a portfolio, on LinkedIn, or during a job interview.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:07] So the challenge becomes how do you create credentials that travel—ones that are trusted by employers, usable by learners, and sustainable for your organization?

Celisa Steele: [00:09:18] That is a strategic question—one that can’t be answered in isolation. It needs to be part of a broader rethinking of your learning portfolio and the place of credentials in your business model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:33] We’ve covered three strategic shifts so far: personalization as a strategic priority, point-of-need learning, and fragmentation and innovation in credentials. Next up: artificial intelligence—arguably the biggest driver of change in nearly every industry, including CE. In some ways, AI is hard to separate out from the other shifts we’re talking about. AI has already come up multiple times in our conversation about how those first three shifts are happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:02] AI has the potential to revolutionize how learning is created, delivered, and consumed. AI is an enabler, but it’s also a disruptor. What’s the role of a learning business when AI can do parts of what we do faster, cheaper, better?

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:21] There’s the very real possibility that AI will soon be able to build bespoke learning experiences from massive content repositories, assembling a course on the fly from building blocks that are already in your catalog.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:35] That changes, fundamentally, the job of the learning provider. You’re no longer just designing experiences. That puts more emphasis on curating, tagging, and structuring your content so artificial intelligence can work with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:50] AI might reduce the need for multiple content formats. You might only need a single master version, perhaps loaded into something like a custom GPT (as we’ve discussed before), and AI will handle the rest, turning it into a video, a slide deck, an article, an interactive chatbot, whatever, based on the learner’s needs and wants.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:13] That’s a profound shift. It means learning businesses need to invest in content governance—taxonomies, tagging, competency alignment—so that your materials are ready to be remixed and reassembled.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:28] You mentioned NotebookLM earlier, Celisa. The ability exists now to create podcast-style guides from existing materials. That’s a glimpse of what’s to come. Imagine a future where learners expect that level of flexibility and responsiveness as the norm.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:45] The point isn’t to go out and start using NotebookLM or to choose any particular new tool to chase. It’s much more about building infrastructure and strategy that lets your learning business adapt. If you’re thoughtful now, you’ll be more agile later.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:03] Theme five is one many of us are already feeling—CE is becoming a commodity.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:09] Yes, learners increasingly are prioritizing things like convenience, usability, and experience over other, maybe more traditional measures of quality.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:21] One of the Webinar participants who leads learning at a healthcare association, for example, reported that some learners will choose a course that’s faster and easier, even if it’s technically less rigorous, because it fits their lifestyle better. That’s a wake-up call.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:37] In a crowded market, being high-quality isn’t enough. You have to be high-quality, fast, easy to access, relevant, and affordable. That’s a lot.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:47] That is a lot. So what’s the differentiator? It might be the curation, the community, or the context you provide—or even some level of access to the subject matter experts. Those are harder to replicate, and they can offer much more defensible value.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:02] That reminds me of some of the ground that you covered in your conversation with Dhawal Shah of Class Central, Jeff. Especially that community piece. Dhawal flat-out said a learning business shouldn’t try to compete with Big Learning providers (Coursera, Udemy, etc.) on price. That’s a losing battle there because of the sheer scale involved.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:22] This ties back to business models. If your value rests solely on CE credits, you’re vulnerable. What happens if someone else offers the same credit faster or cheaper?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:33] Or if learners start asking, “Why do I need the credit at all?” I don’t think that’s a hypothetical question. That’s already beginning to happen in some sectors.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:43] Our sixth theme is a more internal one versus the external competition we were just talking about, but it’s no less important: silos.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:52] Yes, we hear repeatedly and consistently about challenges related to siloed departments. You have education working separately from marketing, and you have communications that aren’t aligned with credentialing, and so on and so forth.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:06] This fragmentation makes it harder to deliver cohesive experiences, and it slows down innovation. Breaking down silos may require structural changes—shared KPIs, cross-functional teams, or even reorganizing departments.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:22] But it can also start small and less radically than some of those things you just suggested, Jeff. It could be that you start with some joint planning sessions, integrated calendars, or a more collaborative product development process. Because the goal is to act more like a unified learning platform and less like a patchwork of separate functions. Jack Coursen from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) mentioned that, years ago, he made the move to have the professional development team start talking to the marketing team very early in the process—not when a course was ready to launch and they needed to try to drive enrollments but back when the course was being identified as a need and was just beginning to be created, that was when he started talking to marketing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:10] This also means a shifting culture in many organizations—rewarding collaboration, encouraging experimentation, and sharing both risk and wins.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:22] In a lot of ways, all seven of these shifts that we’re talking about, to some extent, tie into a shift in culture. But certainly with that one around silos, I definitely see the connection there.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:32] The seventh and final strategic shift that we’ll mention today is data, specifically the shift from isolated dashboards to data ecosystems that prioritize things like interoperability and integration.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:47] In the past, we were happy if the LMS showed us completion rates or test scores in a somewhat easy way. In fact, we’re still very happy if it does that for us. But the bar now is much higher.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:59] Centralized data lakes are becoming more common and more appealing because these allow LMS, AMS, e-commerce, and engagement data to live together. Which then means you can query all that data in powerful ways. Often you’re going to make use of AI to help you with some of that querying.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:21] That kind of infrastructure enables not just reporting but personalization (which we’ve talked about), prediction, and automation. But it doesn’t happen by accident.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:32] Organizations are going to have to make that decision to invest in interoperability. They’re going to need to choose systems that talk to each other. And they’re also going to need to invest in data governance so that they can make sure that they have high-quality data, that the data is consistent, that there’s security around all of that data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:50] If data is the fuel for innovation, we need to make sure it’s clean, accessible, and ready to use. That’s not a tech project—it’s a strategic imperative.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:06] We’re about to recap the seven shifts that we think warrant some attention for learning businesses looking to offer continuing education that’s valued in 2030 and beyond, so stick around to the end.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:26] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share an episode with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:34] So let’s recap the seven strategic shifts shaping continuing education as we head towards 2030.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:41] First, personalization is moving from optional to essential. Learners expect relevance at the individual level, and that expectation is growing over time for true personalization, ultimately down to individualization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:57] Two, point-of-need learning is incredibly valuable, as it meets learners where they are. But we’re still building out how to achieve and monetize point-of-need offerings.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:09] Yes, that can still be a bit tricky, but the value of point-of-need learning is so valuable that it warrants trying to crack those nuts. Then, third, we talked about credentials and how they’re fragmenting. Stackable, flexible recognition is in, and skill or knowledge demonstration is gaining ground over older measures like seat time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:31] Four, this hardly needs to be said, but AI is changing the game, both enabling new capabilities and requiring new strategies.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:39] Fifth, competition and commoditization are real. These realities make not only what you offer but how you offer it important. There’s a growing expectation among learners that it should be easy, relevant, and enjoyable to engage with you or any learning provider.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:58] Number six, silos stall strategy. Integration—of teams, systems, and goals—is key to innovation.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:07] And then, seventh and finally, data isn’t just about reporting anymore. Data is the engine for personalization. It is part of what makes AI so powerful. And it helps you make informed decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:22] And here’s something extra to consider. None of these shifts stands alone. They’re intertwined. Personalization depends on data. AI depends on breaking down silos. Credential innovation ties directly to commoditization and learner expectations.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:38] If you’re wondering where to begin, start with leverage points. Think about places where a single change would support progress on multiple fronts for you. For example, investing in a data structure can help with AI, personalization, and strategic decision-making.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:56] Or piloting AI tools in one area of your content strategy might create momentum to rethink credentials or learner engagement.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:05] The key is to take some action and to not get overwhelmed and remain inactive. These shifts aren’t a checklist, but they are signals. Your job is to interpret what these signals might mean for your mission, your learners, and your future.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:21] If you’re listening to this, you’re already a little ahead of the curve because the future isn’t waiting for 2030 to arrive. It’s unfolding now, and learning leaders have a real opportunity to help shape it.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:33] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Udemy, Coursera, and edX are part of the competitive landscape your learning business operates in, so it’s valuable to understand how your learners might view your catalog in light of the catalogs of Big Learning providers.

This episode, number 455, features a conversation with Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, which Dhawal describes as a Tripadvisor for online education. Class Central aggregates reviews of hundreds of thousands of courses from platforms all over the world, bringing together the learning-verse in a single searchable and discoverable interface.

Dhawal discusses the evolution of MOOCs, community in the context of online courses, business models (including pricing and the relevant benefits of business-to-business models versus business-to-consumer), and the importance of partnerships.

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] Hello and welcome to this episode, number 455, which features a conversation with Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, which Dhawal describes as a Tripadvisor for online education.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:31] Class Central aggregates reviews of hundreds of thousands of courses from platforms all over the world, bringing together the learning-verse in a single searchable, discoverable interface. Jeff, tell us a bit about what you and Dhawal talk about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:47] Dhawal started Class Central as a side project in 2011, and he found himself in the right place at the right time as massive open online courses (MOOCs) took off in 2012. Dhawal has paid close attention to this industry ever since, and I think his take on the industry and his analysis of the offerings and, increasingly, the business side of Big Learning is incredibly valuable to learning businesses because Udemy, Coursera, edX, and the like are part of the competitive landscape. Your learners might well be weighing your catalog against the catalogs of those Big Learning providers.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:26] You cover quite a bit of ground with Dhawal, talking about community in the context of online courses, business models (including pricing and the relevant benefits of business-to-business models versus business-to-consumer), and the importance of partnerships. So, without further ado, let’s roll the conversation with Dhawal Shah.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:51] 2012, right after you started, was the year of the MOOC. I can remember back then that MOOCs started with a lot of hype. MOOCs were going to save the world—a lot of enthusiasm. Looking back on that early enthusiasm, what did people get right, and what did they get wrong about where online learning was headed?

Dhawal Shah: [00:02:12] I always approach it from a learner perspective. I was not in an industry. I was just a student. I just built it for my own needs. To me, what MOOCs, as a learner experience, got right was it was a real university course. There was a difficulty level there. It had some hard deadlines. There were graded assignments, which you had to finish. There was a TED Talk by Daphne Koller, one of the co-founders of Coursera back then, where they showed the engagement went up on the weekends because people were completing assignments. We would be on the forums helping each other out. Any questions I had, somebody had already asked and answered.

Dhawal Shah: [00:02:53] I think what the original MOOCs accidentally got it right was the community, the shared experience. Because there were so few courses and so much media attention, a lot of people were funneled into fewer courses, but they didn’t have a business model back then. And, as they started trying to monetize it, scale it, they launched more courses. The sessions became more readily available, but the community slowly diluted and got thinner and thinner. Eventually, I don’t think, outside of some outlier courses, the Coursera-, edX-style community is pretty much non-existent.

Dhawal Shah: [00:03:35] And since they went the VC-funded route and all that, they were selling the hype. Coursera and Udacity also and edX had also started a side project. They just launched something and did really well. Then they tried to build the narrative—we’ll know through data how learners learn, and everything could be solved because of that. But that never really panned out. Data allows you to figure out if your course is really bad, but how to make a good course is still a difficult challenge. It requires a bit of art and science. There is some sort of non-tangible feeling when there’s a video, if you can connect with an instructor.

Dhawal Shah: [00:04:21] One of the things that I remember from the MOOC era was the courses were produced as we were taking the course. You had a feedback loop because you’re taking week one. Then the instructor is shooting week two. So they’re taking your feedback and comments and applying them in week two. It became a vast shared experience, and I think that was just accidental. When they started trying to make it more professional, make these organizations more revenue-driven and sustainable, and get VC return scale, then the community got lost.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:00] That is an interesting comment because I can remember, even before the Courseras and the edXs came along (MOOCs pre-existed that), I can remember people like Stephen Downes and George Siemens were doing early versions of MOOC, and they were big on that whole concept of the community informing the course to develop in the right way and to really serve the learner needs in that way. And it feels like, yes, a lot of that has been lost along the way. Is that your perspective?

Dhawal Shah: [00:05:27] Yes, especially for scale platforms. There are always smaller platforms that are trying, like Discord, other ways to do community. But for platforms that truly target scale, they have to somehow remove the human out of the equation, whether it be the instructors or even the students. Nowadays, a course on Udemy or Coursera doesn’t get better the more students it has. But, before, the community actually made the courses better, and the courses used to be even more difficult because there was community support, which is not the same as asking ChatGPT. The community support is like a social contract.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:06] Right. That’s obviously a strategic and an operational decision on the part of those big providers to evolve in that way—understandable for achieving scale. What other kinds of strategic decisions do you think those big providers have made along the way that other types of potentially smaller continuing education providers should take note of?

Dhawal Shah: [00:06:27] Someone like Coursera or Udemy, there’s probably a lot to learn from their interfaces because they probably spend on A/B testing. Overall, I think they’re more of a marketing partnerships company. Coursera relies on their partnerships and building great landing pages and marketing. I think the platform itself hasn’t evolved that much. I’m not sure what a small business can learn because they have to grow every year for the sake of growth. I think that’s the onus on them now. They’re a public company. Something else is driving their decisions, and it’s not purely the learning experience. Small players have the liberty—if you’re a small, bootstrapped, profitable one like Class Central is—to focus on just the things that matter to the learners.

Dhawal Shah: [00:07:25] The other learnings that I have seen then are monetization and pricing. They focus a lot on intro courses, so you can know what an intro course charges. There’s also how they evolve from completely free. Day one, there were completely free certificates. Then, after a while, they put the free certificates behind the paywall. And then, eventually, they put the graded assignments behind the paywall. That shows the priority of learners—what they are most willing to pay for is the certificate and the graded assignments, and the content comes next. Udemy has a paywall on content, but for Coursera the majority is still a freemium platform, where you can audit a course, but you pay for additional features. So far. I can’t predict the future.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:20] That is interesting that you can look at what they’re doing and read between the lines. And smaller providers should look at those companies that have to scale, that have to potentially satisfy shareholders or investors. For a smaller organization, you may be able to do some things differently because you don’t have to do that, and that’s an important point for listeners to keep in mind. These large providers—the Udemys and the Courseras—obviously have to attract a lot of students. They have to get a lot of enrollments. Is there anything to learn from that? Is there anything that you see them do particularly well to pull students to them?

Dhawal Shah: [00:08:55] For Coursera, it’s the partnerships. Their formula is generally a brand name, like a university or a tech company, a hot topic, and a certificate—those are the three elements for Coursera. For Udemy, generally it’s the content. They’re focusing on in-demand content. Coursera might do data analytics, design, or user interface. Because of certification, they go higher up in the learning journey, more around conceptual, while Udemy focuses more on tools.

Dhawal Shah: [00:09:41] You can learn design at Coursera and Figma on Udemy, and then that informs the pricing. Udemy has to charge somewhere between $10 to $15, but Coursera can charge $50 to $60 a month. Coursera, because of the brand name, is a premium platform. It’s not premium compared to a lot of boutique, small…like the live session. In the on-demand world, that’s how they have divided their lines. The subscription for Udemy is now $20 or something like that, while Coursera is $50 to $60 a month—Coursera Plus. So that’s clear. Even though Udemy has a significantly bigger catalog, it shows the premium on the brand.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:29] There has been more of a shift over time, seemingly from B2C to B2B in this world. It’s a varying degree somewhere—the degree to which, say, Udemy is focusing on B2B might be different from the degree to which Coursera is. Do you think that’s where all of these companies are headed? How do you see that enterprise opportunity versus the direct-to-learner, more B2C, opportunity?

Dhawal Shah: [00:10:55] The challenge is, with B2C, you have to make that sale again and again, at a Coursera scale or a Udemy scale. Udemy has a number they share in their earnings report, which is the monthly average buyers, and the monthly average buyers is about a million people. So it’s a lot of small money that you’re collecting from a million people every month. You’re impacted by market trends, change in currency rates because you’re a global company, B2C. They have also done a lot of deals over the years, like coupon codes and all that. And they have created an audience who is addicted to buying stuff for cheap—they wait for these deals and discounts. They have pulled back on all that.

Dhawal Shah: [00:11:45] There is an upper limit to how many people are willing to buy a course in today’s world, and Udemy has not scaled in the last…. Udemy’s revenue peaked in 2020—the consumer revenue—and has been declining since then. That’s why, for them, the enterprise has grown tremendously in the last four years. I have a theory that the B2C pricing needs to be much cheaper, but, because of the enterprise play here, they cannot actually reduce the B2C price, or companies will be like, “Hey, go to your employees, and just buy it cheaper.” I think that pushes the B2C price, and it creates a tension where they can’t grow B2C without hurting B2B—especially, I feel like that’s true for Udemy. Coursera is already premium, and the challenge they face is one of the earnings calls, the CEO or the CFO said they don’t sell company-wide licenses. They sell to a small team because it’s more expensive, while Udemy generally sells more….

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:53] Right.

Dhawal Shah: [00:12:54] And even from B2B, they’re going to enterprise. Udemy has their strategies to go bigger and bigger—bigger and bigger companies—and they’re ready to remove the focus from small business. In a way, to me, it feels more like an addiction of revenue—that they have the numbers; they have to grow. I think it’s natural for them to go to one person and get a few million dollars multiyear, and instead of going to get the same amount, you have to go to 10,000 people, and people are fickle. They do have a great marketing engine, so the profit margins on B2C are less. For a Udemy subscription, they will eventually keep 85 percent of their revenue, but, for B2C, they keep maybe 50 to 60 percent of the revenue. Overall, everything for them works for enterprise, and the same is true for Coursera to a certain extent, but their marketing, branding, and certification are much stronger in B2C. They do much better in B2C than B2B.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:05] How important in that B2B or broader enterprise market are the credentials and the certificates, or is it mainly just about the content there?

Dhawal Shah: [00:14:18] I have this analysis I wrote “Content vs Credential,” where Coursera is a credential company while Udemy is content. That’s why Coursera does so well in B2C while Udemy does so well in B2B because Udemy is selling content. For companies, their employees are maybe more concerned about content over credential. They want the skills. Unless you’re in some sort of very specific…you need it for compliance. But, if you just want somebody to know Figma or some of your people to know Excel, Udemy is a much better platform, much better license to give to your employees.

Dhawal Shah: [00:14:56] Coursera is a lot of intro content, which is tied to a credential, which is for job-/career-seekers, career-changers. So you do a Google certificate on Coursera for your next job, not for your current job, while you might do a certain specific course, Excel or something, for your current job from Udemy. That’s how I place them. The credential is much stronger in B2C, and that’s why they’ve been able to grow their quarterly B2C revenue across more than 100 million while Udemy has struggled in the 70 to 80 range for a long time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:36] That’s an interesting difference in analysis, and I remember reading that analysis of yours. We’ll see if we can link to that in the show notes because I think listeners should see it. You mentioned all of these large online providers now are global companies. They’re attracting a lot of registrations/users from outside the U.S. How has that global growth gone? Have you seen them hit pitfalls in doing that? Or are they automatically a magnet for people who want to participate in the content and the credentials that they’re offering?

Dhawal Shah: [00:16:10] I think globally there is a lot more demand but maybe less appetite to pay. I looked into your 10Ks, or annual reports, of Coursera, Udemy, and Duolingo, and basically Coursera’s U.S. revenue is 54 percent, Duolingo is around 41-42, and Udemy is 36 percent. One of the interesting things, they all say no other country accounted for more than 10 percent of their revenue, except Udemy. In 2024, they mentioned Japan accounted for more than 10 percent of their revenue, but I think that’s an outlier. I think they have an on-ground partnership that helps that. But you can make up to 60 percent of your revenue outside.

Dhawal Shah: [00:16:55] At a country level, it’s a small revenue, and you have to price it. I just came from India after three months, and Udemy prices are significantly cheaper there. You can get a course for $3 to $4, maybe a bit more. The same course in the U.S. will be about $10. Overall, they have to drastically cut the price to be more competitive in India and other places. Coursera is doing the same. You have to do geo-pricing, but you have to sell it for a lot less, and then you have to sell it to a lot more people, and the appetite to pay is even less there. So I think it’s a challenge. They have been able to grow a lot, but the most important market for each of them is the U.S.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:44] You mentioned Duolingo in the mix there a minute ago. When I think about companies that are innovating with their platform or have an innovative platform, particularly at scale, Duolingo is one that tends to come to mind for me first. They’ve always used it. They’ve always had a lot of machine learning under the hood. I assume they’re making a lot of use of AI at this point. How do you see AI impacting these large providers? I’m sure they’re using it in their marketing, but are they using it in meaningful ways around shaping the learning experience, evolving their platforms?

Dhawal Shah: [00:18:20] Yes. The reason gen AI works specifically for Duolingo is because they are more of a platform company, and they have been able to scale their content, and they have been able to add features. With Duolingo, you’re not going there to just watch a video; it plays video then quiz. Why Udemy and Coursera have that problem is because they are a content company, and they like to syndicate content from other places, make it feel easy. So their platforms then became more and more like YouTube with a few extra steps. That’s how I define it. They made the platform more and more simple, and their content, so far, requires people attach to it or a brand attaches to it.

Dhawal Shah: [00:19:04] I think they’ve added a support coach, a Coursera coach—or Udemy has. All of them are adding those features. It hasn’t really impacted their bottom line. I don’t see people saying, “Wow, this is really helpful.” A chatbot is a chatbot, and I would rather talk with ChatGPT than the chatbot inside of…. It’s the same context. ChatGPT has probably injected way more data, or they’re using the same APIs. In a way, they are not able to build meaningful experiences because they have pulled back on the platform, making specialized courses for a certain platform.

Dhawal Shah: [00:19:42] What I’ve recently seen—not experienced—is companies are trying to do role-play. They’re trying to implement role-play. Udemy mentioned that they just launched the feature, and 1,000 role-plays were created by creators and all that. Certainly, time will tell if this is a valuable enough feature that learners will pay for it. Honestly, I can just use the audio mode in ChatGPT and do the role-play myself. What value can you add on top of the existing technology? Because existing technology does so much heavy lifting. And then what value can you add on top of it that people will pay for? Because it’s expensive—those APIs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:34] Yes.

Dhawal Shah: [00:20:34] If you sell a course for $10 and then add role-play to it, it’s cutting into your margin then. That’s what happened in Duolingo. A quarter ago, their stocks fell because of the margins, and then they posted record growth, and everything was fine. But Duolingo Max—I think they call it Super Max, but the one which has a video call and all other features—it’s eating into their margins and making each user less profitable. But Duolingo is an extremely efficient marketing engine, which is profitable. It’s still profitable. For Coursera and Udemy, they probably don’t have those margins. Their growth is stalled.

Dhawal Shah: [00:21:16] Udemy makes 800 million or something a year, and their market cap is a billion. For them, it’s the gen AI. It’s been two years—2023 was when ChatGPT went viral. So these companies haven’t meaningfully implemented anything that a user will say, “Let me go. I need to,” and they have the resources. Coursera has 700 or 800 million in the bank. Udemy has 300, 400 million in the bank. So the Udemy CTO came back or CEO/founder—one of the founders came back as a CTO—and he announced that he’s working on a bunch of features, and they’re trying to get back to product innovation. All these companies, except Duolingo, have changed their CEOs too, so I think there might be a lag. They’re focused on making content, helping with the syllabus and other kinds of features they’ve added. But, for a pure learner, is there something that’s worth watching? I personally believe I haven’t seen that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:30] Where are these companies going to go? Maybe leaving Duolingo aside. When I look at Udemy or Coursera or edX or any of them, it feels like they just plateaued. You know what to expect when you go to that type of platform. It hasn’t really changed in a while now—at least from my perspective. You’re much closer to this than I am. It’s not clear to me how they would change to necessarily create more value in a way that’s going to be viable for them from a business perspective. But what do you think? Is there a way past what strikes me as a plateau right now?

Dhawal Shah: [00:23:03] The numbers tell. Udemy said one percent or negative growth for this year. Coursera has 5-percent growth. In a way the numbers have plateaued, but I think these platforms are pretty efficient and profitable. They’re unprofitable on paper because they’re investing in other things, but they really want to be profitable. They have plateaued in terms of revenues. Because they’re a public company, it’s a bigger issue. But, if they were a private company, they would be a very healthy, sustainable business. They would have to at least reduce staff and other kinds of things, but I’ve been waiting for two years. I think they owe their growth not to products but more to marketing.

Dhawal Shah: [00:23:48] For Coursera, it’s the marketing and partnerships. They used that university brand so they could build a strong brand, and then they took that brand and started partnerships with tech companies. I personally believe, at this point, Coursera makes more money, more revenue—at least in B2C—from their company certificates or professional certificates than from their university. That’s been their growth engine for the last few years. They might have plateaued even before the pandemic, and the pandemic gave them a boost and increased the height of the plateau. For Udemy, they made sure they reached the plateau very quickly in B2C but took a while to get into B2B. So I’m also waiting for them to launch the next big feature.

Dhawal Shah: [00:24:38] With Udemy, there’s still, hey, if I want to learn something that was announced last week or a few weeks ago, Udemy is the cutting edge. And Coursera is like UI/UX or some sort of data analytics. Some are like, “I want to spend six months on something, three to six months on it.” That’s where I would go for Coursera. And they keep launching new certificates and new partnerships. But the rate of launching these new professional certificates…then the older ones expire in a way because they might be less relevant, older. So it’s not fast enough for them to grow their revenue because it still takes a while to get Microsoft or Google to create. Even if Coursera is funding it to a certain extent, it still takes a while to create a three- to six-month certificate. They can’t really scale that quickly.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:31] If you were advising a smaller provider of online education, or maybe somebody wants to start up an online education business, and Udemy or Coursera are out there and overlapping, semi-competitive in their space can potentially take away some of their prospective learners, what would you advise them to do to stand out, differentiate themselves, be able to compete in that environment?

Dhawal Shah: [00:25:56] Do not compete head-on with pricing and say that you’re on-demand platforms. Their on-demand content would definitely be a much cheaper scaled platform. Definitely do not compete head-on with them. I feel like there are plenty of opportunities. If you can get your marketing and can have a steady stream of traffic and people coming to you, there are plenty of opportunities for small providers/small platforms to create—and create a more comprehensive program. Because all of these layers sometimes give you a lot of videos, but they’re very simple, and they don’t have a community.

Dhawal Shah: [00:26:38] Communities can be a big differentiator and support. They tend to be very isolating platforms. They don’t have Webinars. They don’t have places to connect with other learners, other humans. They are very agnostic. The professors that chair, they put the course on instructors, and they’re not involved at all. Smaller platforms still have the ability to interact, get people through a much longer commitment. At this point, it’s still difficult for a learner to do a six-month course. The most motivated people do. But doing six months of self-paced, on-demand learning on their own—having some other ways to keep them engaged. It doesn’t have to be technology; it can be human. Domain expertise always matters. These are very agnostic platforms.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:35] Right. Very generic.

Dhawal Shah: [00:27:39] Yes, they will release a course and keep it for years and years. But, if you are in small, in the industry, and all that, you can provide the learners with updates and be like, “Hey, this is what’s happening in the industry, and I can show your expertise, not just through teaching but also through the knowledge of the industry.” That’s what I do to a certain extent too. It’s like, “Hey, we have a catalog, but here is some analysis of what we know because we built this catalog. Keep an eye on the platform.”

Dhawal Shah: [00:28:07] And, for us, it’s been a very successful strategy because that’s how people know about us (Class Central), and the brand becomes stronger. A catalog is very passive—you keep putting courses; people come and search. But the report where we do analysis and other kinds of articles is an active entity. It’s a way for us to engage with the world. I’ve seen multiple companies over the years who spend so much time building the catalog, but then, once they launch it, they’re like, “There’s nothing to share, nothing to say.” There are ways to keep the engagement going, build the community. The big players would never want to do that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:47] We’re switching gears a bit to wrap up. We have a tradition of asking guests on Leading Learning about their own approaches to lifelong learning, so I would love to hear about some of your habits and practices, maybe some of the resources you look to. Do you spend much of your time in these Udemy or Coursera courses, or are you going for other ways of supporting your own learning?

Dhawal Shah: [00:29:10] It’s all goals and phases. What I like about Udemy and Coursera is they’re structured—generally Coursera more. I always like the academia way of teaching and pointing to research papers and all that. It feels pretty cool to me. We used to run a community inside of Class Central, where we did courses together, like a study group, and we also did some products—we called it “cohorts” because everybody was into cohorts a few years ago—where we took a course online, we put a start date, and then discussed it as a community. So that’s when I finished a lot of courses, with the community. At this point, you do what you need to do. If I need to do a Google Sheet formula or something, with ChatGPT, I can just ask it.

Dhawal Shah: [00:30:04] We have to figure out how do you keep learning? It’s easy to do now, but that doesn’t mean you know the topic, and you might be stuck at a beginner level in everything because you’re just asking questions to a chatbot, and it gives you the answer. That’s something I’m trying to figure out. Where should I invest so that I know? Usually, what I’ve known from myself is the more I know about the topic, the better I can use gen AI for it. I can use it in coding in the languages that I use, but, if I try to do an experiment and start something in a different language and build an app from scratch, it really doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for me. The writing we do, we try to push for human-written content as much as possible. I still believe in human expertise. It doesn’t scale, but, being a small business, it allows me the freedom to be more creative and talk about the things and do the things that I enjoy.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:10] We’re not done quite yet—keep listening for our recap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:14] Check out the Class Central Web site and Dhawal Shah on LinkedIn.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:27] And, if you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, we’d love for you to share an episode with a colleague or two who you think would benefit from listening.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:35] Celisa, when you think about the conversation with Dhawal, what are you taking away?

Celisa Steele: [00:31:39] I think his take on the value of community as part of learning is something I can wholeheartedly endorse, and I appreciate his perspective on community as a potential differentiator when learners might be comparing a Big Learning option to something offered by a learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:57] I also think the “content versus credential” lens is potentially useful to learning businesses in looking at their offerings and assessing where they’re putting the emphasis for individual products and their portfolio overall.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:11] Yes, and then also Dhawal’s comments about the addiction of revenue—that pressure that Big Learning providers feel to grow and grow revenue—also reinforces for me the emphasis that we put on reach, revenue, and impact. Truly successful learning businesses are going to focus on all three and not give undue weight to anyone—even that important revenue one.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:33] So that’s it for this episode. Thanks again for listening, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post A Look at the Learning-Verse with Dhawal Shah appeared first on Leading Learning.

This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 454, is the second installment in a two-part look at how learning businesses can best navigate uncertainty. Co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss five practice levers: pulse monitoring, scenario planning, revenue model innovation, ecosystem partnerships, and tech awareness. These levers can help you translate the four habitsets discussed in episode 453 into action.

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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: [00:00:17] How to navigate uncertainty successfully is top of mind for many leaders now, and this episode is a second installment in a two-part look at ways to help your learning business survive and thrive in uncertain times.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:32] Our look at uncertainty in this episode and our last episode draws on a keynote I gave recently, and we wanted to share what I covered more broadly to help more learning businesses as they seek to navigate uncertainty.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:45] In our last episode, we looked at four habitsets that can help learning business leaders, and in this episode, number 454, we want to turn to five practice levers that can help you put those habits into action. These are levers you can pull, actions you can take that support those habitsets, that help you navigate uncertainty effectively. Because the practice levers connect to the habitsets, it’s good for us to recap the four habitsets that we talked about in episode 453, and those four are informed agility, strategic foresight, stakeholder intimacy, and portfolio thinking.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:24] Just a quick run-through of what we meant by each of those. Informed agility is about moving quickly but with insight. You want to pilot, test, adjust in real time—this is the domain of the minimum viable product. The next one, strategic foresight, means regularly scanning for weak signals that are emerging in your market and exploring the possible futures that those signals could lead you to. The third one, stakeholder intimacy, means staying close to your learners, to your members, to your customers—making sure you know them deeply. And then the fourth one is portfolio thinking—designing an integrated suite of offerings that spread the risk and reinforce value that aren’t too concentrated on a single offering (for example, your annual conference).

Celisa Steele: [00:02:19] These four habitsets can help your learning business become more antifragile, meaning your learning business doesn’t just survive any difficult time, but it becomes stronger because of that difficulty. Antifragility is something that we talked more about in episode 453, along with more about each of those habitsets.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:42] But habitsets have to be put into use to become habits, and that’s where the five practice levers we want to talk about today come into play.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:52] These are tools, approaches, and disciplines that help make those habits actionable. These are practical, flexible, and scalable. These are the kinds of things that any learning business can apply.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:06] And you don’t need to implement all five at once. You can pick one, start small, and then build from there. But these levers are designed to strengthen your organization’s ability to navigate uncertainty, respond to change, and act with purpose.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:22] So let’s start with the first lever: pulse monitoring, which ties to the stakeholder intimacy habitset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:30] Pulse monitoring is about regularly gathering insights from your market and your stakeholders—not once a year, not when something goes wrong, but on an ongoing, consistent basis. It’s a system of listening.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:46] And not just listening passively, like reviewing some analytics from your Web site. You should also be actively and directly engaging.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:55] We’ve developed something at Tagoras called the Market Insight Matrix. It breaks insight-gathering into three stages—idea generation, idea verification, and idea testing—and, within each stage, you can listen passively, you can listen actively, or you can be much more direct.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:16] Passive might be the Web analytics that I mentioned, or maybe you’re monitoring social media. If you want to take a more active approach, that could be polling some of your learners or members, or it could be looking at usage patterns in your learning management system. And then a direct way might be having interviews with some of your learners or conducting focus groups.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:37] The goal is to make that activity structured and repeatable, not something you do only when you’re launching a new product. It should be part of your rhythm as an organization. It should be done systematically. You should have a system for how you’re going to do this, and there’s responsibility and accountability that should be lying behind it. And what’s being heard and learned should be reported back in a way that allows you to use and leverage that information and insight.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:07] In that keynote that you gave, Jeff, you noted that organizations that probably responded best to COVID were the ones that were already doing this kind of monitoring. They weren’t scrambling to figure out what learners needed; they already knew that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:20] That’s right. If you’ve built a habit of listening, you can move faster and more confidently when disruption hits, and you’re more likely to uncover emerging needs and opportunities before your competitors do.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:32] That was a look at one of the practice levers, pulse monitoring. Let’s move to the second lever, scenario planning. This one ties closely to that habitset of strategic foresight.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:44] Yes, scenario planning is about exploring possible futures, especially around key decisions or initiatives that you’re considering, and then thinking through what might happen under different conditions.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:56] Instead of committing to a single projection of the future, you consider multiple outcomes. You’re going to look at a best-case scenario, a more moderate scenario, and a worst-case scenario.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:08] Exactly. For each scenario, you’re going to ask, “What works well here? What struggles? What would we want to preserve regardless of how things unfold?”

Celisa Steele: [00:06:17] And then you identify a keystone change, something that has a high impact across multiple futures—maybe across all three of those best-case, worst-case, more middle-of-the-road scenarios. That term “keystone change,” that’s something that you borrow from Greg Satell, right?

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:35] That’s right. Greg is one of our favorite thinkers about change and being strategic in the face of change. We’ve had him on the podcast before. A keystone change, as he defines it, is a relatively small or focused decision that triggers broader transformation. For example, during the pandemic, some organizations didn’t just move their conferences online. A lot of organizations did that because they had to, but some used that moment to reimagine their entire events strategy, and that one decision led to new pricing models, year-round engagement, other offerings, and, in general, a more resilient business.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:14] It’s about using uncertainty as a forcing function. It’s using uncertainty to help you clarify priorities and to make decisions that can catalyze your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:25] Right. Disruption obviously can feel disorienting. But it also sharpens your focus. Scenario planning helps you get the most from that clarity—by turning it into strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:37] We’ve talked about two practice levers so far: pulse monitoring and scenario planning. The third lever we want to talk about is revenue model innovation. That one tends to perk up ears.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:51] And with good reason. Many learning businesses are still overly dependent on what we would characterize as transactional revenue—selling individual courses, events, or credentials. That’s a model that’s vulnerable in volatile times.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:06] And so this lever encourages us to explore models that are more predictable, more scalable, more learner-centric, and it ties pretty directly to the portfolio thinking habitset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:19] Things like subscription models, membership access, learning passes, learning paths, microcredentials—these are all ways to create ongoing value and potentially recurring revenue.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:32] I’ll mention here our Value Ramp. This is a simple tool that helps you look at the products that you offer along two axes. One axis is price; the other is value. The driving principle behind the Value Ramp is that, as products become more valuable, their price ought to go up, and, as their price goes up, they ought to be more valuable. And so, then, any individual product, as it’s more valuable, more expensive, is going to move up the curve or ramp. And you have to build some momentum with your offerings to help people move up that ramp or up that curve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:10] Yes, it’s a fact of life, at this point, that most prospective learners out there expect to get something free from us, at least early in their relationship with us. They want to be able to test the waters before they dive in and buy that bigger-ticket seminar or conference registration or buy services from us. The Value Ramp is a tool for thinking more intentionally and consciously about our portfolios and how the offerings fit together.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:38] As one example, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) has a subscription model, which I would place fairly high up on their Value Ramp because the Learning Pass—that’s what they call the subscription—includes most of their self-paced online offerings, which learners can also buy as one-offs. I’d put those one-offs lower down on the Value Ramp. ASHA launched that subscription model in February 2020, just before COVID rocked the world.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:07] In what I see as an antifragile move, ASHA didn’t just wring its hands—I’m sure there was some handwringing and bemoaning the horrible timing of the launch—but then they decided to make the Learning Pass free to members for three months to help those members during a tough time. But they were also smart about positioning that as a short-term freebie, and, over time, they returned to the original intention of this being a paid subscription. Now the Learning Pass generates significantly more revenue than their previous model of one-off sales did. In fact, more than double what they used to produce from those one-off-type sales.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:47] Using the same resources, those exact same courses—double the revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:50] Yes, they didn’t create anything new that they weren’t going to create anyway. They packaged it differently. They positioned it differently and applied attractive pricing to it.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:59] That shows the power of recurring models. They can create sustained engagement; they can create smoother, more predictable revenue cycles for the learning business; and they help align with the reality of learning, that learning is a process and not an event. I’ve heard Jack Coursen of ASHA talk about that. Philosophically, the Learning Pass aligns well with what we know about how learning happens.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:24] Definitely. Whether it’s a subscription model or some other recurring model, they often make life easier operationally. You reduce the need for constant remarketing. You deepen your relationship with learners because they’re typically there for the long term. They’re going to renew year over year. And, because that’s happening, you can gather much more meaningful data about usage and outcomes.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:48] We’ve talked about pulse monitoring, scenario planning, and revenue model innovation. Now let’s turn to our fourth lever, ecosystem partnerships. This one seems especially important in the current climate, where speed, scale, and reach are all really important and come at a premium.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:10] Ecosystem partnerships are about recognizing that you don’t have to build or deliver everything on your own. In fact, trying to do it all internally can slow you down and limit your impact. If you’re trying to do things like build that portfolio out, if you’re trying to find good ways to get that insight into your market, those partnerships can really help.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:32] You might partner with an academic institution; you might partner with a technology vendor; you might partner with employers; you might partner with a peer organization—those people who might potentially be competitors, but you could also choose to cooperate with them. No matter who you’re looking at a potential partnership with, the key is to make sure that you really do have shared value and that you’re aligning around that shared value.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:58] An example I gave in the keynote was an association that partnered with a university to offer a joint certificate. The association brought audience reach and subject matter expertise. The university brought brand credibility and credentialing infrastructure. Together, they created something stronger than either could have alone.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:18] Partnerships aren’t necessarily only about content. They can also be about distribution, co-marketing, research, or even platform integration.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:29] I suggested using the frame of content, people, and technology—which we’ve talked about before—as the big areas around which you might form a partnership. If you look at each of those areas, there are going to be sub-areas within each one. Within your content, you’ve got online courses; you’ve got place-based courses; you’ve got community interactions. There may be good ideas for partnership in there. If you look at people, you’ve got your volunteers; you’ve got your speakers; you’ve got employers, just to name a few. Plenty of opportunities for partnership there. Look under technology. You’ve got all the various vendors you work with around various platforms. If you break it down and look at what your ecosystem looks like in terms of content, people, and technology, there are a ton of partnership opportunities. The key, of course, is to start with listening. Understand what your partner needs and how you complement each other. And then be intentional about how the collaboration supports your learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:24] That was the fourth lever, ecosystem partnerships. The fifth practice lever, the final one that we’ll talk about, is tech awareness. This is about being tech-aware but not necessarily tech-led. This one feels particularly urgent with all the buzz around AI and other emerging technologies.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:43] Yes, there’s a lot of pressure to adopt the latest thing right now. There always is, but I feel like that’s particularly strong right now, especially when competitors are making headlines with whatever it is. But being tech-led can lead you astray if the technology isn’t really aligned with your strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:01] To be tech-aware means you need to stay informed. You need to know about what these emerging technologies are. You need to experiment with them, but you need to be doing that thoughtfully. And you need to make sure that, ultimately, any choices you make about your technology really serve your mission and your learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:19] You want to ask, “Does this tool enhance accessibility?,” for example. “Does it simplify the learning experience?” “Does it help us deliver value more effectively?”

Celisa Steele: [00:15:29] You shared an example of a group that’s been using AI to help accelerate content development by helping subject matter experts draft outlines. They’ve used AI to bring in initial drafts of content. Then the subject matter experts can review that. That group wasn’t trying to replace those human subject matter experts, but they were trying to better support them through the thoughtful use of AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:54] That’s a great illustration. In that case, they really worked with the subject matter experts, and they integrated their SMEs, which I’ve started to talk about more and more, throughout that entire process. They were able to accelerate things but still keep that quality, that human check on it—that was very important to them, and it’s important to probably every organization that’s putting out learning content. In that case, the technology really helped to amplify what the people were already good at—both the people on the learning team who were doing the design and development and also the subject matter experts. It definitely did not eliminate human input. That’s really the sweet spot: where tech supports human intelligence and doesn’t displace it.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:36] This lever around tech awareness isn’t just for your IT staff.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:42] Absolutely. In this case, everyone on the team—especially product developers, instructional designers, learning leaders—has to have a baseline of tech literacy. They don’t have to code, but they have to be able to ask good questions and participate in smart decisions around technology and in the use of the technology.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:08] We’re not quite done yet. Stick around to hear about the concept of strategic slack, our recap of the five practice levers, and some suggested reflection questions.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:26] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please recommend it to one colleague or co-worker you feel would get value from listening.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:33] To recap, we covered five practice levers. Pulse monitoring, which is building structured ongoing systems to listen and learn from your market. Scenario planning—mapping multiple futures and identifying keystone changes that create strategic leverage. Revenue model innovation—moving beyond one-time sales and exploring recurring, scalable value delivery. Ecosystem partnerships—collaborate across organizations to go faster and further. And then, finally, tech awareness—using technology thoughtfully, aligned with strategy and learner needs.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:12] These five levers help you activate the four habitsets that we talked about in episode 453. These levers can help you turn ideas into action and help you build the capacity to respond and grow through uncertainty.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:27] Again, you don’t need to implement all five at once. But you should be asking, “Which ones are we already using? Which could we strengthen? And what might we try next?” Which practice lever could you commit to activating or strengthening within the next 30 days?

Celisa Steele: [00:18:44] Strategic adaptation is about progress, not perfection. This is that idea of “Just pick one of these.” Even a small move in the right direction can compound over time, especially when it’s supported by good habits. You don’t have to overhaul your entire strategy overnight. But what’s one concrete thing you could do to start moving forward? And remember these reflection questions aren’t just for you. These can be great things to discuss with your full team.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:12] If you want help thinking through any of this—how to build in foresight, design stronger portfolios, or rethink your revenue model—we’d love to talk. That’s the kind of work that we do at Tagoras.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:23] We’ve included links to some of the tools we’ve mentioned, like the Market Insight Matrix and the Value Ramp. Lastly, Jeff, one thing you mentioned in your keynote that we haven’t talked about yet is this concept of strategic slack.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:42] That’s right. Strategic slack is the opposite of over-optimization. When everything is tightly scheduled, tightly budgeted, tightly staffed, there’s no room for experimentation. There’s no room to respond to emerging ideas or unexpected shifts. There’s no room to deal with failure.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:02] Part of becoming antifragile is building in space for adaptation. That might mean having some slack in budget, some slack in staffing flexibility, so you’re allowing room for trial. You’re allowing room for curiosity and mid-course corrections. Because, if you’re constantly running at 100-percent capacity, you’re actually very brittle. One unexpected issue—you lose a key staff member, or a vendor folds—and you’re in real trouble.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:31] Which ties back to something we’ve talked about before on this podcast—the idea that learning businesses aren’t just about delivering education. They’re systems that have to learn themselves. Learning isn’t just something we offer to others. It’s something we have to embody as organizations. And, uncertainty, for all its challenges, is an incredibly rich teacher if we’re willing to engage with it.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:55] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Five Practice Levers for Navigating Uncertainty appeared first on Leading Learning.

If one thing is certain these days, it’s that uncertainty is top of mind for many leaders. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 453, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss four habitsets that can help learning businesses navigate uncertain times: informed agility, strategic foresight, stakeholder intimacy, and portfolio thinking.

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: [00:00:17] There’s one topic that we can say with confidence is top of mind for a lot of learning business leaders these days, and that topic is uncertainty. More specifically, how to navigate your learning business in uncertain times.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:30] And so navigating uncertainty is what we’ll talk about in this episode, number 453, and in our next. Our two-part conversation is going to draw heavily on a keynote that you gave recently, Jeff, to a group of standards development organizations, but the ideas that you shared apply not just to SDOs but more broadly across all types of learning businesses. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:54] Definitely. Whether you’re with an association, a higher ed continuing education unit, a for-profit training firm, or any market-facing learning business, we’re all operating in a much more uncertain, fast-moving environment than we were even a few years ago. That’s what I addressed in that keynote, and that’s what we’re going to dive into here today.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:16] You started your talk—good comp lit major that you are—with a Zen parable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:22] Yes, it’s always a good policy to start with a Zen parable. This is an old one I remember reading to the kids when they were younger. There’s a farmer whose horse runs away one day, and the neighbors say, “Oh, that’s very bad luck. You’re not going to be able to farm your land now.” And this farmer says, “Hmm, maybe.” A day later, his horse comes back and brings six wild horses with it, and the neighbors say, “Oh, that’s very lucky. Now you’re very rich.” And the farmer says, “Hmm, maybe.” A few days later, the farmer’s son decides to try and tame one of the wild horses, gets thrown off, and breaks his leg. The neighbors, of course, show up once again, and they say, “Oh, that’s really bad luck.” The farmer, of course, says, “Maybe.” And then the next week, soldiers come to draft young men into the army to fight in a brutal war, and the farmer’s son is spared because of the broken leg. “How lucky,” the neighbors say. And, of course, the farmer says, “Maybe.” That’s where the parable ends.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:30] Not to be too reductive, but the point of the parable is that what looks good or bad in the moment may not stay that way, and so a mindset of thoughtful uncertainty—a maybe mindset—can actually offer valuable perspective.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:47] That kind of mindset leads to the question “How do learning businesses operate in a world where the outcomes aren’t always clear, and the variables keep shifting?”

Celisa Steele: [00:02:59] You outlined two major types of uncertainty in your talk, Jeff: new disruptions and continuing disruptions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:07] That’s right. We’re facing some really intense new disruptions, and, by new, I mean the last year to six months or so. These newer disruptions include things like economic uncertainty with inflation, tighter budgets, slower decision cycles, those sorts of things. There are also political dynamics—both national and international—with elections, funding shifts, and geopolitical tension all affecting how people plan and prioritize learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:37] There are also continuing disruptions—things that have been reshaping our work and our lives over the past decade or so. Those disruptions aren’t going away. One of those is the evolution of the workforce.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:51] Absolutely. The rise of non-traditional career paths, the emphasis we now see on upskilling and reskilling, new forms of credentialing—those have been growing for years, but now they feel like they’re accelerating. Learners expect more flexibility. They expect relevant, personalized experiences. And employers want proof of competence, not just participation.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:16] Then there’s ongoing disruption coming from the realm of technology, particularly artificial intelligence.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:23] Yes, AI is obviously the big one right now. It’s reshaping how we develop content, assess learning, and even how we think about expertise. But it’s also the latest step in a longer trend of tech-driven change—massive open online courses, the evolution of LMSes, microlearning, mobile-first design. All of it’s pushing us to rethink how we deliver and sustain learning over time.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:53] With all of that swirling, a natural instinct can be to retreat or hunker down—to try to avoid risk by not doing anything. But you argue for a different response. You talked about antifragility in that speech that you gave.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:12] Yes, it’s a concept that I really like. It comes from Nassim Taleb, who’s a philosopher who came out of risk management of all things, the financial world, and was informed by his work there in developing some of his theories. But the way he views it, a fragile system breaks under pressure. On the other hand, a resilient system resists pressure, and it survives. But an antifragile system actually grows stronger because of pressure. That’s really what we want in a learning business or any business—a structure and culture that not only can weather uncertainty and the disruptions that come with it but learns from that, adapts, and improves. It’s probably helpful to have some examples around this to get at what Taleb is talking about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:04] In the human body, for example, the muscular system I would describe as antifragile. If you’ve ever spent some time at the gym and had anybody instruct you on how to do things right, you know you have to work your muscles to the point of failure, to the point where you actually get little tears in your muscles for them to then grow and for you to develop that muscle mass. So that human muscular system is antifragile. In Greek mythology—this is often one of the examples that’s given for antifragility—the hydra would be an antifragile being. If you chop off one of the heads of the hydra, two are going to grow back. It’s always going to get stronger if you keep hacking at it. But let’s talk about something from the learning world, specifically from the association world.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:50] A few years ago when COVID happened, Ralph Johnson, who, at that time, was the CEO of the Veterinary Medicine Association Executives (VMAE)—which is like the association for the heads of veterinary medical associations—saw what was happening with COVID. They had, I think, their own annual conference planned, and he was thinking, “We’re not going to be able to have this thing. It’s going to have to go virtual. As a matter of fact, that’s going to be true for all of my members. All of their meetings are going to have to go virtual as well.” Instead of holding the usual face-to-face meeting, he held a virtual conference about how to hold a virtual conference for his members, for the leaders of his membership organizations. He took that opportunity, that disruption, to do something that created tremendous value for his members, both right there in the moment, and, I’m sure, increased their perception of VMAE as a source of value over the longer term.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:50] Those examples are helpful. And bonus points for pulling in Greek mythology to go along with your Zen parable earlier. Well done there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:57] Spanning the globe here, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:59] This idea of antifragility brings to mind for me that old saw, “Never waste a crisis.” Ralph Johnson was not wasting a crisis. He could have said, “Oh, no, we can’t have our annual meeting.” But instead of panicking or even just pivoting for his organization alone, he saw an opportunity. That was very powerful. That was definitely not wasting a crisis there. Now, when you talked about building antifragility, you were talking about some habitsets that we can cultivate to help us with that antifragility. “Habitset” is a term that you borrow from Kevin Eikenberry, who’s been on the podcast before. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:42] Yes, even just recently. We often talk about skillsets and mindsets. I think everybody knows those terms. But what Kevin emphasizes—and what I found very powerful—is the idea of habitsets. They’re not just what you know or believe but what you consistently do. Habitsets are embedded ways of acting that help you navigate change effectively.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:07] You outlined four habitsets in your keynote: informed agility, strategic foresight, stakeholder intimacy, and portfolio thinking. Let’s talk through each of those four habitsets, and let’s start with informed agility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:23] Informed agility means moving quickly but not recklessly. It’s about testing early, learning fast, and adjusting in real time. A lot of organizations equate strategy with very long and deliberate planning. You do want to be careful, to be deliberate, when you’re putting together a strategy. But, in uncertain times, strategy has to be more fluid. It’s not about predicting and locking in a plan; it’s about sensing, responding, and iterating. It’s exactly what Ralph Johnson did at VMAE. That was informed agility there. He learned quickly what the whole virtual conference thing was about, and then he used that.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:05] You gave an example of organizations that experimented with new (new to them anyway) delivery formats during the pandemic—maybe launching virtual events, as was the case with Ralph and VMAE, or new on-demand learning resources—and not waiting for perfection but saying, “We’re going to go ahead and put this out there, and we’re going to learn based on how our audience responds to this.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:30] Right. They weren’t waiting for all the answers. They tried something, listened to feedback, refined the offer. That’s informed agility. It’s not just about speed; it’s also about insight. You need mechanisms to gather data and hear from your audience as you go, not at some arbitrary timeline of every three years or five years when it’s “time” to conduct your annual needs assessment again.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:53] That was a look at informed agility. Let’s move to the second habitset: strategic foresight, which ties very nicely to what you were just talking about, Jeff, about listening as part of what you’re piloting or trying out. Strategic foresight is about scanning the horizon.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:13] Yes, strategic foresight is not about trying to predict the future with any real accuracy; it’s about watching for signals, seeing patterns that are emerging, and asking, “What might this mean for us?” And, more importantly, “What would we do if this trend accelerated?”

Celisa Steele: [00:11:33] We’ve had Rohit Bhargava on the podcast before (four times), and he talks about the non-obvious—that you’re looking for non-obvious trends; you’re looking for the stuff that’s out there, but nobody else is quite paying attention to it yet, but you can begin to get an idea of where it’s going to go and what that might mean. And, if you can do that, if you can pay attention to it and see what it might mean, boy, that’s a real leg up in terms of being able to respond to what your audience needs. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:03] Rohit talks about that sort of thing. And Jeff De Cagna, who we’ve also had on the podcast multiple times (another four-timer), is really big on strategic foresight, so it’s appropriate to mention his name here too. He describes strategic foresight as an intentional process of learning with the future. 

Celisa Steele: [00:12:21] I like that “learning with the future.” Some of those trends that you might be looking for, when you have your strategic foresight habitset going, are things like generative AI, remote-first workplaces, how certification and licensure requirements are shifting. None of those should be total surprises now. They don’t even qualify as non-obvious. But there may be some non-obvious trends that relate to those.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:51] The signs have been there, and you need to carve out space in your planning and conversations to explore these things—before they become urgent. Strategic foresight isn’t extra; it’s essential as an ongoing habitset.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:05] It’s also important to note too that it’s not necessarily a solo activity. If you are going to be engaged in strategic foresight, yes, it’s probably about you carving out some time on your own to observe and reflect, but you could also involve others. You suggest forming foresight groups—even informal ones—inside a learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:26] It can be as simple as getting three to five colleagues together once a month to discuss, “What are we seeing out there? What’s on the edge that might move to the center?” That small investment can yield a huge payoff in organizational readiness.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:43] We’ve talked about two of the four habitsets: informed agility and strategic foresight. Let’s move on to habitset number three: stakeholder intimacy. I really appreciate the way you phrase this one, as intimacy gets at the idea of this being a relationship. It makes it clear that this goes beyond customer service or even customer journey. This is about real people, not personas.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:10] It’s about depth. Stakeholder intimacy means you know your learners, your members, your customers—not just in terms of their titles or roles but their motivations, their contexts, their struggles. And you know not just the most vocal ones and the ones that come to your annual meeting and sign up for your courses, but the ones who don’t. The ones who are reluctant for whatever reason to respond to your surveys. They’re the ones who maybe never even open the e-mail asking them to respond to your survey.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:41] And that intimacy can’t come from a one-time survey anyway. It takes ongoing, intentional engagement. It is a relationship, and relationships are organic and living, and they evolve and change.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:55] You listen actively. You conduct interviews. You ask open-ended questions. You test things early and see how people respond. It’s about forming, again, genuine relationships with the people you serve. And the payoff is that you can design offerings that actually meet real needs—not just what you assume the needs are.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:16] That was a look at stakeholder intimacy. And that brings us to our fourth and final habitset: portfolio thinking. This is about how you design and structure what you offer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:29] Exactly. We’ve been big on this for a long time. Too many organizations rely on a single-point revenue source, like an annual conference or one major course or credential. That’s risky. Portfolio thinking means developing a range of offerings—different formats, different price points, different entry points into your catalog of options.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:54] Then you’re not selling just one course. You might be building pathways. You might be offering microlearning, deep dives, and bundled subscriptions. You might have place-based learning. You might be offering ongoing support. There could be a whole range of things that might be part of your portfolio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:12] Ideally, these offerings reinforce each other. They’re telling that logical story that fits together. A Webinar leads to a short course. A short course leads to a credential. A credential leads to participating in cohort-based communities. So you move from isolated transactions to sustained engagement.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:31] You made the point that portfolio thinking isn’t about doing more—it’s about being more coherent and designing with intention. I think you were just pointing to that with that idea that your offerings hopefully reinforce one another.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:46] That’s the core of any sort of strategy. It’s certainly the core of portfolio strategy—being coherent and designing with intention. You don’t want 37 unrelated offerings. You want a set of offerings that may be much smaller but that work together to serve the learner and support your strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:10] We’ll recap the habitsets and preview what’s to come in the second part of our look at navigating uncertainty, so stick around to the end.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:26] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, we’d be grateful if you’d mention it to one colleague or co-worker you feel would get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:35] To recap, we talked about four habitsets. First, informed agility—this is about moving quickly but with insight. You want to be piloting, testing, and then adjusting in real time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:47] Second, we talked about strategic foresight. Regularly scan for weak signals out in your marketplace, and explore possible futures.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:58] The third habitset, stakeholder intimacy—this is about staying really close to your learners, your members, your customers, really getting to know them deeply. And then the final habitset we talked about was portfolio thinking—this is about designing an integrated suite of offerings that help you spread risk and also reinforce value.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:21] Cultivating these habitsets gives you a foundation for navigating uncertainty—not just reacting to it but learning from it and growing stronger.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:31] In our next episode, we’re going to turn to five practice levers that help you activate these habitsets, that help you move from ideas to action.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:41] In the meantime, here’s a little homework, something to help with reflection and application. Think about a challenge you’re navigating right now—one that you attribute specifically to the uncertainty we’re experiencing, one where the ambiguity, volatility, or complexity of the current environment is making the solution difficult to see or act on. Pause here, and really think about that. Don’t go abstract—get specific.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:11] Maybe your challenge is a drop in enrollment or registration for an event. Maybe it’s a stalled product development issue. Maybe it’s a board that’s hesitant to invest. Whatever it is, identify that specifically, and then ask, “How is uncertainty shaping this challenge? And what opportunities might that uncertainty open up?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:34] Sometimes uncertainty isn’t just an obstacle; it’s a spotlight. It highlights the fragilities in your system. It forces decisions that were, frankly, long overdue. It creates space for new approaches.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:47] Once you have that specific challenge in mind, ask, “Which habitset, of the four that we talked about, could help you address that challenge more effectively?” Is it time to be more agile? Is it time to be more attuned to your stakeholders? To be more forward-looking? Or to be more intentional in how your offerings work together?

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:09] Again, this isn’t a rhetorical question. We mean this as something for you to truly try to answer. And these questions aren’t just for you as an individual leader—they’re great prompts for a team conversation.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:21] Thanks again, 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 Four Habitsets for Navigating Uncertainty appeared first on Leading Learning.

Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss the powerful and sometimes limiting role of credit (CE, CME, CLE, CPE, etc.) and subject matter experts (SMEs) in learning businesses. Both are mainstays, but they can restrict innovation, often unintentionally.

This episode unpacks how credit and SMEs function as enablers and as limiters—and what learning businesses can do to navigate those dynamics more intentionally.

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: [00:00:17] A little while back, I wrote a post on LinkedIn, just a few paragraphs, and I honestly didn’t expect much from it. But it got more traction than most things I post, which usually tells me I’ve hit a nerve—or at least raised something that others are thinking about.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:32] What you raised in that post was something we see a lot in our work with learning businesses: the powerful and sometimes limiting role of credit (CE, CME, CLE, CPE) and subject matter experts, or SMEs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:51] Both are pillars in many learning businesses, but they can also quietly restrict innovation or even hold an organization back strategically, often unintentionally.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:02] So, in this episode, number 452, we want to unpack both how credit and SMEs function as enablers and as limiters—and what learning businesses can do to navigate those dynamics more intentionally, how they can be aware of these double-edged swords and make better use of credit and SMEs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:25] We’ll also pull in some insights from others who joined the conversation in the comments on my LinkedIn post.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:31] Let’s start with credit. This could be CE, CME, CLE, CPE, CEUs, however credit shows up in your learning business. It’s often a baseline requirement. For a lot of learners, if an offering doesn’t carry credit, it doesn’t count.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:48] Exactly. That’s why offering credit nearly always increases demand. We’ve seen that constantly and consistently over the years. It opens doors, it helps learners meet requirements, and it can even be seen as a point of legitimacy—“Oh, this course offers credit, so it must be serious or credible because there’s probably been some vetting, some requirements met for it to be able to offer credit.”

Celisa Steele: [00:02:14] But that’s only one side of the sword.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:18] The other edge is what happens to learning businesses over time. When credit becomes the main selling point, which it so often does with all sorts of organizations, the offerings start to get commoditized. If everyone’s competing on credit hours, then it’s a race to the bottom in pricing or a race to package the same content in slightly different ways.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:41] This is especially true when you’re pricing per unit because one credit hour looks a lot like another, at least on paper. It’s often hard to differentiate based on content quality or instructional design when what a learner sees in your catalog is just a number: 1.0 CEU or 2.5 CME credits, etc.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:04] Right. It becomes like producing widgets instead of producing rich learning experiences. You end up competing on volume, cost, or convenience. I don’t know how many learning businesses there are that want to be in a pricing war or a speed contest. That’s not what most of us have signed up for. That’s usually not a sustainable strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:24] It can also be a distraction from the actual learning. When credit is what learners are focused on, then that becomes the goal—checking that box, getting the points, getting those credits—and the focus then isn’t necessarily on building real competence or real confidence in the learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:42] Yes, we hear about checkbox learning all the time. This is one of the areas where I think we have a responsibility as learning leaders to ask, “Are we reinforcing that transactional mindset? Are we contributing to the idea that learning is just a checkbox?”

Celisa Steele: [00:04:00] To quote you to yourself, in that LinkedIn post, you wrote, “Whether or not offering credit is central to your learning business, continued, creative efforts to provide—and communicate—value beyond credit is essential to an effective strategy in today’s market.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:16] What a smart quote! That is the heart of it. The question I posed was, “How are we, as a learning business, creating or will we create value that transcends credit?” Because, if credit is your only hook, your only promise to learners, you’re in a pretty vulnerable position.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:37] Yes, then you’re a one-trick pony. The “transcending credit” part is where some of the most interesting comments on your LinkedIn post centered and that idea that organizations can focus too much on credit requirements. When they do that, they often miss the opportunity to foster real engagement, to be part of facilitating deeper learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:03] That’s really spot-on. A lot of organizations get so locked into the mechanics of credit—tracking hours, ensuring compliance—that they forget to step back and ask, “What kind of learning experience are we actually creating here?”

Celisa Steele: [00:05:18] Let’s talk about some ways that learning businesses can create that value beyond credit. Let’s talk about some of what we’ve seen that’s worked.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:28] One thing that stands out, that we’ve talked about many times, is application. Are learners doing something with the content? Are you helping them translate knowledge into action? That’s inherently more valuable than passive seat time. I think learners recognize it when it’s happening too. This isn’t value that’s lost on them.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:47] As a learner, if I’m in a situation where I’m actually translating what I’m learning into something that I’m struggling with at work or in my life, that’s incredibly valuable to me because it then means, yes, I’m perhaps checking the box in terms of getting a credit that I need, but I’m also getting something that I also need in this other way that’s going to help me do my job or work better. Yes, I definitely see it as a learner myself.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:13] In that case, when you have two checkbox alternatives—which is so often the case in these competitive continuing education markets; you may have myriad providers you can go to for that continuing education credit—but, if you know one of them is going to provide you with application and applicable results, that’s going to skew you towards going back to that provider again and again.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:37] Application you just mentioned as being something that learning businesses can focus on as a way to create value beyond credit. Reflection is another one, and that’s something that we also talk a lot about. Application and reflection are often tied together. Are you building in time for learners to reflect on what they’re being taught, to begin that process of connecting the material to their own experiences, to begin to make the meaning very personal for them?

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:06] It’s often a very simple element to add. We’ve made that comment many, many times over the years. But that gets overlooked, adding that reflection element. We talked about application. Another one is community. When learning offerings foster connection—that could be peer learning, discussion, maybe even cohort-based experiences—then you’re offering something that credit alone can’t match. Most of us as learning professionals know this. We know that so much of learning comes out of social interaction, those informal elements that can be there to complement a formal learning experience but are so valuable in and of themselves. This is an area where, even though we know it, learning businesses have not, over the years that we’ve been watching this, been as conscious and intentional about leveraging community as part of their practices as they could be.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:59] I feel like it’s either not thought about, or it’s thought about but not scaffolded. It’s like, “Yes, of course you’re going to benefit from your peers.” But the way you achieve that is by putting people in a room with their peers.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:13] Yes. “Talk among yourselves” sort of thing. You need more than that.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:16] There’s also a brand dimension here that, if your learning business can be known not just as that place to go and get credit but as a place to go where learners really grow, then your brand is going to help build loyalty. It’s going to help get people to keep coming back because they’re going to know that they’re going to get opportunities for application and reflection. They’re going to be able to have meaningful community connection. And so they’re going to come back to you, not because they have to—because they probably, as you were saying, Jeff, have all these other choices for a place to go to just check the box for their credit—but they’re going to come back to you because they want to.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:55] Of course, that’s what changes the game. It moves you from transactionally oriented to relationship-oriented to transformational, once you’re firing on all cylinders. And, let’s be honest, that’s what got most of us—or at least I hope that’s what got most of us—into this space in the first place.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:17] Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that you’re going to abandon credit entirely. Credit does still matter. What we’re saying is don’t let credit define the experience. Don’t let credit be the only reason that your offerings exist.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:31] Exactly. Credit can be part of your value proposition, and it probably should be in many instances. It’s the price of entry in many markets. If you’re not offering credit, then you’re not going to get that first look that you need from your potential customer. We’re definitely not saying don’t do credit. You often need that credit. But it shouldn’t be the core of your value proposition.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:55] You also noted in that LinkedIn post that demand for credit tends to increase competition. That’s already come up a little bit in what we’re talking about here. Of course, when you have increased competition, that can drive down pricing. That’s another pressure point, another aspect of this double-edged sword of credit.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:13] Yes, it’s an important one. We’ve worked with learning businesses that feel stuck. They know they’re delivering high-quality learning, but they can’t raise prices because everyone else is offering one-hour Webinars for $29 or bundling dozens of hours together at rock-bottom rates.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:33] Again, it comes back to differentiation. If credit is the only selling point—that one-hour Webinar with that one hour of credit or that one credit that goes with it—if that’s all that you’re talking about, then you’re probably in a race that you don’t want to win.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:49] That’s right because you’re racing to the bottom, and you get to a point where you’re charging so little that you have no sustainability. You have nothing to invest back into the learning business. Maybe you have eliminated everybody else, but you’re going to have trouble thriving yourself. You’ve got to ask, “What else do we offer that learners can’t get elsewhere?” What’s the transformation? What’s the connection? What’s the unique perspective or value we bring? That can be hard work to figure that out. It really can be. And it can involve some tough choices about who you’re serving and how you’re serving and all sorts of things—the things that are at the core, at the heart of effective strategy. But you have to do it.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:31] We’ve been talking about credit so far. Let’s pivot to the second half of your LinkedIn post, another double-edged sword: subject matter experts. Or SMEs, as we call them, for short.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:45] It’s so much easier to call them SMEs. But we need to be clear.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:49] And some people call them S-M-Es.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:51] S-M-Es or SMEs, yes, but definitely less of a mouthful than subject matter expert. SMEs are essential. Without them, most learning businesses would have a serious content problem. They’re the ones with deep knowledge, real-world insights, the credibility that learners often expect. We know that’s a decision factor for learners to have those highly reputable SMEs involved.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:18] But that doesn’t necessarily make those SMEs great facilitators of learning. They might be experts in their subject—that’s in their name—but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily experts in andragogy or pedagogy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:33] That’s right. Most SMEs default to what they know, which is often lecturing. That’s the default modus operandi, to use a fancy Latin term for how your average subject matter expert is going to deliver their content expertise. That might’ve worked for them in school or early in their careers, so it feels like that’s the way to go. But it’s not always the most effective way to support adult learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:58] A challenge is lecture is what the SMEs know. Another challenge is that many SMEs don’t have time or don’t feel like they have time to try something new. They’re busy. Maybe they’re doing this in a volunteer capacity. Or they’re being paid, maybe modestly. Asking them to rethink their whole approach to teaching something, that can seem like a heavy lift to those people.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:25] Yes, and that’s why I think learning businesses have to be very intentional with this. We can’t just hand SMEs a slide deck and hope for the best or say things like, “Be interactive. Be engaging.” That doesn’t provide the support that they need. We need to coach them. We need to educate them about adult learning principles. We need to partner with them. This is the whole reason that we developed our “Presenting for Impact” course, which is available for free, and we’ll be sure to link to that. In fact, we developed it because Jack Coursen at ASHA saw this issue and felt that he wanted to be intentional and proactive in addressing this with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, ASHA’s subject matter experts and helping them with their online presentations in particular. We developed “Presenting for Impact” for ASHA for that specific reason. ASHA gave us the rights to offer it broadly so that other organizations can use it—and it is something that needs to be used. Whether it’s “Presenting for Impact” or something else, you need to have that intentional, supportive approach to empowering your subject matter experts to become excellent teachers.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:34] And having a resource like “Presenting for Impact” or other resources, what you’re signaling with resources like that is that you do care about supporting your subject matter experts and that you’re willing to partner with them. You’re willing to work as a team with them, and I think that can be really, really effective when it happens. When a learning business and its SMEs work together as a team that can open the door to better learning for the individuals participating in the experience. But then it has ripple effects. Those learners who then take something to heart and go out and apply it, that benefits the people that that learner serves as well. So it is very powerful to think about how best to support and partner with your subject matter experts.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:23] That mutual learning is key. When staff bring knowledge about adult learning, and SMEs bring content expertise, you get something powerful—if there’s trust and collaboration.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:37] The focus of that trust and collaboration is around helping that subject matter expert see herself not just as a presenter but embracing that role of facilitator, a facilitator of learning. If that shift can happen, that’s super powerful. That can really change the dynamic in any learning experience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:01] That need for support was echoed by a number of the commenters on the post. There was one who called that process of helping content presenters become learning facilitators an “untapped goldmine.” And I think that’s spot-on.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:18] Because, when SMEs make that shift, when they say, “Okay, I’m no longer talking at people; I’m actually engaging with them,” it really does change the nature of the experience. Learners tend to become much more engaged. The outcomes tend to be much stronger. Often the subject matter experts themselves feel more satisfied rather than “I’m just up here lecturing, and there may or may not be anyone in the room. I can do this on my own. Set me up, and I’ll just play out for 50 minutes or an hour or whatever.” But when there’s real engagement, I think that subject matter experts can get excited by that and by seeing that knowledge transfer happen.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:57] Definitely. We’ve seen that in working with organizations and their subject matter experts. There’s also another layer to this, and that’s, increasingly, SMEs can go it alone. We’ve talked about this. They can create a course on Thinkific or Kajabi or collaborate with LinkedIn Learning. They don’t always need the learning business anymore.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:22] And so that means the value we, as a learning business, have to offer, that has to go beyond logistics. It has to be beyond just saying, “Hey, we can put you in front of a room full of people who need to hear about this topic or care about this topic.” It has to, again, get back to a true partnership and bringing something to the table—the learning business bringing something to the table—that helps the subject matter expert be more successful too.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:48] Yes, definitely. That’s why I posed the second bottom-line question in the post, which was, “How will we foster SME relationships and bolster SME capabilities to support our goals—and theirs?”

Celisa Steele: [00:18:02] Because, if we can’t support SMEs in a way that aligns with their motivations and our organizational strategy, then we risk poor learning. We risk burnout. We risk disengagement. We risk losing learners and SMEs altogether.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:18] On the flip side, if we do support them well, if we train, coach, listen, we can create long-term relationships with trusted contributors who get better over time.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:28] Yes, it’s like building a teaching faculty, even if they’re volunteers, even if they’re part-time contributors. You’re investing in them as professionals, not just treating them as vessels of information.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:40] Again, that leads us back to value beyond the basics. When learners experience a well-designed session led by someone who truly knows the material and knows how to teach it, that’s when you start standing out.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:54] There was one more idea that came up in the comments to your original post, Jeff, and I think it’s something that it’s worth talking about here. It’s essentially around how can we make sure that we create a shared purpose or community?

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:10] That one really struck me. Because, at the end of the day, learning isn’t just about gaining skills or fulfilling a requirement. It’s also about belonging, about being part of something.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:22] And, for learning businesses, that can be a huge differentiator. For learning businesses that are housed within an association, this is often completely enmeshed in their mission. You want to be about belonging and that sense of community. If learners feel like they’re part of a community, if they feel like they’re connected to others who are on a similar journey, then that’s the kind of value that credit and content alone can’t provide because you’ve got this added layer, this added value of community.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:53] It also opens the door to peer learning, ongoing engagement, maybe even advocacy. When learners identify with the mission or the community, they’re more likely to stay connected, keep learning, and recommend your offerings to others.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:08] This can become a third key question that we want to leave you, dear listener, with. Are we building offerings that foster connection and a sense of shared purpose—not just delivering knowledge?

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:28] We’ll recap briefly and offer some reflection questions, so stick around to the end.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:40] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please do us the favor of sharing this show with one colleague or co-worker who you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:50] To summarize this episode, we’ve looked at credit and SMEs as essential but sometimes limiting forces in learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:58] Credit can be a value-add, but it can also commoditize your offerings if it becomes the main driver. We have to find ways to offer something beyond the unit of credit.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:10] Subject matter experts, they’re your lifeblood, but they’re not always equipped to deliver the kind of facilitation that today’s learners need and expect. And that means investing in them, supporting them, and aligning their work with your learning business’s strategic goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:27] Underneath both of these is a deeper need to build learning experiences that foster meaning, connection, and community. That’s where transformation lives.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:38] So ask yourself, “What assumptions are you making about credit? What assumptions are you making about subject matter experts? Where might some new approaches open up greater value and a greater sense of community and connection?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:52] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Beyond Credit and SMEs: Unlocking Learning’s Full Potential appeared first on Leading Learning.

Drawing on their own experience and insights from experts like Richard Rumelt, Roger Martin, and Michael Porter, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele look at the importance of coherence and posit that strategic coherence occurs when a learning business’s choices and actions reinforce each other in the service of its strategy.

They unpack what coherence means, how to spot when coherence is missing, and ways to build and sustain coherence to help make your learning business’s strategy stick.

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: [00:00:17] Today we’re focusing on a concept that might not always get called out explicitly in strategy discussions, but it’s absolutely essential, and that’s coherence.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] Coherence is a big part of what separates good strategies not just from bad ones but great strategies from good ones. And coherence can help learning businesses avoid spinning their wheels.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:39] Coherence is about more than just being organized or consistent. Richard Rumelt, one of our favorite strategic thinkers, talks about coherent actions. Roger Martin, another strategy luminary, describes strategy as an integrated set of choices. And I’d argue that even something like the popular entrepreneurial operating system (EOS)—which, as the name suggests, is operationally oriented—is fundamentally about bringing coherence and cohesion to strategy. These thinkers and approaches are all getting at the same thing—namely that, for strategy to work, the parts have to fit together.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:19] Fitting together is key. When your goals, actions, and resources reinforce each other—when they’re coherent—you get more leverage, and (to hark back to a recent episode) it’s easier to create and maintain momentum. Coherence helps your learning business focus energy where it matters most and increases your chances of following through on strategic intent.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:45] In this episode, we’ll unpack what coherence means, how to spot when it’s missing, and ways to build and sustain it in your learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:56] It’s appropriate to say a bit more about what we mean by coherence. In general—meaning the dictionary-definition kind of way—coherence is a systematic or logical connection or consistency.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:10] But we’re talking about coherence in the context of strategy. And, yes, strategy is usually based on a good, insightful idea. But that’s not enough. You have to also execute on that idea, and execution is greatly helped by coherence.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:28] We’ve noticed that the concept of coherence comes up in a lot of writing and thinking about strategy. Jeff, you’ve already mentioned Rumelt and Martin and EOS and other thinkers that directly or indirectly mentioned coherence in their thinking and their writing about strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:45] Yes, it is core to so much of what’s been said about strategy over the past several decades, and that’s true even when the specific term “coherence” is not necessarily used. Michael Porter, for example, who is widely regarded as the father of competitive strategy, doesn’t really use the term “coherence,” but he definitely stresses strategic “fit” and stresses that good strategy involves activities that reinforce one another in a system—what he calls “activity systems.” So that’s Porter. And then Rumelt, who we’ve mentioned, talks about coherent actions and says that strategy is a coordinated effort, not a wish list, which I think is what it often ends up being with many organizations. And Roger Martin talks about strategy as integrated choices—it’s not just goals, but how goals, capabilities, and activities interconnect, how you have a logical consistency among them. Another person I’ll mention, who doesn’t get mentioned quite as often, is Henry Mintzberg, but he’s another well-known strategic thinker, and he defines strategy as a pattern in a stream of decisions and actions, and that implies coherence over time. All of that is just scratching the surface. We can name many other people, but coherence comes up again and again in one form or another.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:12] Implicit in all of those thinkers and the thinking that you referenced, Jeff, is the fact that coherence is more than alignment. It’s more than being organized. Coherence is deeper. It’s about this idea of mutual reinforcement. If we want to tighten up that dictionary definition of coherence—a systematic or logical connection or consistency—we might say that strategic coherence occurs when your learning business’s choices and actions reinforce each other in the service of your strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:44] This is a simple example. If your learning business is focused on delivering learner-centered, personalized learning experiences—which is something that a lot of learning businesses certainly aspire to—if you’re saying that that’s what you’re trying to do strategically, but then you haven’t put policies, processes, and technologies in place to collect and leverage learner data, then you don’t have coherence there.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:11] That’s a little bit more about what we mean by coherence. Next we can talk about why coherence is strategic, delve a little bit deeper there. In essence, the reason coherence is strategic is because it helps serve as a filter. It helps us make choices. It allows us to ask, “Does this fit with what we’re doing and why we’re doing it?” when you’re assessing any particular initiative or activity that your learning business is undertaking or considering undertaking.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:40] Yes, exactly. Another way to come at that is to understand strategy as a decision-making tool, a way to make choices. Strategy is a “framework which guides those choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization,” to quote the definition that was put forth by Benjamin Tregoe and John Zimmerman many years ago in Top Management Strategy, which is one of those gems that I think a lot of people don’t know about.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:08] When you have coherence helping to serve as a filter, helping with strategy as a decision-making tool, it also helps then with that critical strategy-execution gap. It can often be easy to generate an idea. Sometimes it’s not easy to generate the idea, but, whether it’s easy or hard to get to the idea, you still have to then execute on that idea. You have to do the right things in the right sequence, and that can be harder than generating just the base idea. So that then you’re bringing it to fruition, and coherence helps with that because we have limited time, we have limited resources, and so coherence helps us focus our effort.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:48] We’ve already mentioned Richard Rumelt a couple of times. He’s one of our favorites. I particularly like the way that he talks about coherence as essentially a means of differentiation because strong coherence in a strategy is relatively rare. Just by achieving it, your business becomes harder to imitate. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Coherence creates a defensibility by building a unique system. I’ve seen this at work, for example, in what NIGP: The Institute for Public Procurement has done with its certification and education programs. Strategically, the organization is focused on being a career-long resource for procurement professionals. To that end, it made the decision a few years back to stand up a new certification to replace one that it had spun out years before, and it also developed a set of learning pathways that aligned with clearly defined competencies, provided for certificates and specializations to align with the career stage and needs of its members, and it also supported the path for certification. In many ways, NIGP’s learning business is a model of strategic coherence.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:11] And that, to my mind, brings up a metaphor, an analogy. You think about gears, and you think about them spinning on their own. Maybe that’s fine for that gear to be spinning, but when you get those gears interlocked and when they’re helping to drive one another so that momentum on one gear is feeding into momentum of another, that’s this image of strategic coherence that we’re talking about.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:36] We’ve talked about what we mean by strategic coherence. We’ve talked a little bit about why coherence is strategic and why it matters when you’re thinking about strategy. The next thing we can talk about is some indicators or signs of incoherence—what it might look like if you don’t have a coherent strategy. Common signs can include things like competing initiatives without clear prioritization. Maybe you have a number of things, and, depending on who you talk to, one is more important than the other. Or maybe people would say, “Oh, they’re all important,” so there’s not that sense of how they potentially fit together. Or, when push comes to shove, what choice do you make about which one to prioritize? (To go back to choices and the importance of strategy in helping you make choices.)

Celisa Steele: [00:09:21] Another sign of incoherence or strategic incoherence is that you might have program sprawl without a clear value narrative. Maybe you’re continuing to add to your portfolio of learning products and services without potentially taking the hard look at what might need to come out, without being clear about what this new product adds, and painting that full picture of the value that you can offer to the learners that you serve. A third common sign is that the metrics that are being tracked, the data that you’re looking at, don’t tie to strategy. Maybe you’re all focused on enrollments, but you’re not really looking at completion or about application back on the job. Again, it’s about being clear about your strategy and then making sure that you’re tracking that, which, obviously, metrics are one major way to do that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:14] I like that you mentioned the word “narrative” in those points. We often talk about being able to, for example, tell a value story. In general, I think it’s a sign of coherence if you can tell a good story about what your learning business is doing, and it’s a sign of incoherence if you can’t tell a good, compelling, clear story about what your learning business is doing. I would add into all of that misalignment between departments. We see this happen so often. Marketing is selling one thing, but the education team is delivering another. Or membership and education are unclear or divided on the purpose of education offerings. Is it a member benefit, or is it non-dues revenue, or is it in some muddled area in between? We see this happen a lot with trade and professional associations.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:02] Another thing that can come up that can add to incoherence is the shiny object syndrome, that idea of “Oh, there’s this new trend. We need to get on the bandwagon. We need to do something with it,” but without asking about what is the strategic fit? Where does this fit into what we’re trying to achieve? That’s one way that that can play out. Opportunism is related to that—this idea of saying yes to whatever it might be. You have your board come to you, you have vocal learners come to you and ask for something, and you say yes without really thinking about, again, that overall strategic fit, and is this going to be coherent and help you drive other things forward? Or is it going to, again, dilute resources and spread out what you might be doing and mean that you accomplish less even though you might be doing more?

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:53] Another example of incoherence we’ll offer up to keep helping to illustrate this is one we see quite often, where you have an organization striving for learner engagement, which is something we hear about all the time—“We want more learner engagement. We’re striving for learner engagement.” With that in mind, they adopt a technology platform; it might be community software, for example, because community equals engagement, so they’re going to get that in place. But then there’s no supporting strategy for uptake of the platform or integration with existing learntech or the existing approach to program delivery. Again, there’s no coherence there. There’s nothing making the pieces fit together and ultimately create that whole that’s going to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:37] Next we want to talk about how do you go about building and sustaining strategic coherence because, hopefully, at this point, you’re convinced that coherence is important. It’s valuable. It’s going to help focus. It’s going to help you deliver and bring to life your strategy. How do you achieve it? The first step is having a strategy and then making sure that that’s communicated and that everyone who needs to be on board is truly on board with that strategy, aware of it, gets the value of it, and wants to play their role in helping to make that strategy come to life. Because you can’t even hope to have coherence without that clarity around the base strategy, about what you’re trying to achieve. So that’s step one. You absolutely have to have clarity around the strategy. You have to have that in place and communicate it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:27] Once you have the strategy, coherence requires you to reassess existing activities and initiatives. Are they contributing, or are they distracting? If distracting, then you want to end them immediately if you can. If you can’t end them immediately, make a plan to wind them down over time. And, if there are somehow necessary but not strategic activities that you have to consider, what can you do to limit the resources on those activities?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:00] That last case that you mentioned—this idea of something that’s necessary but not strategic—hopefully very few things actually fall into that bucket. We put it out there because there may be some things that fall into that, but you want to be very clear about why is this necessary if it’s not strategic? And then, if that’s true, as you said, Jeff, what can we do to limit the resources that we’re spending on that? You were talking about reassessing existing activities and initiatives. You’re going to want to do the same thing when you’re looking at activities or initiatives that you’re considering starting. How do they contribute to the strategy, and how do they connect to other initiatives and activities that you already have going on? Because, again, it’s about coherence, yes, with the overall strategy but also the coherence of the activities with each other.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:51] You may need to use or create frameworks or tools for doing all of this. That can be helpful with this sort of thing. What’s going to work best is going to depend on your organization, its culture, and where you are in this overall process. At the high level, tools like Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade or even Richard Rumelt’s concept of a strategic kernel—which consists of a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and then your set of coherent actions—can be a great starting point. They help to put some definition around it, give you a point of reference for everybody who’s involved.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:27] Now, when you’re operationalizing, developing things like a simple decision criteria filter—which is something we’ve often done with clients—you can use that to help focus and score specific choices, and you can do this with something simple, like an Excel sheet, where you lay choices all out, and you can assign a score and some variables to them and work through the factors that are involved in any sort of strategic decision. You can also look at tools. We mentioned the entrepreneurial operating system (EOS) earlier and things like the Vision/Traction Organizer, part of that, can be very helpful in bringing some coherence to your efforts. Classics like the Balanced Scorecard might apply here. Or McKinsey’s 7-S model. These are all well-known approaches that, even if you haven’t heard of them before now, you can find out more about them easily just doing some quick Googling.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:17] And then you’re going to want to make sure that, once you have these tools in place, you’re clear on that strategy, then you’re going to make sure that you’re having good conversation within your learning business. You’re going to need cross-functional teams talking. Coherence isn’t just a leadership issue. It is a leadership issue but not just a leadership issue because execution happens in the details, so you really need everyone in the team, everyone who’s involved in one of these activities or initiatives that helps bring this strategy to life, they need to understand; they need to be involved in these conversations, these discussions, to keep that strategy and the idea of the coherence of all the activity that’s happening front of mind for them.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:58] Again, some of the tools you mentioned, Jeff, can be helpful in keeping the strategy and the idea of coherence front and center. The entrepreneurial operating system (EOS), for example, has this idea of rocks and regular meetings and lays out some of the cadence of that. Whether you’re following a framework like that or doing something on your own, the main thing is that you’re going to want to make sure that you’re having those conversations and having them frequently and continually.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:24] Yes, I’d also put the Tagoras Learning Business Maturity Model in this camp. We’ve talked about the maturity model a lot here on the show—many episodes that you can find that deal with that. It isn’t specifically intended as a strategy tool, but it can certainly help with strategy because what it does provide is a lens on an organization’s strategic activities that can then prompt dialogue, and it makes it hard to hide incoherence in my experience. We’ve seen, for example, that the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) used it over a number of years, and it has definitely led to productive, cross-functional conversation that’s guided NRECA in adjusting and refining its strategic activities over time and keeping that sense of coherence alive in them.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:13] Coherence is born of clarity—the strategy that you’re assessing against—and it also is based in regularity. Don’t forget to revisit the strategy, to revisit the activities and how coherent they are regularly. It’s a great idea to have a plan and approach for that in place. That might mean a mix of leadership meetings, and it might mean also full-team meetings or full-organization meetings if your learning business happens to be housed within a larger organization, as is often the case in trade and professional associations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:47] Like pretty much everything related to strategy, building coherence isn’t a one-time fix—it’s a mindset and a discipline. It means continually asking not just what we’re doing but how it all fits together. At the end of the day, coherence is what transforms a strategy from a list of good ideas into a system of meaningful action.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:17] We’ll recap briefly and offer some thoughts on next steps, so stick around to the end.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:30] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please do us the favor of sharing this show with one colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:40] To sum up, one of the key points we hope you take away from this episode is that often strategy doesn’t fail because of a bad idea.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:48] Perhaps more often strategy fails when coherent actions are not taken to support and actualize the strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:56] Another key point is that clarity about your strategy is a precursor to coherence.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:02] And that clarity and coherence pave the way for momentum. Clarity, coherence, and momentum are not, on their own, how-tos for great strategy, but they are attributes of great strategy, the kind that achieves meaningful results.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:18] Coherence matters for learning businesses because it guides decisions, focuses resources, and increases the likelihood of meaningful execution on your strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:29] Coherence serves as a filter for choosing what to do and—just as importantly—what not to do. So we encourage you, dear listener, to look at what you’re doing in your learning business and ask, “Are our efforts reinforcing one another or pulling us in different directions and diluting our resources?”

Celisa Steele: [00:20:48] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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