Leading Learning

Flexibility is an essential skill for those leading learning businesses. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 450, we talk with Kevin Eikenberry about flexible leadership.

Kevin Eikenberry is chief potential officer of the Kevin Eikenberry Group and an author, most recently of Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. The conversation covers three pillars of flexible leadership (mindset, skillset, and habitset) and four types of contexts leaders must lead in (clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic).

The world feels more complex and uncertain. If you’re a leader, this episode can help you have more clarity in what you do and how you do it.

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] This episode, number 450, features a conversation with Kevin Eikenberry, a recognized expert in leadership development and in learning and the chief potential officer of the Kevin Eikenberry Group. Kevin is a leader, a learner, a podcaster, a speaker, and an author, most recently of Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. Jeff, you had the pleasure of speaking with Kevin Eikenberry again—I say “again” because he’s been on the Leading Learning Podcast before, way back in episode 80. What did you and Kevin talk about this time?

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] As you might guess, we talk about the concept of flexible leadership and the growing relevance of flexible leadership in a world that feels more complex and uncertain and that seems to necessitate flexibility.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:05] Kevin also talks about three pillars of flexible leadership in your conversation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:11] He does. He talks about the importance of mindset, skillset, and habitset. Arguably, those same three things are not just keys to leadership but to learning—we need mindset, skillset, and habitset to effectively learn and apply ideas and concepts.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:29] I’ll also say, dear listener, that if Jeff and Kevin’s conversation piques your interest in flexible leadership and you want to work on improving your own leadership (your confidence, your flexibility, your leadership in general), listen at the end for ways to access some of Kevin’s resources. With that, on with the conversation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:54] You have got a new book out—we were talking a little bit before the show—and, between being the lead author and the coauthor and all of those sorts of things, you’re past 20 books at this point, so you’ve got quite a track record here. This one is called Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. There’s probably a lot of appetite out there for learning how to navigate uncertainty these days and do that with confidence. You say, in the book, leadership is complicated—arguably, it’s more complicated than ever now—but you also say that the core of leadership hasn’t changed. What prompted you to write Flexible Leadership now, and what does flexibility really mean in our current context?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:02:39] As you said earlier, the world is complex, and there is as much or more uncertainty than ever. I don’t know if we can actually say that because this is the only time we’ve lived, but we can safely say that there’s as much or more uncertainty across a wide variety of areas than most of us can remember in our lifetimes. And so all of that adds to the complexity of leading. The need for us to have tools to help us deal with uncertainty is greater now than ever, and so I believe the book is coming out at the right time. I’m excited because I think that it has something to say that hasn’t really been said. I’m like you—I read lots of books. I read lots of books about leadership, and I don’t say that lightly because there’s a tremendous amount of stuff that I’ve read that’s phenomenal. Certainly, I’m standing on the shoulders of all of that, and yet I do think I’m saying some things here that haven’t been said.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:36] Are you hearing right now—or in leading up to writing this book—from leaders who are feeling overwhelmed in our current world? And what are you hearing from them if that’s the case?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:03:47] I certainly hear some of that. I know this won’t be out in the world for a while, and people could be listening to this anytime in the future, but, as you and I are having this conversation, it’s been almost exactly five years since COVID changed a whole lot of stuff for most all of us. From that time on, the level of overwhelm, the amount and speed of change, the amount of uncertainty have become a bigger issue than ever before. I don’t think it’s always come out as “I’m overwhelmed with uncertainty,” and yet that’s a big part of what it’s been. And, to your point, I think we’re hearing that word more now, even though I’m not sure what people are feeling is any different than it’s been for three, four, five, six years, but I think that people are starting to hold on to that word or want to let go of that word, but that word is more in our language than it had been previously.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:44] Now, you structure the book around three pillars, and we’re talking about uncertainty—it’s nice to have some structure to how to think about that. But those three pillars in your book are mindset, skillset, and habitset. Maybe you can talk a little bit about why you structured it that way, and then I’d also like to know which of those do you see most often overlooked by leaders?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:05:10] I am so glad that you brought that up. If there’s any audience, any of the podcasts that I’m going to do in the promotion of this book, this is the audience that I think will resonate with this particular point. Like all of us in the learning business, we know that we’re in the business of giving people skills, and that’s true. People go to training, build skill, watch an e-learning course, watch a YouTube video, listen to this podcast, hoping to get some skills. Skillset is super important, but, without the other two, the skillsets don’t matter. Let’s just walk through it all the way. I would say of the three, we, Jeff, as an industry, are best at the skillset. We know what we’re supposed to do—put new skills in people’s toolkits. But, if the mindset doesn’t match it, if people don’t believe that those skills apply, if they don’t believe those skills are relevant, if they don’t think they’re needed, if they don’t think they’re important, it doesn’t matter how good we are at giving them the skills. If the mindset doesn’t match it, they’re not going to use it.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:06:15] Intellectually, they might get it—whether it’s in a workshop or a virtual workshop or whatever, whatever the learning experience is, synchronous or asynchronous—they might nod, but nothing’s going to change. And then the gap between the skillset and the habitset, I think, is the one that all of us have tried to figure out for a long time, or we try to be really good at skillset and then hope. Hope is not a very good strategy in this particular case. When I talk about habitset, I’m talking about skills in my toolkit that I pull out and use because, if not, we give people a learning experience, and those tools become dusty or rusty, and, if they’re dusty or rusty and aren’t being used, what was the point? Habitset is applying the stuff. It’s crossing the chasm from knowing to doing. It’s the question, Jeff, that I ask on my podcast every episode: “Now what? What will you do with this?” So I framed the book around mindset, skillset, habitset. We’ve been talking about that. We’ve been trying to help clients apply that for a long time, and it made total sense to me to make that the overarching framework of the book.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:28] I really love habitset, and it’s something I’ve been trying to become more conscious of myself because, as you said, you have these skills, but, until you do start to habituate them into what you’re doing, they just don’t have the power that they could, and I’ve tried to be more conscious in noticing that. I find it’s easier when I’m doing something like, say, learning a musical instrument. I finally realized, “Oh, I’ve got those scales under my hands in a way that I can use them meaningfully now.” I find it a little harder when I’m thinking about leadership to figure out that I’ve embodied and incorporated the habits that I need. Do you have any tips for leaders who want to develop their habitset portion of this?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:08:13] I was mindful as you were talking about your fingers feeling the scales. In days long ago, I played the saxophone, and there was a time when I had that skillset. But, if you don’t keep that, if you don’t keep doing it, that’s going away. The last time I put my hands on a saxophone, I could still play a scale, but not the way I once could. We’re mostly talking now about bringing in new things to bear—a brand-new thing that I’m going to try to apply. We’re very fortunate now, in this time, that there’s been a tremendous amount of study, research, and practical writing about how do we build habits? And probably the most famous application of all that is Atomic Habits by James Clear. I certainly mentioned some of his work in the back part of this book. It’s not the only book around habits that’s very good; it happens to be the one that continues to outsell everything else, and most everyone who’s listening probably has at least heard of it. If you’ve heard of it, you should read it. If you own it and haven’t read it, you should read it. If you read it but haven’t done anything, read it again. Fundamentally, there’s a lot in there.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:09:22] For us, as individual leaders, the main thing is we need to try something. We need to find a time when we can try it. I know this may sound old school—it’s not the only way we learn anymore, I realize—but think about the time you left a workshop, and you left with a lot of excitement, anticipation, you were ready to go try stuff, and then you got back to the office, and the world hits you. All of that intention went by the wayside while you were trying to bury your head into the work and get caught up right from being gone. The thing to do, I suggest, is pick something small and get started. And, while there’s a lot of stuff in this book, Jeff, every individual piece is like, “Try this. Try this here.” If we want to start to build up our muscle memory around being flexible, it requires us to just get started.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:22] I’m going to do something surprising here and switch to Welsh really quick—use a Welsh word.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:10:27] It’s not surprising to me.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:29] It’s not surprising to you. It might be surprising to readers to hear me say “Cynefin” (ku-nev-in), which I hope I’m pronouncing correctly. I only have a shot at it because your book said how to pronounce it correctly. I’ve seen the word in print for years and years, and I’m familiar with Dave Snowden’s work, but I think this is the first time I’ve had to say it out loud.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:10:47] You get an A.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:48] Fantastic. I mentioned it because you draw on the Cynefin Framework to help leaders respond based on context. In the learning business—and we’re probably not alone in this—we often face multiple contexts at once. How do leaders get better at diagnosing context, which seems essential, when we’re talking about uncertainty as we have been—diagnosing context and responding appropriately?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:11:16] Let me tie it to uncertainty for a second in Dave Snowden’s work—really great work—around this thing called the Cynefin Framework. Everybody, if you’re not familiar with it, he says that the situations we find ourselves in fall into—generally speaking, for the purposes of this conversation—one of four contexts, and that’s in this framework. One of those contexts is called the “clear context,” and this is the context that a lot of us grew up in at work. There’s a clear cause and effect. People know what things are best. Practices are really fantastic. We should find a best practice. We should follow a process. The person who has expertise has the answers. We could go there and get the answers. And that’s awesome. You in the learning business, this is the way it once was—let’s find our subject matter expert. We’ve got some processes. We’ll put this together, whatever the media might be, and we’re going to rock and roll. But the world is more complicated, Snowden would say, or more complex, and he would say those two things are different—two of the other four parts of the framework.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:12:22] Fundamentally, there are more things that we don’t know than there used to be, and that would be complicated. There are things we know we don’t know, and so we have to try to find those things. Yet it’s still an ordered world such that there is probably a way to find all those things out. It might take time. Sometimes we may have to make decisions without all that information, but all that information probably exists. And you’re saying, “But, Kevin, not all the things I deal with now are like that.” Some of them are like, “We don’t even know what we don’t know.” It’s fuzzier even than that, and that’s what Snowden and the framework would call “complex.” I believe that more and more of our work is here. There are competing priorities. There are different situations. There’s no such thing as single, right answers. There are shades of gray in every direction you want to look. Oftentimes we’ll make some decision. We’ll look back at it six months later and say, “Well, it makes sense now. Now we know why all these unintended consequences happen. If I’d known all that then, I’d have made different choices.” But, in a complex setting, we might not be able to know all those things then, and so we have to approach those kinds of things quite differently than if the context is clear.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:13:37] The fourth one of his contexts is “chaotic.” And here’s what I find happening: Leaders either want to assume everything’s a clear context, which it’s not, or they say, “Well, if it’s not totally clear, then it’s just chaotic,” and they want to throw everything in the world of chaos. I would suggest that, in the world of work—as Snowden would define it, which is a helpful way to think about it—there are very few things that are truly chaotic, that most of the things that we might call chaotic are actually complex or complicated. I know that we haven’t given this, Jeff, the treatment that people need. I encourage them—whether they get Flexible Leadership, or they read up on Dave’s work—I highly recommend you doing it. What I’m trying to do is help you think through a map of what to do in your situation. If you always do the same thing, you always get the same result, obviously. But, in a world that’s continuing to change, and there are varying degrees of uncertainty, those things we’ve always done, our natural responses, our best practices, what we think it is, our style are likely not going to help us. I’d like to say one more thing about style if you don’t mind.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:14:47] This particular audience, I know that a lot of you really care about helping your leaders. I’m asking you now, as you’re listening to me, to put on your helping-other-leaders-learn, not just for yourself but for everybody else too. In your organization, it is your goal, it is your passion that you want to help leaders get better. I love that; we are on exactly the same page. And yet one of the things that we often do is use assessments and use tools and use styles, assessments, and all sorts of things. We use strengths and styles and Myers-Briggs, DISC, and we can go on and on. All of those tools are marvelous until they’re not. Often they’re not. Here’s why. It’s because we have now turned them into our identity. “Well, I lead like this because this is who I am. These are my strengths.” “I’m a facilitative leader.” “I’m a directive leader.” “I’m a servant leader.” “I’m an iS.” “I’m an ENTJ.” I can talk all the different languages. The point is, once it becomes our identity, we are mentally locked in, and our ability to flex gets even harder. Knowing our style to know our tendencies, super helpful. But, if we oversimplify it and, as professionals, if we keep trying to teach it so they get it, what we might be doing is cementing in the inability for them to flex, and that’s not what we want at the end of the day.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:19] Yes, locking people into an identity that they then don’t know how to navigate their way out of. That does prompt a follow-on question for me that is related to what we were just talking about with Dave Snowden’s work. People want consistency. They want consistency in themselves and their own behavior. They want some consistency in what they are providing as an organization because, arguably, that’s the basis of trust, and it’s a basis of security. There is a legitimate need for consistency. You don’t want that “foolish consistency” that, as Emerson said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” You’ve got to know when to have the consistency and when to be flexible as you advocate and be able to innovate in the context that you’re in. How do you strike that balance?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:17:02] First of all, you framed it the right way. It’s a balance. Too often people say, “I can be consistent,” or “I can be flexible.” And, as you’ve hinted, the most helpful way to think about this is “How can I be consistent and still be flexible?” Or “How can I be flexible and still have a level of consistency?” Think of a tree, a mature tree. A mature tree is stable and consistent and known and not moving, and it’s locked in. It’s rooted. And, as leaders, we should be rooted. We should be rooted in our values and our principles, in the principles of human behavior, group dynamics, change management, and all that sort of stuff. There are principles that are known. There are values that we hold. There’s a mission that we have. There are purposes that we serve. That doesn’t change. But how we work to get to those things, like the leaves on the tree, should absolutely be flexible. It really is a matter of how do I do both? Not pick one. So thinking about this is what I talk about in the book as a flexor, that we need to be both consistent and flexible, and I believe that, once people see us as consistent on the why, they’re going to be very comfortable with us being flexible on the how.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:29] You referenced just a bit ago in our conversation this idea of cultivating yourself as a leader but also helping to cultivate other leaders. You even devote a chapter in the book to “Creating an Organization of Flexible Leaders,” which I know, in their hearts, the people who are leading learning businesses, of course, want to do that, to be able to cultivate the people who are working for them and with them as leaders, even their learners as leaders. But I also find that, in many of the learning businesses we deal with, especially in trade and professional associations, staff development isn’t always at the top of the list. It’s often a cobbler’s children thing in terms of developing people. What are the first steps leaders can take to begin a cultural shift that does lead to that organization of flexible leaders?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:19:20] Let’s say you’re a trade association, and you are trying to provide services to your members around learning services; if you want to have the most possible impact and influence on helping them to do that, you better be doing it yourselves. It can’t be that the emperor has no clothes because your vision. People watch our feet more than our lips, and so we need to put that at the forefront because, if we don’t, everything that we’re doing out into the world, even if our intention is completely honorable, it’s ringing hollow if people aren’t seeing it in what we’re doing. How does that play out with your staff? You’ve got your staff out there talking about the importance of learning with your members and all that sort of stuff, and then they’re thinking, “Well, I’m not getting any of that. It’s a fool’s errand to do that.” So I would be pretty blunt, hopefully kind but straightforward, Jeff, and say, “If that’s what’s happening, you need to reassess the priorities because your ability to be influential with your members and with your external customers will go up when it’s consistent with what you’re doing internally.” Do you agree? What have you thought about that?

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:39] Absolutely. I feel like we’ve said similar things in the past that, yes, you absolutely have to be walking the walk. In my mind, that’s a big part of leadership in general. If you’re not an avatar for your expectations of people, then how can you hold them to those expectations?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:20:58] I think we all see that when those people are around us. They’re on the same Teams channel with us. But, if it’s our customers, sometimes that can get disconnected. I don’t think anyone’s going to disagree with what you or I just said, but, with the customers out there, we can lose that thought. You and I are both saying don’t lose that thought. You’ve got to because, if you don’t, it’s going to have impacts that you might not even be able to see.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:23] To go back to our earlier discussion around the habitset, this needs to become habitual as part of you and as part of your organization. It’s ingrained in the culture. Part of what flexible leadership does for me is help to elevate the consciousness of that and make it clear that you have to be intentional about doing that. It’s not just going to happen.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:21:42] I’m very clear that, in this book, I’m asking people, like you said it, and I agree, that being a leader is a complex task. It’s not simple. It’s complex. In this book, I’m urging people to make it harder for a while because I’m suggesting that you don’t just do what comes natural, that you don’t just do your habit, that you don’t just do your style, but rather that you look at the context and say, “Oh, well, it depends.” What does it depend on? “Well, based on that, I might need to do this a little bit differently.” That’s the crux of this book, which means that I’m urging you to say, “I have to get out of my auto-response habit, natural-response style and make that my new habit.” Once I can get that as my new starting point, then I’m going to look at the context of the situation, at least for an instant or an hour or a day, before I go forward. Once that becomes your new habit, now you’re really on the path of being flexible rather than wanting to be a flexible leader.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:46] Yes, I like that—making it harder possibly before it gets easier, which is so often the case with learning in general. You have to get out of your comfort zone. You have to make the effort. You have to do the deliberate practice. Sometimes it doesn’t feel all that pleasant, but it gets you to where you ultimately want to go, which does feel great once you get there.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:23:04] And the fruits of leadership are tremendous. The opportunity that we have to make a difference for our organization, for our clients, for our members, for our customers, for our teams. As we get better at it, the fruit of that labor is pretty amazing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:19] Definitely. This isn’t going to be the TL;DR version because I want everybody to read this book. This is a great book for everybody to read—Flexible Leadership. But this is a podcast, people are listening, and, if they want to begin applying some of the ideas to their business, where would you suggest they start? Is there a particular chapter or a practice that you cover or something that jumps out at you that you really want people to know about this and do this from the book?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:23:46] The first thing, I think we’ve done a pretty good job here, Jeff, and I hope that you have the intention and realize that “flexible” is okay and probably even preferable in some cases. Secondly, there are times when you are considering something or someone asks you for your input or your eye or your decision on something, and you say in your head, “It depends.” In those moments, when you say it depends, ask yourself, “What does it depend on?” And, based on that, I might do something different. That’s the kernel of being a flexible leader. But, when you ask yourself, or when you say, “It depends,” you don’t even have to know how to say Cynefin to fundamentally…. At some level, you’re saying, “I have to make more sense of this situation before I decide what we could or should do.” It’s intention plus context—this I’ve described as “It depends.” And then, lastly, it’s flexors—being willing to flex. Let’s take a super simple one for 30 seconds. Sometimes our best response is to answer. Sometimes our best response is to ask.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:24:47] Most of us lean toward one of those things most of the time, and yet where we need to be in a certain situation or in lots of situations is more the other direction on that. Maybe we need to ask more, or maybe we ask a lot, and sometimes we need to be more definitive for our team. That would be one of the things we would call a “flexor” or the “Answering/Asking Flexor.” That’s what I would say. If you’re going to buy the book, start with the first chapter because it lays out the groundwork and why this is so important for all of us. And, if you do that, I think you’re heading in the right direction. In fact, you can get that chapter for free if you go to our Web site and give yourself a taste of the book. If you go to flexibleleadershipbook.com, it’ll get you all the ways to order the book, and there’s a bunch of bonuses if you buy more books for your organization, but you can get that chapter.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:37] That was definitely one of the things I was going to ask you before we wrapped up here. But one other thing I want to ask you before we tie a bow around this is about your own lifelong learning, and I believe we’ve talked about this before. Certainly, evidence of it has come up in the podcast, but you obviously have to always be learning yourself to do what you do and to do it well. How would you talk about your own—I’m going to use one of your terms—habitset around lifelong learning? How have you cultivated that habitset, and what does it consist of?

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:26:07] I read a lot. I consume a lot of things in a lot of different ways. I’ll say that something I do that not everybody does is I look at the world often through a learning lens. In other words, something will happen, and I’ll say, “What can I learn from that?” Or let’s take it more specifically from a leadership lens. If I watch a movie, I can enjoy the movie. It’s not like I’m some sort of weirdo, but I’m going to look at that movie at some point through the leadership lens. What are the leadership lessons here? What does this confirm for me? Or what does this make me think about that I’ve not considered before? When I’m reading an autobiography or a biography, that’s part of the lens I’m looking at it through. We can become a better learner about anything, in part, by choosing the lens to look at it through. We can watch any news program, and I’m not talking about politics now, although you can watch a show that’s about politics, and, if you watch it, instead of thinking about the policy, think about the process that the leaders were using or not using and say, “What can I take from this? What lessons can I draw? What inferences can I make?” That’s a really powerful thing.

Kevin Eikenberry: [00:27:21] The other thing that I’d like to think I’m pretty good at is reflection, which is to be consciously willing to stop and look back and say, “How did that go? What worked? What didn’t? What do I want to do differently next time?” One of the things that I will do when you and I are done, before I get on to my next thing because I’m going to have a couple of minutes, is I’m going to say, “How did I think I did here? What might I do differently or better next time? Did that analogy work? Did I talk too much?”—which I think I did in this case. Or whatever. But think about what happened and say, “What do I want to keep? What do I want to change, and why?” Doing that is a hugely valuable way to learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:02] We are big fans of reflection here at Leading Learning. I do believe we have at least one episode devoted to it, and we often do after action reviews for our episodes as well. And I love consciously applying a learning lens as you go through life, certainly something every listener here should take to heart.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:29] For more about Kevin’s work, visit the Kevin Eikenberry Group Web site. You can also get free access to the first chapter of Flexible Leadership.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:53] Celisa, when you think about the conversation with Kevin, what are you taking away?

Celisa Steele: [00:28:58] You already highlighted mindset, skillset, and habitset at the outset of our conversation, but Kevin does a nice job of explaining how each is essential for leading and, as you already said, learning too. I also like how he uses Dave Snowden’s framework, but I’m going to leave the Welsh pronunciation to you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:20] That’s right. The Cynefin (ku-nev-in) Framework, which puts forth four contexts: clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic. Kevin pointed to the fact that too often leaders assume things are clear or chaotic, but probably a lot of contexts are actually complicated or complex.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:39] I’ll mention one other thing I’m taking away, and that’s Kevin’s distinction that, if leaders are consistent with the why, then they can be flexible in the how.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:49] That’s it for this episode. Kevin has a lot of wisdom to share about leadership. So thanks for listening in to that, and we’ll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Flexible Leadership with Kevin Eikenberry appeared first on Leading Learning.

This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast looks at why and how learning businesses can and should segment their audience—what it looks like in practice and how it can lead to more engagement, better learning outcomes, and, yes, better business results.

If you’re already segmenting learners, the episode will provide food for thought and an opportunity to reassess your approach. If you’re new to segmentation, then you’ll walk away with how to start.

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] Jeff, have you ever had one of those moments where you’re scrolling through a streaming service, and it suggests a show that’s so spot-on, it’s almost creepy how well it knows what you’d like?

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:27] Definitely. It’s like, “Hey, Jeff, we know you love rock and roll and satirical comedy, so here’s a series where Stephen Colbert comments on biopics about musicians à la Mystery Science Theater.”

Celisa Steele: [00:00:38] And you’d watch that series, right? Because it fits your interests.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:42] And I now have questions about whether I should be happy about my viewing options or deeply concerned that an algorithm understands me better than some of my friends do. But I digress.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:53] That kind of personalization is what makes companies like Netflix or Spotify so good at what they do. And they do it through segmentation. They analyze behavior, preferences, patterns, and then they serve up the right content for the right person at the right time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:11] Of course, achieving the level of personalization of a Netflix or Spotify might be a stretch for most learning businesses, but many learning businesses aren’t doing even basic segmentation well. They offer the same courses, the same marketing messages, and the same learning experiences to everyone—whether they’re a brand-new professional or a 30-year veteran, whether they’re highly engaged by the subject or just trying to fulfill their CE requirements.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] Which is a problem, because learners—who are also entertainment consumers—are expecting more personalized experiences. If we don’t take the time to understand and segment our learners, we risk losing them to providers who do that segmentation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:54] So we want to spend this episode talking about why and how learning businesses can and should segment their audience—what it looks like in practice and how it can lead to more engagement, better learning outcomes, and, yes, better business results.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:10] If you’re already segmenting, great. We hope the episode will still provide you with some food for thought and an opportunity to reassess your approach to segmentation. You might walk away with a new dimension you want to segment on or a new idea to try for how you leverage the segments you have in place. Of course, if you aren’t yet doing segmentation, then we hope this episode starts you down that road.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:33] Let’s start off with why segmentation matters: the business case for segmentation. And we’ll say, out of the gate, segmentation isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s essential if you want that engagement, retention, and revenue that so many learning businesses are seeking.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:52] Learning businesses compete for attention, and personalized experiences help cut through all the noise. We’ve talked about awareness. We’ve talked about attention many times before on the podcast. Segmentation is a way to help you make your messaging more tailored, more personalized, which is then going to hopefully help it, once it does get someone’s attention, keep that attention.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:15] We’ve made comparisons between learning and marketing before. That’s familiar ground with us. Segmentation happens all the time in marketing—e-mail campaigns, for example, or in ads. You can set up all sorts of segmentation around running digital ads. And learning businesses need to be doing the same. They need to be doing that as part of their own marketing promotions, but they also need to be doing it as they’re thinking about their portfolio and their product development.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:42] The danger of not segmenting or not segmenting well is that you waste hard-earned attention and awareness, and then you make it even harder to get that back. If you’re sending that same e-mail about a beginner’s course to seasoned professionals, when they tune in, they’re going to be like, “Hey, that’s not for me. That doesn’t interest me.” So the next time they see your e-mail, even if it does tout an offering that is more appropriate to them as a seasoned professional, they might be less likely to open it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:11] In that case, it might be much better to have different learning paths that are based on career stage and then promote the appropriate one to the appropriate person. We’ve brought this up before. You can’t stress enough, at this point, how important getting attention is and how hard it is to get attention. I think we all know that. And, once you’ve got it, you better be delivering something that’s relevant and interesting to that particular person, or you’re going to lose them, and you may not get them back.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:39] If we know that segmentation is really important, critical in fact, then the next big question is how to do that segmentation. Because not all segmentation is created equal.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:51] You don’t want to split people into new versus experienced or member versus nonmember and then call it a day. We’ve done our job. There are different approaches to segmentation, and the trick is finding what actually matters for your learners and your learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:10] We’re going to talk about some different ways to segment learners, and there are lots of ways to slice and dice an audience. Before we jump into different ways to segment learners, we’re going to say up front that less is more and that it’s really important to also be asking why as you think through your segmentation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:31] You can segment in so many different ways, but it’s a lot easier to manage a handful of meaningful segments or meaningful personas. Businesses like to talk about personas a lot, but you can’t have 80 of those and serve them effectively. You can’t even have 30 of those and serve them effectively. You’ve got to get it down to the ones that matter most for your particular business.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:57] That’s around that less is more. Part of it’s being able to keep them in mind, being able to meaningfully serve them. That’s why less is more effective in this case. In terms of that importance of asking why, it’s about what will you do with that segment? What will you do with that piece of data you’re thinking about segmenting along? And the real takeaway here is don’t collect that data if you don’t really have a plan to use it. You’ve got to get people’s attention to collect data often in the first place, and then you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many asks, especially if you’re not going to do anything with it. So the data you’re trying to collect and determine about individual learners, make that important; make that relevant. Make sure you know why you’re collecting it and what you’re going to do with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:43] A part of that why and a part of that relevance is the size of the segments that you define. We just talked about not having too many different segments because that gets to be hard to manage, and oftentimes, if you have too many segments, you start getting them down to sizes that don’t really work from a business standpoint because we are, after all, talking about the learning business. It’s pretty easy to slice down to segments that are so small that there’s just no way you’re going to be able to offer a financially viable product. Now, if you’re a mission-driven organization, as many learning businesses are, you may make the decision to offer something to that segment anyway and offset the loss somewhere else. But, let’s face it, you can only do so much of that.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:25] Those are some upfront caveats or upfront thoughts to think about as you’re thinking about what segmentation might make sense for your audience, for your learners. What we can do now is talk about some typical ways to segment learners and different ways to think about that. Demographic segmentation is a very big, typical way to segment an audience. This might have you looking at things like what career stage is that individual in? What industry, or what job role? Are they a member or nonmember? Maybe you want to do things like collect geographical location, if you offer synchronous learning opportunities, whether those are in-person or online, and you want to be able to offer that at appropriate times to those learners. Maybe you want to use that geographic location to also make some assumptions around language support or localization needs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:16] Demographic is definitely a standard one. In a lot of ways, it’s often the easiest one for learning businesses to work with. Particularly if you’re within, say, a member organization, a lot of times you’re going to have some of that data about your learners, or you can get it relatively easier. Other types of data might not be as easy. Relative to any segmentation, you want to form some solid ideas about the segmentations you want as early as possible so you can plan for it because it’s going to be pretty rare that you’re going to be able to push a button and have your segmentation data. You’re going to have to collect it over time. You’ve got to be thinking about the things that you really want to have in terms of segmentation data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:56] A second one we’ll mention is behavioral segmentation—things like preferences for in-person offerings versus online or preference for mobile-friendly learning or short form (microlearning) versus deep dive or more immersive opportunities, what the engagement patterns are of your learners, their past participation, their tech access and savviness. These reflect ways that they behave. But, again, you’ve got to have a plan for figuring out how you’re going to get that. Are you going to get that through a survey? Are you tracking your LMS data? How are you getting that?

Celisa Steele: [00:09:29] Buried in some of what you were saying is this idea of engagement. How engaged are these segments? How engaged are these learners? Are they coming back to you, and what are they coming back to you for? This is perhaps a bit of a side note, but a potential, useful distinction or segmentation could be around who do you consider alumni? Who has come and learned from you before? Maybe that’s a useful segmentation because the messaging to those folks is a little bit different than to folks who’ve never learned with you before or haven’t learned with you in this type of offering. They haven’t yet gone to the big place-based conference, or they haven’t yet tried the mobile-friendly course offerings that you have, things like that, and that distinction of “Who is an alumni?” in this case.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:16] These are great things to brainstorm about within your learning business. What are these different types of segmentation that really matter? Again, going back to that why. Another one is needs-based segmentation—knowing pain points of particular groups of learners, knowing learning goals of particular groups of learners, the urgency of skill acquisition for particular segments within your audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:37] Then there’s also the potential to segment around competitive offerings, i.e., where does this segment of your learners tend to go to learn if they’re not going to learn from you? In some cases, that might be they’re going nowhere, and that might be your competitive landscape with them, which then would lead to a certain type of messaging. For others, you may know that there’s another offering in the field that is competitive with yours, and they have enough money and enough wherewithal to get themselves to that place-based offering. That’s going to be what you’re alluding to in some of your marketing messaging, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:12] Or configuring your advertising against keywords that relate to that competitor—back to the personalization and marketing. Another one is what’s typically referred to as psychographic segmentation. What do you know about the mindset of the different segments within your audience, the motivations, the barriers to learning? How can you speak to those, both in how you promote and in what you provide in terms of learning experiences?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:35] That ties back to the needs-based segmentation that you mentioned earlier, Jeff, around pain points, learning goals, and the urgency of skill acquisition. A lot of those then tie into things like mindset and motivation. But, again, the more fully you understand the drivers and the barriers for your learners, the more effective you’re going to be able to be in how you design your learning offerings and also how you talk about them, how you promote them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:00] You can imagine a Venn diagram around some of this stuff, where some of these different segments, these different categories overlap. You’re looking for that sweet spot where you’re capturing the most of these characteristics within a particular segment, which can be very powerful in terms of positioning and messaging. One we’ll mention that we find a lot of organizations don’t tend to focus on as much as they could is ability and willingness to pay and, related to that, the learners’ or members’ or customers’ role relative to decision-making for learning. Are they making training decisions for others? And, if you know you’ve got a segment of your population that is making training decisions for others or if you know you’ve got a particular segment of your population that is showing a particular willingness and ability to pay for whatever an offering is, that’s very valuable data.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:49] Related to that, we could call this the firmographic segmentation. If you’re thinking about firms, if you are a learning business that’s selling B2B, what do you know about those firms that make really good B2B customers in terms of company size or industry focus or any of that? Having that segmentation and that data for your B2B customers can also be extremely valuable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:13] That’s one of those classic overlap areas. If you’re trying to target organizations of a certain size, and you want to get to the person who makes training decisions within that organization, that’s a great segment to be able to have data on.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:23] And the last segmentation idea or category we’ll talk to is around strategic importance or strategic relevance. When you think about your learning business, your mission, your goals for the next two or three years, how important are particular segments to helping you achieve those goals, achieve that mission?

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:47] We’ll tie a bow around this by saying, again, that be sparing (less is more), and why is very important. You want to consider all of these different types of segments, but whittle it down to the ones that are important for your learning business and know why they are important.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:05] We’ve talked a little bit about the business case for segmentation, for why segmentation matters at that high level. We’ve just talked through some different ways that you can think about segmenting learners. Now it feels like it would be worthwhile to touch, at least briefly, on how do you get that segmentation data? How do you get that data that’s going to allow you to segment your audience?

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:26] We referenced this a little bit earlier, saying you need a plan. You need to make some decisions as early as possible about the types of segmentation and that segmentation data that you want to collect because it’s not going to magically appear for you in most cases. But, as you have that plan, then you’re going to have to go through the process of getting, maintaining, and updating the data. One classic method around this is surveying and getting learners to self-identify in some of these segment choices that we’ve talked about. We know from hard experience ourselves, and most of our clients know, that surveying is getting tougher and tougher (to get people to respond to surveys). But it still needs to be a tool in your toolset, and it also needs to be something that you’re repeating with some regularity over time. Running the survey once every five or ten years is probably not going to give you the level of segmentation data that you really need.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:16] Surveys and learner self-identification may be a proactive way of getting some of this data. Another proactive way would be around using some other qualitative methods. Maybe you do interviews. You pick up the phone and call some people who you deem to be representative of some of these segments that you’ve identified. Maybe you do focus groups where you bring in more than one from that sample segment and talk through key issues with them and uncover things like some of those psychographic needs around mindset and motivation or getting a little bit around the competitive landscape for those folks. Those would be more proactive ways to get some of the data or to update data. If you think you already have some of this or if you’ve collected it in the past, maybe it needs to be refreshed. But, in addition to proactive, there’s data that already exists, and it’s going to be then more a matter of pulling that together, looking through it, and assessing that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:12] It’s somewhat more passive—or automated data is the way to put it. The types of things that you’re getting through your learning management system. Learning management systems are collecting all sorts of data, which often does not get used as well as it could. Your Web site data, through your Google Analytics and other types of data that you’re collecting there. Your e-mail, those open rates and click rates and engagement rates with your e-mail—a wealth of data. You’ve got so many different data sources you can tap into, and you’re going to do this over time. This isn’t a static one-point-in-time thing. You’re going to be continually refining this segmentation data. I’ll note that a lot of what we’re talking about here aligns completely with our Market Insight Matrix tool, which we have an episode dedicated to that. We’ve talked about that tool a lot. I don’t think we’ve talked about it a lot as a path to segmentation, but it absolutely is because it’s all about getting different types of data that you can then use in how you’re going to market your offerings.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:07] This is a great place to leverage artificial intelligence or other analytic tools to help you dig through some of that data, like you were saying, Jeff. If you’re going to have this wealth of individual points of data about individual learners from your learning management system, you’re probably going to need some tools to help you make sense of that volume of data, to see some of the patterns and see some of the takeaways around your segmentation from that. Just be thinking about AI and other analytical tools to help you find some of those insights into your audience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:40] Yes, those can be extremely powerful. Those are things we’re using ourselves in thinking about our own segments right now. Maybe we should turn to how to use all of this wonderful segmentation data that we’ve been talking about here.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:54] A clear place where you can use this segmentation data is in your promotions. We started out near the beginning of our conversation talking about how common it is for promotions in the marketing world to make use of segmentation so that they can better personalize the message that’s being received. That’s something for learning businesses to do. You can be thinking about, “Okay, what is the message in the e-mail for this segment going to be? How can we speak to them and hit on some of their pain points or hit on some of their aspirations and really target it to that segment?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:31] We’ve talked before on a number of occasions about learner engagement, about how engagement begins during that promotional cycle (the early stages of marketing), getting to the right learners with the right message, and engaging the motivations of those learners as you bring them towards the actual offering and move them into the actual offering. You want to, again, as you’re saying, Celisa, tailor that message and put them on a path towards learner engagement in your offerings. You can also do things when you’re promoting, like configuring specific offers to specific groups. You might do things like free courses to previously unengaged members or customers to try to move the needle or a special follow-on deal for folks who enrolled in a specific course or seminar.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:18] And then you can also potentially use segmentation data to determine the cadence or the frequency or the timing of your promotional messages. If you know that seasoned professionals tend to be much more harried, and they’re going to only want to see, at most, one e-mail a week from you, then maybe they want it at a certain time of day. This is where you can begin to play with “When do we send it? How frequently do we send it?” to also go along with that tailored messaging and also potentially those tailored, specific offerings to your particular segments.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:54] Yes, and this is definitely a place to leverage AI. You can supply information about a particular offering and information about the audience segments, and, for example, have AI write different e-mails emphasizing different features for different segments, asynchronous for mid-career-ers who are likely to have school-age kids, that sort of thing. All of these things we’re talking about we do in our own learning business. For example, in the run-up to the most recent Learning Business Summit, we did this, fed a bunch of data into ChatGPT, and had it help generate a series of different e-mails for marketing that particular event. That’s a starting point, we should say. In my experience so far, ChatGPT still does not come up with the perfect thing, but it can help to jog your thinking and get you on a clear path that you can then configure and customize to truly fit your audience and the different segments within it.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:47] Promotion is a very clear, fairly obvious way to use segmentation data. Another big way to use segmentation data is for product development.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:58] Yes, definitely. Being able to leverage content in different ways, in different formats, and for different audiences. Of course, you have to have the segmentation data to do that in the first place. You don’t want to just be proliferating content without, again, that why in the background, having identified specific audiences that different permutations of content can be used for. We had an interesting example come up in our mastermind not too long ago, where one of the members in a trade association was approached by a member company who wanted to use that organization’s core training, or one of its core trainings, to create more targeted, specific training for its own employees internally. They were able to take the core training of the organization, run it through Synthesia (one of the AI video tools), and, based on their segment data for their particular set of employee learners, were able to convert it into content to fit their audience. A content reuse story but tailored based on segmentation data and leveraging AI to make that happen.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:04] You can use the segments to create different versions of the same products. This is a different spin or a slightly larger view of what you were just sharing there, Jeff, in that example. But we know that there have been learning businesses in the past that have put in the time and energy and effort to standardize the set of materials that they have for their trainings, for their learning experiences, and so they have those standard materials, whether it’s in person or online. Once you have those segments, and you realize, “Okay, who’s going to benefit more from the in-person? Who’s going to benefit more from the online?,” then you can again tailor the promotion of that correct product to that user. And, as you’re saying, Jeff, you’re setting them up on the way in to come into a product that’s most likely to align with their needs and their preferences, and then they have that good experience there, and that all leads to greater engagement. That starts very early on in the process, and it ties to both the promotion and to the specific flavor of the offering that that learner, that that segment is presented with.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:10] This is one of the great arguments for being able to chunk your content as much as possible into small components so that those can be reconfigured in different ways for those different paths and different audiences. This kind of segmentation is fundamental to personalization and to adaptive learning experiences that we know so many organizations want to make part of their approach to learning right now. AI has big promise around this. But, if you don’t have that segmentation data in the first place, it’s hard to leverage the opportunities for personalization and adaptive learning experiences and getting the most out of AI.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:51] One approach to adapting a learning experience can be around having different tiers or different levels of the offering. Maybe there’s a free offering that goes to a certain segment. Maybe there’s a shorter version (microlearning piece) that might go to a different segment. Maybe there’s the deeper dive that might go to a third segment. You could imagine that both the free and the micro and then the fuller offering are all based on some of the same assets, the same content, but pulled together differently for different segments.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:26] The last thing we’ll say about using segmentation data around product development—and there’s certainly plenty more that could be said—is it can be a great tool for strengthening community around your learning offerings and, as a result, strengthening learner retention as well. If you’ve got good data on your learners, then you’re able to connect learners with true peers, whether it’s for peer-to-peer learning or accountability, whatever’s going to be productive in that experience. Or connecting them with mentors, so you can see that early-career person, and you can see that later-career person based on the data, and you can see other commonalities between them and be able to arrive at the decision that this is a great match, that this person is going to be a great mentor to this person.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:09] We have talked about why, the business case. We’ve talked about different, typical bits of data that you can use to segment. We’ve talked a little bit about how to get some of that segmentation data. We were just talking about how to use segmentation data. So the last area that we’ll touch on is around the idea of measurement, the idea of looking at the impact of all of this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:30] Measurement is always a good thing and knowing that you are having an impact with what you’re doing. If you’re just starting out with doing this, then getting a baseline now is important. You know where you’re starting from and have an idea of where you’re trying to move to and then see if segmentation of messaging helps, for example, in increasing open rates or click-throughs. And then does it help with the real test, which is purchases?

Celisa Steele: [00:25:57] That reminds me of your conversation with Alaina Szlachta—she was at the Learning Business Summit earlier—that idea of having a hypothesis and that it’s really important because you want to have that hypothesis about, “Okay, now that we have this segmentation, yes, we should see higher open rates,” or “We should see higher click-through rates,” or “We should see greater sales revenue because of this.” So figure out what is that hypothesis that you have around what this segmentation is going to do for you, and then test it; see if it plays out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:26] Definitely true. All strategy basically comes down to having a hypothesis and testing that out.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:33] We talked about it a little bit on the promotion side—click-throughs and open rates. In terms of, once people engage in the learning experience itself, it might be looking at completion rates. Do those go up? Might be looking at evaluation results. Do those go up? Because then the right people are getting to the right offerings. But, again, be very clear. This goes back to that earlier comment about be clear on your why. We were talking about why for segmenting and what’s the end result of that why? Why are you segmenting, and what results are you looking for?

Celisa Steele: [00:27:25] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please do us and a colleague the favor of sharing this show with that colleague, someone you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:35] To recap, we see segmentation as an important aspect of what any learning business should do in the marketing realm.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:42] If you’re already segmenting, revisit your segments. Are they still accurate? Are you leveraging them well, especially in the areas of product development and promotion?

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:51] If you haven’t yet segmented your audience, we encourage you to start small and identify two to five segments that matter the most and that you’re in a position to serve well or soon in the future.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:02] And, whether you’re starting fresh or already have segments in place, remember that you’ll need to continuously refine segments as learner behaviors evolve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:11] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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In physics, momentum is the product of a body’s mass and velocity. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele define strategic momentum as the product of an initiative’s strategic weight and its execution speed, and they discuss why momentum matters, common barriers to maintaining momentum, and strategies for creating and maintaining momentum.

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Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

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

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

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Momentum is crucial in learning—not just for individual learners trying to grow their knowledge, skills, and abilities but also for learning businesses trying to grow their reach, revenue, and impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:28] Imagine a learning business that sees the opportunity to launch a new certification. Leadership is excited, the initial planning moves quickly, including an environmental scan of what’s already out in the market.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:41] But then the process stalls. Scheduling becomes a nightmare as some key stakeholders wind up neck-deep in developing and delivering the annual conference. Decisions are postponed, and months pass.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:53] After the annual conference is over, and the team recovers and returns to the new certification opportunity, it’s slow going to reengage in the past thinking, and, by the time they get back to where they were months ago, they learn a competitor has launched a similar program—an organization that wasn’t doing anything when they did their environmental scan. Now any first-mover advantage is lost.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:17] That’s a hypothetical situation, nice and pat, but what we hope it does is illustrate the point that momentum is important. For those of you who don’t remember a lot of your physics (me included before prepping for this episode), momentum is the product of a body’s mass and velocity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:38] What we’re talking about today is strategic momentum, which we’re defining as the product of an initiative’s strategic weight and its execution speed.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:48] Strategic weight represents the importance and clarity of an initiative—how well defined it is, how well aligned it is, and how valuable it is to the organization. A vague or misaligned initiative has little weight, and it’s not going to be capable of generating meaningful momentum.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:09] Execution speed is how quickly and consistently actions are taken to implement the initiative. A well-defined, important initiative without movement stalls, and a fast but less important or unfocused effort lacks staying power.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:25] That’s our definition of strategic momentum—it’s defined by an initiative’s weight and execution speed. What we want to talk about today is why momentum matters, some common barriers to maintaining momentum, and then some strategies for maintaining momentum.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:45] Let’s look first at that question of why momentum matters in learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:52] The simplest answer is that momentum drives results. The faster a learning business acts on a strategic initiative, the sooner it’s going to see the results of that initiative, the sooner it’s going to see an improvement in its reach, revenue, and/or impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:07] Definitely. You’ve got to get going if you want to get somewhere. Momentum ensures you get going and stay going, and you do it at good speed. Now the next point might be avoiding what we would characterize as “snapshot obsolescence.” If strategic planning is slow, then the data and insights that you’re using to drive that planning, to drive what you’re going to do strategically, those grow stale.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:34] In our hypothetical example that we kicked off with, that was the case there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:38] That’s exactly what happened, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:39] Another reason that momentum matters is that it helps you achieve financial and operational efficiency when projects stall. That ties up some of your resources, even if it’s just the people involved and the people’s time that’s involved. It can create uncertainty because it’s like, “Okay, we were supposed to be done with this by this date. Now we’re not. What am I supposed to be doing? Where does this fall in the overall scheme of priorities?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:05] And then another one—and I think we’ve probably all felt this if we’ve been involved in big strategic initiatives that did get momentum and got us someplace—is it boosts confidence and morale so that sustained momentum keeps the team engaged, whereas, on the other hand, stops and starts create frustration—which we’ve probably all experienced as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:28] I have experienced both the increased morale and the confidence that comes from something rolling along well and also, yes, the deep frustration that can come from something that stalls. The last “why momentum matters” that we’ll touch on here has to do with your place in the marketplace. If you have momentum, that’s going to help you remain relevant, remain competitive.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:54] Those are some reasons why momentum matters. I’m sure you can probably come up with some additional reasons of your own as you’re listening or add some detail to the reasons that we’re talking about here. But it definitely does matter. It really does help to drive a business forward, drive a learning business forward. We can talk next about barriers to momentum. There are a number of factors to look at there as well. Before we dive into some of those, you referenced physics earlier, Celisa. One of the sole laws of physics that I remember is Newton’s first law—a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends to stay at rest, and it’ll stay at rest unless there is a force applied against it that sets it into motion. For momentum to happen, there has to be a decision in the first place to do something. You’re saying, as an organization, “We’re going to look at our strategy. We’re going to make some plans here to move forward.” Once you do that, that’s going to start the motion. But then there are other barriers, the friction that can arise to make that body in motion not stay in motion.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:05] Let’s walk through a few barriers that come to mind when we think about what can slow a strategic initiative down. One is around decision-making and the bottlenecks that can happen there. There can be different factors that lead to that decision-making bottleneck. It might be that there are a lot of stakeholders, and it’s really hard to corral them all. It could be that there are slow approvals, which might tie to a lot of stakeholders being involved and needing to take time to get everyone to say yes and to weigh in and all of that. It could also be because of a lack of clear leadership, a lack of clear ownership—who really is responsible for this and driving this forward?

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:48] Yes, this happens a lot in our world because there’s often a need for consensus or at least a perceived need for consensus that has to be navigated and negotiated. There may be situations where perhaps you don’t need consensus, or you need a lighter level of consensus, and you have to give some single person or a smaller group of people the accountability and the responsibility for moving things forward. Now, another thing we see a lot, a second barrier is perfectionism and over-analysis, that urge to want every detail perfect before taking action, or—we see this all the time—organizations just want more data. “Can we get more information? Can we get deeper and better insight into what we’re trying to do?” And we’re fans of data. Certainly, we do a lot of helping organizations collect data, but there is a limit. At some point, you’ve got to say, “We’ve got enough here to make a reasonable decision to move forward.”

Celisa Steele: [00:07:40] Depending on what your strategic initiative involves, this may be a place where pilots or minimum viable products or things like that may come into play because that’s going to allow you to take some action. And then you were talking about data, Jeff, but it’s also going to give you some very specific data to whatever you’re trying to achieve that’s going to then allow you to refine what you’re doing and move forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:01] Yes, you want to get that body in motion and then do what you can to keep it in motion.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:07] Another barrier to momentum can be competing priorities. This often takes the form of people have their urgent daily tasks. They’re things that have to be done because that symposium is taking place next week, and this has to be done, and therefore some of the strategic work is going to take more of a back seat because, while it’s important, and everyone talks about how important it is, it doesn’t feel as urgent because it perhaps doesn’t have that very clear timeline associated with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:36] Yes, there’s that classic division between the urgent and the important and weighing those against each other. If I’m remembering correctly, if you put those out into a four-square matrix, that’s an Eisenhower Matrix or an Eisenhower Box. I believe it’s Dwight D. who is behind that; it’s how he liked to look at the activities that he engaged in as a general or a president. The things that were both urgent and important got the most attention. But some things were urgent and not that important. Some things were important but not that urgent. And this is all part of, as you said, looking at those competing priorities and having a way to manage them.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:13] Another barrier to momentum is lack of accountability. This may be deemed important, each individual may even see the importance, but, if it’s not clear what I need to do to contribute to this initiative, then that can be a barrier to momentum. Making sure that there are follow-through mechanisms, that those are clear, that people understand what’s being asked of them, that’s going to help you keep momentum. And, if you don’t have those, that’s going to be a major barrier to momentum.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:42] Yes, there needs to be a name associated with the actions you’re taking, a person who is accountable. I’ve seen organizations can get a little uncomfortable with this idea, but it’s so important. We’re doing some work ourselves with the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), and one of the things I like that they stress is you clearly chart out accountability within an organization. This would be accountability within a strategic initiative. And there’s just one name that goes with each of the items that falls into that accountability chart, so that there’s clarity around who’s ultimately responsible, who’s actually going to answer for what’s happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:20] The last barrier to momentum that we’ll touch on today is scheduling challenges. I feel like this one comes up a lot.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:30] It certainly does in our work.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:31] Often the strategic work that organizations are engaging in does require multiple key stakeholders to be involved, but getting all those stakeholders in the same room, whether that’s a physical room or even a virtual room, can be very difficult. Take as an example a learning business. They want to redesign one of their flagship programs, but, when you’re looking at the leadership of the learning business, you’re looking at subject matter experts (SMEs) who need to be involved, you’re looking at the marketing team, it’s very easy for meetings to get pushed out by weeks because you’re trying to make everyone’s schedule work, and that can then delay execution of getting that flagship program redesigned and out there and bringing in more revenue and creating greater impact for your learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:19] That’s one we definitely see variations on time and again in our work. It’s something that we work on getting better at helping our clients manage and make sure that they are…. You can probably never completely eliminate that as a barrier to momentum, but you can certainly alleviate it, ameliorate it—to use another one of those fancy A words.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:40] That’s the handful of barriers that we wanted to touch on: decision-making bottlenecks, perfectionism and over-analysis, competing priorities, lack of clear accountability, and scheduling challenges. Those are the typical barriers that we have in mind when you’re trying to think about how to maintain momentum. Now let’s turn to what can we do. Given those are some of the barriers, what are some of the things we can do to help keep a strategic initiative rolling along, to help it maintain momentum?

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:12] Once we’ve got that body in motion, how do we keep it in motion? In my mind, this first one relates back very strongly to the last point we raised about scheduling, though it applies broadly across the whole idea of momentum. That’s simply communicating the need for momentum, making sure that everybody who is involved in a strategic initiative understands and appreciates why momentum is important.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:39] And so it’s going back to some of those things we opened up with, the idea that, if momentum is what drives results, if you decided to go down the path of this strategic initiative, the faster you complete it, the sooner you’re going to see those results, the sooner your learners are going to see those results and those benefits. That’s one of the things that you might stress as you’re communicating this need for momentum. And, as part of that, stressing to each individual, “You play a role in creating and maintaining momentum, so, if you shrug off your part or don’t do your part when we’re asking, that’s going to slow the whole process down,” making it clear that this really is meant to be teamwork, and each person has something to do, but, by doing their part, they’re contributing to what the organization overall can achieve and can do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:29] This ties back to accountability. Individuals are accountable or need to be held accountable for their role in the initiative and for maintaining momentum in the initiative. That’s the first thing, kind of ground floor—make sure you’re communicating that need for momentum. The next one would be to set and to commit to—again there’s an accountability aspect in there—realistic timelines. You want to establish a firm but, to a certain extent, flexible timeline upfront and then once again hold people accountable to that.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:03] Buried in what you were saying there, Jeff, is there may be some shifting as you get into the work around some of the subtasks that are associated with whatever work you’re doing. But, overall, you’re committing to a clear timeline of “We’re going to have this ready for the board meeting in November” or whatever it is that’s driving it. That’s very clear, and that’s what you’re making sure that everyone is aware of, and then you’re holding everyone accountable to. And, if there is some slippage, then there’s discussion around, “Okay, how do we tighten up some of the next tasks so that we can recover some of the time and stay where we need to be in terms of wrapping up this initiative overall?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:39] One of the reasons for there being some flexibility in the timeline is any strategic initiative is a learning initiative. As you go along, you’re going to get more information as a result of the actions that you take, and you’re almost certainly going to have to adjust at times. But being clear, calling those out, making sure people are aware of them and that they are used as learning experiences, as you may at the same time be adjusting the timeline as a result, that’s very important.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:10] The third idea we have around how to maintain momentum is around tackling those scheduling challenges head-on. There are a few tactical ideas that we can suggest here. One is to lock in key meetings as early as possible and have those scheduled, and then communicate the dates and times, but then also communicate the expectation that people will protect those dates and times. If you know you have those key meetings set with all the key stakeholders, that’s going to be hugely important and hugely helpful in staying on track.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:46] Yes, definitely. We’ve gotten to the point—anybody who’s worked with us from a consulting standpoint knows—that we’ll start looking at the scheduling sometimes even before a contract is signed, just to make sure that we’re getting things in place and are going to be able to establish and maintain the momentum that we’re talking about here. Another approach to tackling scheduling challenges head-on is using a “rolling quorum” approach. If everybody can’t be present, a core group is empowered to move forward, so you don’t have to get everybody there for every decision. You have that ability to keep the momentum going.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:20] For example, you might have as part of your key stakeholders subject matter experts; maybe you’re leveraging a group of four of them. There are some times when two of them can weigh in and can represent that subject matter expert point of view. Another idea is to make sure that you are leveraging asynchronous opportunities to keep progress going, so that you don’t necessarily have to have more scheduled synchronous meetings than are needed. One rule of thumb is that, if a meeting is a status update, then you might be able to do that asynchronously by sharing documents, recording a short video to update people, maybe different project management tools. But, again, if you’re clear about the expectation (“We’re going to be providing status updates; we expect you to review them.”), then some of that can happen asynchronously within a specified amount of time. “At some point during this week, you’re going to review this document or this set of deliverables around what we’re working on,” but that can fit in, slot in to each individual’s schedule where they need it to.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:31] In some ways, it seems like an obvious one, but we see it slip again and again, where the meetings do fall into things like status updates that don’t necessarily require the time they’re taking up to do it. Of course, something that happens then is that people start to zone out of those meetings. They don’t view the meetings as important as they could be and should be, and it damages momentum. It damages the culture around an initiative. This is a culture thing. You’re establishing shared values around how we’re going to manage our project work, and everybody has to buy into that and be committed to doing their status updates in the project management system, if that’s how you’re handling status updates.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:14] A fourth idea for maintaining momentum is around accountability structures. Make sure that you’re building those and then communicating them. We’ve already touched on this at a couple of points in our discussion today, but this is around having clear owners for tasks, especially for decisions, but then the actions that need to come out of those decisions as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:38] I feel like we might have to retitle this “Momentum and Accountability” because accountability obviously comes up a lot and is so important in creating and maintaining accountability. And, within those accountability structures, another thing is to use check-ins, dashboards, project management tools to track progress, as we were just talking about, but those have to be considered part of that accountability structure.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:00] Yes, because accountability is making sure that the people who are supposed to be doing things are doing them. But then there’s also the communication piece around it. That’s where a project management tool can help you, if you’re the one doing it, share that information with others, and, if you’re not the one doing it, to see that progress is being made. Another approach that you can take is to time-box the decision process. What you want to do is set some hard deadlines. You know that this decision has to be made by this date, and you’re going to stick to that, whether everyone weighs in or not. That’s drawing that line in the sand and saying, “If you want to have input on this decision, it has to come by this date because we’re going to choose how we’re moving forward at that point.” I think back to your point around culture too, Jeff. Part of what you can do here is almost create the sense of “Okay, we’re all right with default decision-making,” meaning, if no one objects by a certain date, you’ve provided all the information, they know how to weigh in if they want to weigh in, but, if no one does by that date that you’ve put out there, then the decision is to move forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:05] We’ve talked about communicating the need for momentum, setting and committing to realistic timelines, tackling scheduling changes head-on, building those accountability structures. A fifth one would be maintaining strategic visibility. We see this happen all the time that strategic work is going on, but, after that initial meeting where everybody’s told about it or that sort of thing, it goes under the radar screen after that. You need to keep key initiatives top of mind through your internal communications and regular updates about it so people, if they’re not directly involved at a particular point in the process, are still aware that it is going on and that that momentum is there, that it’s moving forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:47] Another tip that we’ll suggest is around trying to build in urgency but building in urgency with an acknowledgment that burnout is a possibility. You want to set meaningful milestones, and, when you reach those milestones, you want to celebrate those wins because that’s going to help people feel like, yes, progress is being made. Whatever extra time and energy they’re putting in is being valued, and it’s helping us move forward. So you want to have that urgency, and you want to celebrate those milestones that are going to help keep that momentum going.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:20] The last one we’ll mention here is leverage external support. This may sound a little self-serving, but this includes things like bringing in consultants or facilitators that can help create that structure, urgency, and accountability. There is a reason that there is a thriving industry of consultants and facilitators out there because this is a large part of what those types of external experts can help with when it comes to strategic initiatives and momentum.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:52] Those are seven ways to try to help you keep a strategic initiative rolling, to help maintain that momentum. I feel like we should double-down on this idea of priorities and say another word or two about helping your internal stakeholders and your external stakeholders prioritize this work. That can be hard, especially if the folks that you’re involving in the strategic initiative have competing responsibilities and other priorities. And, let’s be honest, that’s very often the chance. Very rarely is someone solely focused on whatever strategic initiative is at hand. Almost everyone is always going to have some level of competing responsibilities and other tasks that they need to get done.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:39] Let’s talk about some concrete ways that we can help those internal and external stakeholders. I’ll say upfront that, for me, these are characteristics or behaviors of good leadership in general within a strategic initiative or otherwise. The first one is to tie the initiative to their success and mission, to the success and mission of those internal and external stakeholders. Show them why this matters for their career, for their team, for the learners that they serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:10] That’s right. If you’re working on a certification program, you can say, “When we finish this, you’re going to be directly helping thousands of professionals advance their careers.” Helping people see that this very detailed work they may be doing around wordsmithing learning objectives, ultimately this has the potential to change how people work out in the field and in the industry that they serve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:32] A second one is do what you can to reduce their cognitive load. Break work into bite-sized, manageable tasks rather than overwhelming people with big tasks or a big dump of tasks onto them.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:47] We know, as learning business professionals, that cognitive load is a real issue. It’s something we have to help our learners with. When we’re engaging in strategic initiatives, we also need to help the stakeholders involved in that work, have it be manageable, help them with that cognitive load. We can use templates. We can bring a draft of content for a group to review rather than trying to groupthink it in the moment. We can use summaries, perhaps AI-generated summaries, from meetings to help people keep up with what were the major takeaways from that last meeting and refresh them as they’re going into the next meeting, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:23] This is a great potential place to use AI. We’ve seen organizations starting to do this, for example, with their subject matter experts in generating content for courses. Ultimately you want your human subject matter experts driving the content, but, with so many fields these days, to do some initial drafts of objectives and some initial drafts of content for those subject matter experts to then be able to respond to and shape and work with—from my own experience, being given a draft of something, even if I then do, and I usually do, put substantial work into reshaping and crafting that draft into something of my own. It helps so much to have that to start with.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:00] Another approach can be to incentivize engagement. If you’re working with outside subject matter experts, often those are volunteers. But this is a space where you could look at is there an honorarium that you can offer for their participation? If there’s not, if it doesn’t make sense to have a monetary incentive, maybe some form of recognition—making sure that the folks involved in this are getting touted in your communications internally and externally.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:30] I’m a big fan of that. I don’t think it happens enough. Annual meetings and things like that, that’s the perfect place to stand those subject matter experts up in front of everybody and say, “These people really helped us to deliver meaningful content, learning experiences” (whatever it is) “out to our audience. We wouldn’t be the same organization without them.” I don’t see that happen enough.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:50] And then, if we’re thinking about internal stakeholders, one opportunity is to tie their participation in the strategic initiative to their performance goals. Make this part of their annual review, their quarterly review. Have some bullet point in there that is about their contribution to this strategic initiative.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:11] And then a fourth one is leveraging peer influence. It helps a lot if you’ve got a respected leader or a well-known subject matter expert involved and engaged. Cultivating that person can help make it much more likely that others are going to want to be engaged and will prioritize it when they see this respected individual giving their time and effort to it.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:33] Again, this gets back to part of what you can do. If you do have that respected leader, you do have that well-known subject matter expert involved, make sure that you’re sharing that publicly, that you’re recognizing their contributions. That’s going to help them keep that momentum. People are going to want to be part of that because it’s going to have that sense of weight and importance and vitality to it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:53] We’ve looked at why momentum matters, barriers, ways to keep it rolling, and ways to help internal and external stakeholders prioritize. We’re going to offer a recap and some reflection questions, so stick with us for a couple more minutes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:23] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please do us and a colleague the favor of sharing this show with one other person who you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:32] To recap, we’re defining strategic momentum in a learning business as the sustained forward movement toward key goals related to reach, revenue, and impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:44] Strategic momentum is enabled by timely decision-making, consistent execution, and an environment that minimizes delays and friction. It matters because learning businesses thrive when they move with purpose and efficiency.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:59] To help you understand momentum in your learning business, consider these questions. Where and when does your organization tend to stall? What can you do differently to minimize friction and keep making progress? The answers will likely point to how you can make the initiative more important and more urgent for those involved.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:19] Where and why have you had success in maintaining momentum on a strategic initiative? Analyze that success, looking for ideas you might be able to apply to situations that are more likely to stall.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:31] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Because good strategy is organic and responsive, it needs to be revisited periodically. There are predictable, recurring whens that are be natural times for you to reassess your strategy, like the start of a new budget year.

There are also less predictable whens that are important times to revisit strategy, like a global pandemic or government policy changes.

While it’s easier to plan for revisiting strategy at predictable points, it’s as important to reassess strategy when the situation shifts. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele offer Marian Urquilla’s Strategy Triage Tool as an approach learning businesses can leverage for some of those unexpected times when a strategy reassessment is needed.

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

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

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] Strategy is not a one-and-done activity. Given all the effort that usually goes into identifying a good strategy, articulating the strategy, breaking the strategy down into the actions and tasks that will bring it to life, it can be tempting to set it and forget it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] Though it’s tempting, we’re sure you know that’s not how good strategy survives. Good strategy is more organic and responsive. It necessarily is influenced by a whole range of factors, from what’s going on inside your learning business to what’s going on outside your organization and impacting your learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:53] Back in mid-December, we aired episode 440, and we called that “No Time Like Now for Strategy.” We were thinking about time from the standpoint of predictable, recurring whens that might be natural times for you to revisit and confirm or adjust your strategy—things like the end of the calendar year, the start of a new budget year, the launch of the annual learner survey, the start of planning for the annual convention, and so on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:26] But then there are less predictable whens that can also be good and important times to revisit and reassess strategy: a sudden resignation of someone on your team, for example, or a large corporate buyer or academic partner not renewing a course licensing agreement, a new and well-funded competitor entering your market.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:47] There can be unpredictable whens like the ones that you were just mentioning, Jeff, but there can also be ones that aren’t necessarily specific to your organization and its market. These can be broader, more far-reaching whens: pandemics like COVID-19, a watershed moment in technology like ChatGPT in late 2022, or policy changes and executive orders like those coming out in the U.S. in the early weeks of President Trump’s second term.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:20] It’s certainly easier to plan for revisiting strategy at predictable points, but it’s at least as important to revisit and reassess strategy on an ad-hoc basis.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:31] We want to offer a tool for strategy triage when you find your learning business needs to pause and reassess. This tool comes from Marian Urquilla, a strategy consultant, coach, and co-founder of the Center for Community Investment, and she originally developed her Strategy Triage Tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, but she recently revised it to be applicable more broadly, including in the wake of the 2024 elections in the U.S.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:02] We like this tool because it jibes with how we tend to talk about strategy, how we have talked about strategy in the past, but it’s nice to bring that different perspective into the conversation as we’ll do today. What we’ll do is break this down into a why, what, and who look at using this tool.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:21] We’ll start with why. Depending on what your learning business offers, depending on who it serves, recent policy changes may be raising truly existential questions for you. Is a business built on DEI-focused courses built for institutional clients who receive federal funding viable?

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:42] You may have a very clear why to engage in strategy triage, to use this tool—it may be screaming at you. But most organizations are going to feel significant ripple effects of the political and economic changes going on right now. They may have to look a little harder. It may not be staring them quite as much in the face, but they’re going to be there. And, of course, AI is marching on. It’s going to continue to create disruption. In other words, there is plenty of reason for pretty much any organization to consider right now as a time of significant disruption.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:19] One of the key points around this why is that there will be times when something happens that will require you to adjust your strategy. If we look again at the COVID-19 pandemic, that impacted pretty much all learning businesses. Actually, if you think about it, pretty much all businesses, period, were affected for a period of time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:40] Yes, plenty of why out there for taking a look at strategy, for engaging in something like a triage effort. Right now, to me, just feels palpable as one of those why moments. A lot of listeners are probably familiar with the acronym VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. That certainly feels very high right now in general, and we need strategy to guide our work and to provide that important framework for making decisions, which means revisiting strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:18] That’s right because, even when you have a high VUCA situation—you’ve got all that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—strategy is still important. But it can sometimes be hard to wade through that volatility and uncertainty to revisit strategy and to do that clearly. That’s why we wanted to share this tool, this Strategy Triage Tool, because it doesn’t dismiss VUCA. In fact, it understands that strategy has to coexist with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—part of what helps you shift and adjust and tweak your strategy are those volatile situations, those uncertain times, those complex times, all that ambiguity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:02] Yes, definitely. You don’t want to blindly stick with whatever strategy you had in place while all this is going around. You need this approach, to be able to adjust. This tool is a way to allow you to balance the need to look at the current situation—whatever it is that’s causing you to reassess, whatever your form of VUCA is—with the need to continue to operate and do your work. How do you get that balance between, yes, it is chaotic out there, there is VUCA out there, and we’ve got to still somehow be able to make our way through it?

Celisa Steele: [00:06:35] That’s the why. Now let’s turn to the what. The Strategy Triage Tool that we want to share with you is essentially a set of questions—a discussion guide—that’s going to help generate a shared understanding of the situation and then translate that understanding into decisions. It’s as simple as that, and it’s as hard as that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:00] Yes, because this is not easy stuff. This work is very much about starting with an understanding of your situation—an understanding that is deep and objective. That kind of deep, objective understanding is how we’ve always advocated going about strategy. When we’ve talked about it on the podcast, when we’ve engaged with it in our work as Tagoras, when we’re doing consulting with clients, that is the starting point—to deeply and objectively understand what is going on here.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:32] The more disruptive the situation, the more volatile the situation, the higher that VUCA knob is cranked up, the more you have to be careful not to just be reactionary. You need to keep asking, “Is this really so? Can we be sure that how we’re describing the situation is accurate and is likely to hold?” Understanding your situation, you do have to engage on that and not just give yourself a pass on it, do a fair to middling job on it. You need to probe on that and make sure you really do understand the situation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:05] Yes, because it’s easy right now that that VUCA knob is probably cranked up to 11—a little Spinal Tap reference there—and it’s easy to start screaming, “The sky is falling!” and assume that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. But you do have to back up and say, “Okay, is this really as bad as it looks? What’s really going on here? Let’s try to get a 360 view of the situation and determine what is real, what’s not real. What do we have to wait and see? What’s going to happen before we start making decisions and start doing some of the triage work that we’re talking about here?” You don’t want to slap a cast on something that doesn’t require a cast—stick with a medical-type analogy. I think I associate triage with M*A*S*H, the old sitcom-type show.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:53] Definitely comes from the medical world for sure.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:55] In a way, I think all strategy is triage if it’s being done well because you’re always in constant play. Sometimes you’ve got that VUCA knob turned up to 11, and—to go back to my MAS*H analogy—you’re in the war zone, and you got incoming and that sort of thing. Sometimes it’s like that. But all the time your situation is changing. It’s very rare that you’re just sitting on smooth waters, and everything is remaining the same around you. You always have to be checking and adjusting and making sure that you’ve got the diagnosis right. The diagnosis is changing. You’ve got to treat it a little bit differently. Really, if your strategy is living and organic, that’s always going to be happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:38] It’s interesting you mentioned diagnosis. One of our other favorite texts on strategy is Richard Rumelt’s, and he talks about diagnosing the situation. There is a lot of medical terminology at play in the world of strategy. What we’re going to do now is give you some of the highlights and talk about certain aspects of the Strategy Triage Tool, but we point you to the tool itself too. Again, this is Marian Urquilla’s tool, and we’re highlighting it because it feels useful, and it aligns with how we think about strategy when we work with learning businesses to help them set their strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:20] Core to this strategy approach, to this triage approach, is the guiding question.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:28] The idea is that you want to balance responsiveness to the current moment—whatever that situation is that has arisen—with your long-term purpose. You don’t want to ignore or totally let go of that long-term purpose, but you need to be responsive to the moment and grounded in that long-term purpose. This guiding question should be open-ended and future-focused. It’s about how do you move forward? And you want to be careful as you’re developing this guiding question to not necessarily get into decisions or assumptions about who’s responsible for what or what the solution is going to look like. This is about a guiding question. It doesn’t have a lot of the answers baked in. It’s going to be this touchstone that you’re able to return to as a point to help you clarify or rein in some of the conversations that might be happening as you begin to explore what you might need to change or perhaps leave the same with your strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:24] An example of what this type of question might look like would be, “How do we navigate this moment while remaining steady in our commitment to the learners we serve and the future we’re working toward?”

Celisa Steele: [00:11:37] It’s obviously still fairly generic. You might want to be a little bit more specific in yours about what the current moment is or about what that future you’re working toward looks like. But the idea is you’re balancing, again, the current moment with this commitment towards your longer-term purpose, that future that you’re working toward. This guiding question is deceptively simple, but it’s not necessarily easy to land on that guiding question. You’re going to need to spend some time generating that guiding question because you do want it to serve effectively as that touchstone that you’re going to return to. There are some questions, some prompts that you can use to help you generate your guiding question. One of them is, simply, “What is your long-term commitment?” This is essentially your mission. And that could be that you’re all about improving a field, a profession, or an industry. Or it could be that you’re all about providing valuable skills, knowledge, and credentials to individuals to help them find and succeed in their career. Whatever your long-term commitment is, you need to articulate that and have that reflected in your guiding question.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:43] Another prompt would be “Who are/what are you accountable to?” This can vary a little bit, or the emphasis can change a little bit as your situation changes. It could be things like a board if your learning business is part of an association, for example, or the bottom line if you’re organized as a for-profit. It could be the staff you employ. It could be the learners you serve, the employers of those learners or the people who are served or treated by your learners—sticking with the medical analogy—if it’s patients in the case of doctors or nurses. All of those could be the who and what that you’re accountable for. But, again, the emphasis might change. Depending on what your situation actually is, and being clear about that who or what and what needs to be emphasized at this moment in time is an important part of this process.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:33] And then the third and final prompt to help you as you’re shaping your guiding question is “Given your long-term commitment and your accountability”—basically those first two questions—“how might you be called to respond in this moment?” If we take, as an example, the COVID-19 pandemic, the way to respond in the moment might have been the need to replace in-person learning that you did if that was a significant part of your business model, and now you could no longer hold those in-person learning events. Part of what you were called to do to respond to that moment, perhaps, was to shift some portion—all of it or some critical amount of it—online.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:14] That was the guiding question, which is a key part of this tool that we wanted to highlight. Next would be the initial and bounded assessment.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:23] This is as you’re looking at, “Okay, what’s changed? What disruptions, opportunities, or critical shifts are we now facing, given what’s changed?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:34] What assumptions no longer hold? Have expectations about timelines, capacity, funding, or relationships been upended?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:44] And then what feels most immediate? Are there “all hands on deck” demands that are requiring urgent, immediate action? What capacity might you need to free up to be able to respond to those kinds of urgent demands? Over what period of time might you need to respond to those kinds of demands?

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:03] What feels most uncertain? What remains unclear or in flux?

Celisa Steele: [00:15:08] And then how do these shifts challenge or reaffirm your guiding question? The idea here is that you’ve worked on setting a guiding question. Now you’re thinking through these questions to really assess the current moment and understand it. As you’re articulating things around what’s changed and what assumptions no longer hold—all these things we were just talking about—that might take you back to your guiding question and realize we need to refine that or focus it a little bit more or add a nuance that we didn’t have in there. This is iterative. You’re going to shape that guiding question initially, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s 100-percent set and solid. You might need to revisit it as part of this process.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:48] You can probably tell that these are fertile points of discussion. If you put out these sorts of questions within your organization, you’re going to get good discussions around them. Again, I would emphasize not being reactionary around this, to continually be probing around “Is this real? Is this true? And what’s the risk here?” We’ve talked about risk in other situations where you’re looking at how serious is this—whatever it is that you’re coming up with in the assessment—and how likely is it? Is it true? Is it serious? Is it likely to happen? These should all be parts of how you’re making that assessment.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:26] Once you have that assessment of the situation, you have your guiding question, then you’re going to want to look at your projects and your commitment, basically your workload. You’re going to list out what you and your team are working on. This might be new courses under development. It might mean course revisions. It might mean some of the work you’re doing around evaluation and measurement. Etc. Etc. Everything that you usually do, you want to generate that list of it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:52] It strikes me, as we’re talking through this—and I was struck early on in looking at this approach—that it does align in many ways with Rumelt’s approach to strategy that we’ve talked about before, where you do have the initial diagnosis, you develop a guiding policy (a kernel of your strategy), and then you do have these key actions that you’re looking at taking going forward. Those all align with these first three areas that we’ve highlighted here.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:20] And so, once you have the project commitment/workload list, what you want to do is categorize those into one of five options. I’ll quickly run through the five options, and then we’ll unpack each one a little bit. So the five options are “still relevant”—you’re going to continue forward with that. The second is “emerging priorities or adaptive shifts.” Third category, “pause and recalibrate.” Fourth category, “unknown status or unknown approach.” And then fifth is “honor and let go.”

Celisa Steele: [00:17:52] In “still relevant,” you’re going to continue forward. These are priorities, these are streams of work that remain aligned with your purpose, and they’re feasible given the current conditions. Again, if the current situation has perhaps created challenges or made it hard to do certain types of work, that’s not this category. This is the kind of thing that you already had as a priority, and you can continue to do under current circumstances.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:16] The next area, the “emerging priorities or adaptive shifts,” these are things that suddenly are rising in their priority level. Maybe they’ve become more important given what’s happening in the world or in your learning business. And, to better respond to those new conditions, you need to prioritize those efforts. Maybe there are even some new types of work that you’re adding into that category. Third category, “pause and recalibrate,” these are things that you had been doing, but you need to pause them now because maybe they’re not feasible or because you need to reallocate some resources towards other priorities. The fourth category is “unknown status or unknown approach.” These are where you are going to park things where you need more data, where there’s too much in flux to know whether it makes sense to move forward with them or whether they’re ones you’re going to need to pause and recalibrate, so you put them in this bucket.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:15] And then the final category is around “honor and let go.” In that category, there might be things that were part of your strategy, they were part of your activities that simply aren’t going to happen now because of the changing circumstances or conditions, and so you’re going to put them into this bucket, and you’re going to honor it so that you recognize that this was an intentional decision to no longer carry forward these priorities. Those are the five buckets that you’re working to categorize your efforts into as part of this strategy triage effort.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:51] Urquilla does highlight, warns about some common patterns to watch out for as you’re going through the process, as you’re facilitating use of this Strategy Triage Tool. I suspect these are going to sound familiar to listeners, but the first one is avoidance—ignoring or delaying decisions. I think we’ve all seen this happen in strategy discussions, and there’s a recommendation here to interrupt that by grounding the group and normalizing that desire to avoid and start with broader strokes. So what’s visible now? What can we engage with now that we don’t have to feel like we need to avoid, just to help move that conversation forward? Another pattern is overcommitment—taking on too much and exhausting your capacity. Maybe everybody is eager to dive in and do the triage and get going, but you just take on too much for it to be realistic. A way to combat that, to interrupt that, is to set some clear targets. There are some manageable targets. Let’s free up X amount of dollars around this, or let’s free up two staff members to look at this and make that commitment realistic.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:00] Another pattern is rigidity—clinging to plans or assumptions that no longer fit. In the world we work in, this is the “we’ve always done it this way” type of mentality. In this case, you have to ask—whoever’s involved in this process—“What is it that we’re defending, and to what end? Why are we doing this? What would be possible if we were to release it, if we were to let it go? What’s that going to make possible for us?” And then the fourth pattern that’s highlighted is indecision—getting stuck in the unknowns. We’ve seen this happen so many times. I’m sure folks have experienced this as well, that you don’t know what you don’t know, so you get mired and don’t make any progress forward. In this case, an approach is to set commitments for exploring those unknowns. What do we need to learn and by when? Revisit that regularly. That’s the type of question we’ll often ask clients, pretty much always ask clients, as we’re setting up a strategy engagement. “What do we need to know that we don’t know now?” And we start to develop a plan for getting at that.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:03] We talked about why. We’ve just been talking about what and all these questions and the process that underlie this Strategy Triage Tool. We wanted to also talk a bit about who. We often get a question about who when we talk about strategy with organizations. I will say that the who isn’t one that Marian Urquilla tackles directly. She does note, though, that the tool can be used by individuals, or it can be used by teams within a single organization, or it can be used for networks, for alliances that span multiple organizations. We did want to talk a little bit about the who, though, and, for us, there’re at least two who questions. First, there’s the who in the sense of “what type of organization” should engage in this type of strategy triage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:51] Our answer there is all of the above—it applies to and benefits all types of organizations. There’s really no type of organization that’s not experiencing some level of change, whether it’s the VUCA turned up to 11 or whether it’s more seemingly business as usual, but you need to be looking at what’s going on out there and adjusting accordingly. Really, any type of organization can benefit from this type of approach.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:14] That’s at the organizational level. But there’s also who in the sense of “who should be at the table.” Who should we involve once we decide to engage in this kind of strategy triage work? Here the answer is nuanced, but a big part of it is about making sure that you have the diversity of perspectives represented that you need to have represented.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:39] Yes, you heard the questions and discussion topics that we mentioned earlier. You need people who can help you describe and understand the current situation objectively and deeply and generate that list of what you’re doing and sort the list out, prioritize the list. But, to navigate that diversity, you also need a strong facilitator.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:02] That’s right. When you have a lot of different points of view and perspectives, you’re almost certainly going to have some level of disagreement around priorities or decisions to take.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:13] In fact, if you don’t have disagreement, you’ve probably got something wrong going on.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:17] You need a facilitator that’s going to help you navigate those conversations so that you can all come to a shared, agreed-upon decision, even if it’s not what a particular individual necessarily believes is the best answer, but they can get on board with the approach that you’ve taken. You need a strong facilitator to help navigate that, help align those different perspectives into a truly shared understanding of the situation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:42] I think there’s a next level down on that second who question about who should be at the table. There’s the aspect of who’s prepared to do this work objectively and honestly, which is so important to this process.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:58] That gets back to the diversity of opinions. You need to have people who understand that, who are open to having their minds changed, who are open to coming in with whatever they know currently but to hearing new things and to shifting that. If you have people who are too ingrained in a particular way or particular viewpoint, they’re not going to be as effective in this process because they might not be willing to consider doing things differently.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:24] That may require laying some groundwork, educating potential participants, and, again, strong facilitation. This is one of those classic situations—and it’s a little self-serving for me to say this—where having that objective outsider come in to help facilitate these types of situations can be valuable because often you need that third party to make these situations work. I’ll note that that kind of facilitation tends to be even more important the more volatile or risky a situation an organization finds itself in because those are the types of situations where people can get reactionary very quickly. They can dig in very quickly, and you need either the internal organizational discipline to be able to navigate that, or you need some help from outside in navigating that.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:10] It’s worth noting that, when you’re dealing with volatile, disruptive times, time is of the essence. You’re working to respond to an emerging issue. That means you need to respond with some level of rapidity; you need to do something. It can be better to move ahead than to wait for 100-percent participation if getting that 100-percent participation is going to slow you down. When you’re weighing who needs to be at the table, it’s about do you have that diversity of perspective, do you have people who are willing to engage in honest assessment of the situation and of the work that needs to be done or maybe not done, and are they available. Can they engage? Can they show up and be there for whatever meetings you need to have? All of those things feed into who needs to be involved.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:29] To recap, we talked about why reassessing strategy is important and acknowledged the fact that when to reassess won’t always occur according to a predictable schedule. Sometimes unexpected events inside or outside of your learning business will lead you to the need to reassess.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:47] For those unexpected times when a strategy reassessment is needed, we offered the Strategy Triage Tool developed by Marian Urquilla. It’s a simple tool. It uses a series of questions to focus thinking and then to aid in decision-making, particularly decisions around what activities might need to be paused or even stopped entirely in light of the changes or events in the environment in which you operate.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:15] And we talked about who to involve. Especially in VUCA times, the who is a balance of casting the net broadly to involve those impacted by the decisions and trying to move quickly. Given the diversity of viewpoints you’re aiming for and the potential for anxiety given the disruption, strong facilitation is often critical.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:37] In terms of to-dos, we recommend you keep the Strategy Triage Tool handy for the next time your learning business faces an event that has implications for your strategy, and then try it out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:49] Keep in mind that you can use it on your own. In fact, you might want to try it out on your own before working through it with your team. That would allow you to see where you have questions about the process and make sure you feel it would be valuable to work through as a team.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:04] Lastly, I’ll note that the patterns that Urquilla calls out and cautions us to watch for—avoidance, overcommitment, rigidity, and indecision—are patterns that it can be helpful to be aware of and to address even outside of VUCA moments.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:22] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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For learning businesses, bringing in revenue is an essential function. Revenue is what keeps the organization going and delivering on its mission, whether that mission is solely focused on learning and training or whether it’s a broader mission tied to improving a field, industry, or profession.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele offer five ways to increase the revenue from your portfolio that don’t involve massive investments of time or money: raising prices, packaging products, borrowing to expand, running flash sales, and offering free courses.

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

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

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] For learning businesses, bringing in revenue is an essential function. Revenue is what keeps the organization going and delivering on its mission, whether that mission is solely focused on learning and training or whether it’s a broader mission tied to improving a field, industry, or profession.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] We’ve had a bit of a revenue theme running through recent episodes. That’s true of both our own and my conversation with Erin Pressley of NRECA (the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association). In this episode, number 446, we’re doubling down on revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] That’s right. We’re betting that increasing revenue is something all listeners would like to do, so we want to offer five ways for you to do that. And here’s the kicker—these are five ways to get more revenue out of what already exists and what you already have.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:09] The first way we’re going to talk about is raising prices.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:14] I think I hear some screams through the airwaves right now. People don’t like to talk about raising prices; it seems like something that’s tough to do. But we’ve said many, many times, and we’ll say it again, there is often significant latitude for organizations to raise prices in their education portfolio. A lot of education portfolios are underpriced, in spite of organizations feeling like they’re getting price resistance.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] The basic idea—or one of the basic ideas underlying this piece of advice, this consideration, this way that you might increase revenue out of what you already have—is that raising prices is going to do more for you than any price cutting is likely to be able to do for you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:52] As a lever for net revenue or profitability, raising price is much more powerful than your volume of sales or cutting costs. We’ve been through that extensively in other places. We’re not going to try to do the math for you in an audio podcast. But raising price is a very powerful lever, and you’ve got a couple of ways to approach it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:14] One is there is a margin of expectations around pricing that’s broader than most organizations think, and simply raising prices by 10 or 20 percent is not going to be noticed by most of the audience. That’s going to go straight to your bottom line in terms of net revenue. But then, of course, price is ultimately tied to value. That’s part of why it’s so powerful. It’s a perception tool. And, of course, as anybody who’s been following us for a while knows, there are ways to think about and adjust value so that you can then adjust price, if you feel like you really need to add something to the equation in order to be able to raise prices.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:54] And baked into what you were saying there, Jeff, is that we do believe in value-based pricing. We don’t believe in something like cost-plus pricing, where you’re looking at what it takes you, in terms of money, to produce a particular course, for example, and then adding markup on top of that. For us, pricing is best suited to connecting it to the value of the product that you’re offering. That’s what you were just talking about there, Jeff.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:21] It can be very helpful for you to know, if you don’t know already, what do your learners value? What is it that makes them come to you, and what do they appreciate? Maybe it’s something that you do already have, so that’s why they’re coming to you. Maybe it’s something that, if you would add it to them, it would be perceived as even that much more valuable to them, and you might be more likely to bring in more learners. But adding value doesn’t necessarily have to mean adding a lot or adding something that’s particularly time-intensive or resource-intensive on your side.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:52] It can be adding a simple credential (like a certificate) to something. It could be adding some access to a subject matter expert. It could be any range of things. A tool that can help with this is our Product Value Profile, something we’ve talked about many times. We can make sure that there’s a link to that. We’ve had full episodes on that. Also, looking at your Value Ramp and where a product sits in your portfolio and things you might be able to do to that product to move it up the Value Ramp. These are all ways of coming at pricing. But the message overall is you’ve almost certainly got some latitude with your pricing. You’ve almost certainly got the ability to raise your pricing if you hunker down and be brave and take a hard look at your value and do it. Again, that’s going to go straight to your bottom line.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:35] That’s the first of the five ways: raising prices. The second of the five ways we want to talk about today is packaging your products.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:44] Packaging is an aspect of value, how products are presented but also how products are grouped together, which is one of the things we want to talk about here—bundling. Because you’ve got your products that you’re offering, the different types of learning experiences that are out there that you’re typically selling one by one, but you can bundle those together and promote a set of complementary products at a discount over what it would cost to buy each of those separately. This can be very powerful. And we know from our research that not enough organizations are doing it.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:17] Some of the data that we have cited in our last couple of episodes has pointed out that not as many learning businesses as we might think have experimented with and are working with things like bundling. But, as you just said, Jeff, by bundling products together and offering them at a discount over what it would cost to buy each separately, that’s a clear value for the learner coming in.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:39] And then, for you, as the learning business, if you already have the sunk cost in these products, if they already exist—I’m thinking in particular of something like self-paced, online-type offerings—then you already have them, and what you really want is to get them used. Even if you’re not bringing in quite as much revenue as you would if someone were to buy them each independently, knowing that you have that much more mindshare from that particular learner can be very valuable. And then the other thing is you can think about your bundles in a way where you package together some really strong sellers, some really strong performers, along with related courses or offerings that don’t typically sell quite as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:20] Usually this is going to happen with digital-type products. It doesn’t have to be. You could combine some things with live events as well, but particularly with those digital products, as you were suggesting, Celisa, your incremental costs are practically zero with those, so every additional sale you’re getting is pure margin on those types of products. And again that’s going to your bottom line directly. A lot of focus on the bottom line here today. But, in general, think about what you can bundle together and put out there as a very compelling offer, where they are getting that discount that they would not get by buying each of these things separately, and you’ll probably be making people aware of some things that are complementary in your portfolio that they weren’t necessarily aware of in the first place.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:02] We’ve touched on two ways so far: raising prices and looking at how you package your products (in particular, things like bundling). The third way we want to talk about increasing your revenue—and something you can do very quickly—is look to borrow to expand. This is a way of getting more products into your portfolio without necessarily investing yourself in the development of those products.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:27] You don’t have to build everything. There is stuff out there already that you can leverage and use That may start close to home. You may have subject matter experts who are offering their own digital offerings—digital is going to be a big one for this. They might already have digital offerings that you could partner with and strategically add into your portfolio. But there are also catalogs of courses out there that are available to license. If you’ve got a learning management system in place, and let’s say you say you need something like soft skills to complement the more technical skills that your organization might be offering, there are a number of providers who can give you access to a catalog that’s going to allow you to do that. We happen to have a partnership with one, which is the American Management Association. You can get access to their e-library of leadership and management-type content and, in short order, be able to add that into your portfolio and suddenly have expanded your offerings dramatically.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:23] Whether it’s through some sort of upfront licensing fee that then you’re recouping as you make sales or whether it’s some sort of shared revenue model, there are different ways you can structure this partnership. The idea is to look for content that your learners need that other people have already built. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for you to necessarily own that, the case of soft skills often being one, where leadership and/or communication skills are very broad and aren’t necessarily specific to a field or industry. Look for other ways where you can get some of that content into your catalog, offer value to your learners, and also bring in additional revenue for your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:04] That’s three. So far we’ve talked about raising prices, about packaging/bundling your products together, and then borrowing, tapping into other sources of content to expand what you have in your catalog. A fourth one we’ll talk about is running flash sales.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:22] This is the idea of there’s going to be a very limited time in which you’re going to discount something that you already offer. One of the things that you’ll need to do is be clear on a reason for why this is a temporary thing. Tie it to, perhaps, some type of event or some happening that’s going on either at your organization or more broadly, but be very clear that, for a limited time, people can come in and get great value at a lower-than-usual price.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:52] We’re cautious about discounts in general. We’re not a huge fan of them, but, if they’re done right, if they’re done strategically, they can be a tool that you can use. Like you said, Celisa, in this case, you want to be clear about what the reason is for it, and that it is going to be something that’s time-limited. This type of thing can work well, and I’ll admit I’ve been skeptical about it myself. But we run a mastermind group with leaders from a range of learning businesses, and, in one of those groups last year, I was struck by the number of people in the group who said they had run Black Friday offerings, which I hadn’t associated with this group of people doing. But it worked for them. They generated tens of thousands of dollars right off the bat by running these Black Friday sales. That might not be the type of sale you want to run, but there are occasions that can occur throughout the year. You might want to periodically do customer appreciation-type stuff. There are good reasons for running flash discounts. Find those, and leverage them.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:55] It could be, for example, something like the lead-up to a place-based conference. It could be like, “Hey, if you’re coming to our annual convention next month, be sure you’re coming prepared. Here are five online courses you can use to prep for that. We’re going to offer them at a discount in the lead-up to the conference.” If you do something like that, then the promotions are doing double duty for you because it’s helping people know about these self-paced, online offerings that you have in your catalog, and, whether or not they take you up on that flash sale, it’s also serving to remind them of the fact that you have the annual convention coming up next month—or whatever it is. There’s a level of awareness that it helps with.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:36] It’s potentially leveling out learning, which is something we’ve always been a fan of. In fact, this whole podcast exists because, when we originally launched it, it was to give some free content to people who were going to attend our Leading Learning Symposium. We didn’t sell the podcast. That wasn’t a flash sale thing but that idea of leveling learning, giving people who are going to be attending the same event the opportunity to access some learning and knowledge that’s going to prepare them well for participating in that event and interacting with each other and, in general, raising the level of learning that’s going to happen at the event. So you can get learning leverage out of doing something like a flash sale.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:12] That was the fourth way to increase revenue in the very short term. And that brings us to our fifth and final way: offering free courses. This is arguably a radical version of a flash sale. The price is so low, it goes down to zero. But we thought that free courses warranted its own entry because it is that radical.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:36] It sounds completely counterintuitive. You’re going to give something away in the name of making more revenue. But getting somebody into a free course can be a powerful thing, particularly if it’s a somebody who has not engaged with you or participated with you before. You need that sign of life. You need that connection. Of course, you’re going to follow on from that free course with some relevant offers because you now know something about that person in terms of what they’re interested in and what they need because they were willing to sign up for this free course. That can be a very useful way to leverage “free.”

Celisa Steele: [00:13:08] That is an important point buried in what you just said there, Jeff—that some of these ways to raise revenue may be for only part of your audience, for a targeted segment. And so, precisely, you might be looking at running a flash sale or offering free courses to a less engaged segment of your audience because what you’re aiming for is to get them acquainted with the value that you do provide through your learning products and services, and that may mean that you’re giving them something free or at a deeply discounted price initially. But the intention, the goal, is that they will then come back and become a paying customer because they’ve seen the value of that. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) has offered some free courses, and they’ve done the data analysis to see what the halo effect is in terms of revenue that ends up coming out of that. There are real-world examples of this actually turning into, yes, it’s $0 now, but it means more revenue coming into your organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:08] Yes, ASHA got a significant bump from doing that, and it’s something that they come back to as an approach that they’re using. In everything you were saying, Celisa, you were talking about to go into particular segments. It reinforces the needs for doing that segmentation, making sure you have ways to reach specific parts of your audience. Whether you’re in charge of your own marketing or whether you have to work with a marketing team to do that, make sure that’s happening because, with everything we’re talking about here in terms of revenue, having that segmentation can certainly help with something like offering free courses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:42] With free courses, there’s straight-up free. You put something out there and say, “Hey, come take this.” But you can also do things like “buy one, get one free”—that’s another technique we asked about in some of our recent surveying that we found not enough organizations are taking advantage of. But, to go back to that segmentation argument we were just making, you might want to do a “buy one, get one” even to some of your best customers as a form of appreciation to get them to come back, maybe to buy sooner than they would have if you didn’t have that offering there. There are a lot of ways to look at free, either straight up or in combination, bundling free with an actual purchase that, again, can drive revenue that was not going to be happening otherwise.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:22] I would say too that wrapped up in all of these ideas is a sense of being clear about why you’re trying any of them. If the goal is to bring in more revenue, then having the hypothesis about how doing any of these is going to bring in more revenue—especially these last ones around running flash sales and offering free courses—whatever “lost” revenue you might have, how does that translate into increased revenue? How are you tracking that? How are you going to see that? You can also think about the loss of any revenue from course sales as potentially a marketing expense, if part of what you’re doing with things like flash sales or offering free courses is just awareness, making sure that your audience knows about what you have to offer and the value that it provides. Maybe then that’s a good trade-off. It’s a good way to invest some of your marketing dollars or to think about it being a marketing expense.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:19] We’re going to offer a recap and some reflection questions, so stick with us for a couple more minutes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:33] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please do us and a colleague the favor of sharing this show with one other person who you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:43] To recap, we offered five ways to increase the revenue from your portfolio that don’t involve massive investments of time or money. The five are, one, raising prices; two, packaging products; three, borrowing to expand.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:59] Four, running flash sales; and, five, offering free courses. To help you understand how these might play out in your learning business, here are some questions for reflection for you to consider on your own and then, if you have one, with your team.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:15] When was the last time you raised prices on your offerings? What low-effort value might you add to some or all of your offerings to accompany a price increase? Those are questions that tie to that idea of raising prices.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:30] Which products are your top-sellers? Which are under-performing? Are there logical connections to be made between some of the products in those two categories? And this would go to the point around packaging or bundling your products.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:45] What do your learners need to know that doesn’t fall squarely in your wheelhouse and that probably already exists? Do you have partners who create learning content? What would be relevant to your learners? What might you borrow to expand your own portfolio? Those questions tie to this idea of borrowing to expand.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:04] And then what occasion might you tie a flash sale to? This, of course, goes to the point about flash sales.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:11] And then, tying to the idea of free courses, who might it make sense to offer a free course to? That’s less a specific individual and much more about a segment within your learner population.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:25] Segments once again. We might have to have an episode about segments at some point in the not-too-distant future. But, for now, we’re wrapping up this episode on revenue. Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Culture, mindset, money—these are big and important concepts for any learning business. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 445, we talk with Erin Pressley about all three.

Erin Pressley is senior vice president of education, training, and events at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. Erin describes herself as being passionate about serving NRECA’s members and making money while doing it. She’s a thoughtful and energetic leader with practical and aspirational advice for other learning business leaders.

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, number 445, we talk with Erin Pressley, senior vice president of education, training, and events at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, or NRECA for short. Erin has worked in associations for well over 20 years, and she’s “passionate about serving members and making money while doing it”—and those are her exact words.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:39] Well, nothing wrong with making money. It certainly jibes with our focus at Leading Learning and Tagoras on helping learning businesses improve their reach, revenue, and impact. But we also know that some learning businesses, especially associations or other organizations that may be nonprofits, shy away from focusing on money. They prefer, probably understandably, to focus on the mission and serving learners without talking so much about money. But we know that, for an organization like NRECA, the revenue it brings in through its learning products and services is crucial to being able to deliver on its mission and serve its learners well—that old “no money, no mission” saying.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:27] Absolutely right, Jeff, and that’s one of the things that Erin brings up in our conversation. She’s really clear on that connection between making money and delivering on mission.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:38] Very good. What else do you and Erin talk about, Celisa?

Celisa Steele: [00:01:42] We talk about what NRECA does in general and what it offers in its portfolio, but we spend most of our time talking about culture. When Erin started at NRECA, she consciously chose to focus on shifting the culture in her team—and, spoiler alert, part of that focus is about being more open about the need to make money. We also get into the challenges and opportunities on Erin’s mind when she thinks about the next year or two. And I ask Erin about her approach to her own learning and professional development.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:16] Erin also offers three takeaways near the end of your conversation.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:21] Yes, she does. She mentions the importance of not sleeping on culture, of embracing a test-and-learn mindset, and of recognizing the reality of the need for revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:34] Excellent. So, as you listen to this conversation, dear listener, keep those three things in mind. Now, on to the conversation with Erin Pressley.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:49] Tell us about NRECA—what it does in general and then a sketch of what it offers in terms of learning opportunities.

Erin Pressley: [00:02:57] Sure. NRECA is the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. We represent the 900 rural electric cooperatives that are scattered across the United States in sometimes very small, rural communities of only hundreds of people but also the rural suburbs of Austin, Texas, for example. We make sure and advocate as a trade association—make sure that our members’ interests are front and center with legislators. But we also look to equip and educate our members on issues of real importance to them: the increasing load on electric grids; hiring and retaining folks in rural communities; AI; and, overall, the big umbrella, making sure that they can continue to provide safe, affordable, and reliable electricity to their rural communities.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:54] I’m thinking, in what I’m hearing about your audience there, that’s potentially a pretty broad group, certainly geographically dispersed but then also probably the roles. Talk a little bit about your portfolio and how you try to serve those different members that you serve.

Erin Pressley: [00:04:10] Most trade associations probably have this challenge. You represent an industry, and, within that industry, as you said, there are lots of different roles and responsibilities. From an education standpoint, we have events and training for CEOs, communicators, IT folks, engineering folks, membership folks, up-and-coming emerging leaders. We also serve boards of directors that govern all of these electric cooperatives, and so we’re also teaching a lot of governance and education to these boards of directors. That education can take the shape of events. We do about 20 to 25 live events across the country every year, and then we have probably 8 to 10 week-long, cohort-based, in-person education experiences. Sometimes we partner with University of Wisconsin. We also partner with Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University to deliver those programs. And then we probably have well over 100 online programs, sometimes live, sometimes self-paced, on-demand through a learning management system that folks can engage with. So lots of content across lots of platforms for lots of different people.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:34] Thanks for spelling the breadth of what you offer at NRECA in terms of the learning opportunities. When we think about your role in NRECA, how do you define it or describe your role?

Erin Pressley: [00:05:50] I’m grateful and lucky now to be leading a really amazing team. And my job, number one, is to grow and cultivate this team, to help point them in the right direction and give them this vision, but then to get out of their way and let them do what they do best. If I’ve hired right, and if we’ve coached right, we have an amazing group of folks whose job is to execute on all the things I just talked about. Sometimes I say I’m like their sherpa. We’re climbing up this big mountain, and I’m their sherpa to help get them there, but they’re also doing a lot of the work. And hopefully I’m going to get them to the top of that mountain, and we’re going to deliver some really good stuff for our members.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:35] You’re focused on learning at NRECA. Refresh my memory—how long have you been focused on learning, and how did you wind up with that focus in your professional life?

Erin Pressley: [00:06:46] Interesting, because the bulk of my career—I’ve been working for, dare I say, well over 30 years—the bulk of my career was in media and publishing, and I spent probably two-thirds of my career in that space. At my last association, there was an opportunity. Our VP of education had departed, and I thought, “Hey, I’m used to dealing with content. I’m used to thinking about what an audience wants. I’m used to educating and informing. It just happens to be in the pages of a magazine or online or in a newsletter. Why can’t I apply many of those skills and that passion for delivering good information to an audience? Maybe in a different format on a main stage, in an education session, in a day-long workshop?” So I raised my hand and said, “Hey, I think I can do this job too.” That was really this pivot point for me. In my career, I’d been very focused on content and generating revenue from that content, and now I’ve expanded that into the education space, where I am generating content and driving revenue for that content. That pivot was really important, and I think some of the experience I bring from the media side and the revenue generation side has helped enhance some of the work that we do here in NRECA on the education side.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:12] How long have you been at NRECA at this point?

Erin Pressley: [00:08:15] Two and a half years—not that long in the grand scheme of things. As an association person, I’m still very new to NRECA. I know most association folks often stay with their associations for years, so I’m looking forward to doing that here, though.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:31] One of the things you chose to focus on when you joined NRECA is culture. What led you to focus on culture and say, “This is where I really want to dig in as I’m starting my role here”?

Erin Pressley: [00:08:46] I was very lucky in my last association to see the benefits of focusing on culture firsthand. I was there for 15 years. At the beginning of my tenure, my CEO made it a priority, number one, for him. And so, over my time there, I saw how talking about culture, defining your culture, implementing measurements for your culture, and then seeing it in action—we all were rowing in the same boat in terms of where we wanted to take the culture of the organization. We were honest with each other. We had built trust and collaboration. As a result of all of that, everyone’s work was elevated because we could do our work more collaboratively, with more trust. There was less fear around taking risks. We embraced this test-and-learn culture—when you make a mistake, it’s there so you can learn. Just don’t keep making that same mistake over and over again. I saw firsthand what creating a good culture can do and how it can drive the business and increase member satisfaction, so I wanted to make sure that I brought that along as well in my new role.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:04] It occurs to me that it might be useful to hear from you how you define “culture” because it’s one of those terms that I think we all go, “Okay, yes, culture,” but maybe we all have slightly different views of that. Do you have a definition you like to rely on? Or, if I put you on the spot and ask for one now, what will you say?

Erin Pressley: [00:10:21] I’ve been a longtime fan of Jamie Notter. He talks a lot about culture, and so a lot of how I define it is how he defines it too. It’s the behaviors and the actions and the artifacts that are in your environment that people are seeing and feeling on a day-to-day basis. Even if we don’t have a defined culture statement, there’s a culture there. There are signs and signals from how people are behaving as to what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. I want to be overt with my team about what is acceptable and defining that—things like communication and transparency. It’s great to be a subject matter expert, but it’s better to share that knowledge and what you know with others around you so that they can contribute and be additive to projects that we’re working on together. So that’s my definition and a little bit of a hint of the kind of culture that I’m looking to drive here.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:28] I did want to ask about how you think about or describe the culture that you’re aiming for with your team at NRECA and then some of what you are doing or have done to try to create that desired culture, and potentially, if it involved a shift, how you were trying to drive that shift as well.

Erin Pressley: [00:11:47] I think it did involve a little bit of a shift. Every time you bring a new leader to a team or even a new colleague to a team, that becomes a new team. We were making a lot of changes. I was making a lot of changes. We had to think closely about, “Okay, how do we want to incorporate these changes? How do we want it to feel?” I had to first create this psychological safety among the team and allow them to be able to share what their idea of a good culture was—the things that weren’t working for them, the things that they did, what made a great day of work for them—and I’m still building it. It’s a journey. But having these conversations and listening to the words and the feelings that they brought up about the kind of culture that they would like to see, we organically backed into what we want as a culture—things like trust, accountability, collaboration, a growth mindset. We are in the learning business, and so we should also be learners. We try and bring those values forth when we have conversations, difficult conversations, to say, “Hey, I’m trusting you with this,” or “I’m sharing this with you because we said we wanted to have a culture of transparency or honesty and working to give people valuable feedback. We’re here to help each other.”

Celisa Steele: [00:13:22] I’m thinking, too, it might be helpful for listeners to have a sense of the size of the team as you’re talking about having some of these conversations and arriving together at some of this. Tell us a little bit about the makeup of your team.

Erin Pressley: [00:13:35] I am lucky—and I consider myself very lucky—to have 34 folks on my team, which is a big team, and I get that. I’ve worked in very small teams before too. But we have 34 folks divided into four groups. Our meetings folks who execute all of our meetings, logistics, work with convention centers, etc. Our program manager folks who do the content for all of our events. I have a director education group—I mentioned we work with boards of directors—and these are the folks who are building day-long classes and content for our boards of directors. And then we have a staff and executive education group who works on the certification programs and content for the staff and executives who work at cooperatives.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:27] One of the things I’ve heard you talk about before, in terms of culture at NRECA, was that part of what hadn’t necessarily been a focus for the education group was the recognition of the need for revenue, and that that’s been something that you’ve helped refine. Will you talk a little bit about that?

Erin Pressley: [00:14:47] Sure. We’re a fee-for-service department. What that means is membership dues do not cover the cost of the work that we do. In fact, membership dues at our association and maybe others don’t cover the cost of membership. It’s critical for departments like mine and others in the organization who can generate revenue to do so to support our government relations activities and other things that we have to do that aren’t revenue-generating. There’s a tremendous focus here at NRECA on service excellence and serving our members. I don’t think it’s very different from many other associations, but here sometimes it was at the expense of generating revenue. A lot of what I started to do was just talking about the importance of generating revenue—and not necessarily just to make money. We’re generating revenue because we want to invest it back into the work that we do, whether specifically for education, training, and events because we want bigger, bolder speakers, because we want to invest in a different kind of technology platform or implement some technology that costs some money, or because we want to help the rest of the organization.

Erin Pressley: [00:16:06] There’s a lot going on with a new president, so there’s going to be some financial resources that we need to implement in order to educate a whole new staff, and our team can contribute to that. A lot of what I did was making sure that folks knew, on a day-to-day basis or on a weekly basis, monthly basis, how we’re generating revenue, where things are coming from, making sure they understood what a P&L was, building some general business acumen, but also this constant drumbeat of “We’re making money to help our members, to be a stronger organization so that we can continue to help our members.” One of my colleagues at one point was like, “We’ve never talked about making money before.” But I think, again, it’s framing why we’re making the money that’s important. We’re not making the money just to have a huge bottom line at the end of the year; we’re making the money so we can do more for our members.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:07] You know that we like to talk at Leading Learning and Tagoras about reach, revenue, and impact, and it’s very similar to what you’re sharing there, where the revenue is a critical part of it but almost always because it’s in service of helping deliver greater impact or helping have greater reach in terms of who you’re serving. We see reach, revenue, and impact as critical for learning businesses, and so, if you think near future—and I’m thinking maybe a year, maybe two years out—what challenges are you seeing for NRECA in general in those three areas, in terms of culture, however you want to frame them? When you think about challenges in that near future, what comes to mind for you?

Erin Pressley: [00:17:50] For us, the reach part is critical because, if we can’t get that right, building the revenue and having that impact are going to be that much harder. I mentioned earlier hiring folks to work in rural communities and retaining folks in rural communities can be very difficult. What we’re seeing in our industry is a huge amount of turnover in all roles and especially in the CEO role as CEOs who’ve been at their cooperatives for 20, 30 years are retiring. We’re working hard and trying to get ahead of being able to reach out to these folks so they know who NRECA is, what we have to offer because there are so many new staff coming on board in electric cooperatives who might not know who we are. We’re leaning into our marketing efforts a little more, taking another look at our messaging.

Erin Pressley: [00:18:49] For many folks who work in rural communities, maybe they didn’t have a pleasant education experience or a higher education experience. They didn’t have those opportunities. When we’re looking to them to invest in education as an adult, how can we tap into what’s important for them to make them understand that this education experience is maybe different than what they’ve experienced in the past? That, by investing in us and our education, they’re really helping their communities? Because that’s why they’ve joined their boards, or that’s why they work at these cooperatives. So leaning into the reach part, I think, is a big focus for us over the next few years.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:31] I think that I’m hearing in your answer there, too, that you think that part of the answer to that challenge around reaching more people is marketing. It’s around having that communication piece of it. And we’re hearing that in some of the data that we collected in a year-end survey on the Leading Learning side—that marketing is a big focus for people. Part of it is that awareness piece, making sure that the people you want to serve are aware of all that you have to offer.

Erin Pressley: [00:19:58] And I think hand in hand with that is data, whether it’s the data of the people that you’re trying to reach—do you even know who you’re trying to reach, their demographics and their contact information?—and then also data on the other side too. After you’ve executed this marketing, what’s working? What’s not working? Where are you finding opportunities as you look at your data over time of growing audiences and ideas? We looked at data recently and realized we were not really serving the IT community, and, with cybersecurity and AI growing, they weren’t engaging with us in many of our events. So now we’re looking to potentially launch an IT week-long cohort program for IT folks because we looked at the data and saw that it was an underserved audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:54] We talked a little bit about challenges, the challenges around reaching more of the folks you want to serve. When you think about opportunities—again, that short-ish future year, two years out—what are you seeing as major opportunities for NRECA as a learning business, and what are you choosing to focus on out of those opportunities?

Erin Pressley: [00:21:19] This might not be very different from other trade associations or other associations in general, but we’re leaning more into the growth we’re already seeing in online learning and especially within self-paced, on-demand—we call them SPODs here—but the opportunity for folks to learn on their own terms at their own time in bite-sized chunks, whenever they have time that’s available. We’re seeing great success the few times we’ve dipped our toe into that water. Again, we embrace this test and learn. We’ve taken some of our courses and made them self-paced, on-demand, so we’re seeing a lot of growth in that area. I imagine we’ll continue to lean into that online learning going forward, potentially making it smaller and more bite-sized.

Erin Pressley: [00:22:13] The term “Webinar,” I think, has developed a bad reputation over the last few years, and I get it. So we are launching what we call “online workshops,” which, in format, are Webinars. But we’ve changed the name of them, and they’re very focused on teaching basic skills, like Excel and PowerPoint and how to give a good presentation, to small cohorts across our industry, whether it’s executive assistants, linemen who worked many years restoring power and now find themselves in leadership positions and need to learn some certain skills. So smaller, bite-sized pieces of learning as well in these online workshops. Another area where I see a lot of growth for us, we do a lot of events. The ones that seem most successful are the ones that are focused on these more niche, narrowly defined audiences. We have an event for communicators. We have an event for engineering folks. When we lean into specific demographics, we seem to be doing really well. When we have events that are trying to appeal to everybody at once under one roof, like our annual meeting, we struggle a little bit with engagement.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:35] Those are very interesting trends to think about. The more niche events, it occurred to me that part of that would be that it’s a smaller size, which then seems potentially to open it up better for more peer learning or more interaction among the attendees because it’s not overwhelming. You’re not necessarily dealing with thousands of people but maybe under 100—or I don’t know exactly how small your niche conferences are.

Erin Pressley: [00:23:59] Well, 600 or 700 can be our niche conference. But from a content standpoint, it allows us to be more narrowly focused, and you have people in a room who are already rowing in the same direction.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:17] I thought it was interesting too with the online workshops (the rebranding of Webinars). Some of what you were talking about in terms of subject areas, like Excel and PowerPoint, communications, those are areas in which they could go to other providers for; it’s not necessarily electric-co-ops-specific. But maybe it also ties into that sense of at least you’re in a room with people who are all rowing in the same direction, as you were saying, or in the same boat.

Erin Pressley: [00:24:43] Right. And we really do lean into that. There’s a saying in the co-op industry that’s like, “If you’ve seen one co-op, you’ve seen one co-op.” There’s a sense that we are a unique industry unto ourselves, and it’s certainly a unique business model to be a cooperative. We do lean into that uniqueness when we offer courses that, as you said, could be found in other places, but they don’t have that cooperative twist.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:14] I have a question that we like to ask of all of our podcast guests, which has to do with your approach to your own lifelong learning. When you were talking about the culture that you’re striving for in NRECA, you mentioned growth mindset, and you mentioned that you all are serving learners, and so you’re trying to be good learners yourselves. I’m guessing that you are thoughtful about how you approach your own development. What are some of your habits, practices, or sources when you think about your own growth and development?

Erin Pressley: [00:25:45] Celisa, you and I have talked before—we both love books. To me, that’s often my go-to. At my last organization, I was like, “Do we really want to go to a subscription model?” So I bought a book about it. Here, I’m struggling with some coaching stuff, so I bought a book about it. For me, that’s a lot of where I find direct resources. But, as I think back on my career, where I’ve really found the most value is in building a peer network of folks who can help me out. For many years, I was a part of Association Media & Publishing and participating in those events and being with those folks. I now have a group of peers to talk to and ask about when I have a question.

Erin Pressley: [00:26:32] It’s things like PAR, which I’m also a part of—Professionals for Association Revenue—another organization where I can get with some folks and talk about some things that I might be struggling with. Part of the Tagoras mastermind group that you and Jeff host as well, which has been a great resource to use. One as therapy—to talk about things that are giving you pain—but also ways to get solutions and ideas from folks who are like you. Sometimes you can’t talk to your direct reports or other folks in your organization because they’re not in the education space with you, but building that community of folks has really helped me with my lifelong learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:18] We believe in the power of reflection, and one of the things that we like to help people do with the podcast is think about what are some of the takeaways. If you’re thinking about our conversation, are there one, two, three points that you’re hoping people might walk away with, either to think about or to do something with?

Erin Pressley: [00:27:38] The first one we talked a lot about was culture. I would say don’t sleep on culture. For me, it’s the grease for the wheels. If you can get that right and continue down that lifelong—and it is a lifelong—journey of building that culture within your organization, it’s going to make reach, revenue, and impact and the other work that you do a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable. I would also say embrace this test-and-learn mindset. Try something. You don’t want to try every idea that you have, but, if you’ve vetted an idea, and you really want to get it launched, just try it. Do it once. You don’t have to commit to an event that goes forever and ever. Just do it for one year. See how it works. What did you learn? And if you want to do it again in the future. Lastly, I would say remember that we are a learning business. That means we want to teach education and learning to our members, but we also want to generate revenue from that as well—those two things are not exclusive of each other, so I would definitely lean into that as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:53] We’re not done just yet—keep listening for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:58] Visit the NRECA Web site and connect with Erin on LinkedIn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:09] And, if you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, we’d love for you to share an episode on LinkedIn and tag a colleague or two who you think would benefit from listening.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:18] Jeff, when you think about the conversation with Erin, what are you taking away?

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:23] Erin herself did such a nice job of capturing takeaways at the end, and those really landed with me. Not sleeping on culture, for example, is solid good advice. Erin mentioned Jamie Notter, and we know his and Maddie Grant’s work on culture as well. In fact, we had Jamie talk about culture at a Leading Learning pre-event we co-located with PAR’s RevUP conference, and Erin was there. One of the things that Jamie says is that people think changing culture is hard, but it’s really not. There are just certain things you have to do.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:56] And that ties right into Erin’s second takeaway around embracing a test-and-learn mindset. Just doing some things means you need to try some things, and you need to learn from what you’re trying out. And all of that is part of culture too. You have to create the psychological safety that allows for potential failure—as long as learning happens as part of whatever failure might come about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:20] And then her last point around being honest about being in the business of learning, well, that’s like music to my ears. Like Erin, I know and see the importance of revenue in what learning businesses do. And that’s not all about profit at the expense of mission. It’s about revenue in service of mission and revenue driving greater reach and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:47] That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele share four actionable ideas grounded in survey data collected by Leading Learning and informed by their experience with and observation of learning businesses and the global market for continuing education, professional development, and other lifelong learning.

All four ideas tie to the common theme of resourcefulness—Cobb and Steele’s watchword for learning businesses in 2025.

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Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

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

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

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

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] The year is still new, and so, in this episode, number 444, we want to offer some ideas we believe will shape learning businesses in 2025 and beyond.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:28] In our last episode, we covered key data points from our most recent annual survey of learning businesses, including survey respondents’ top strategic goals for 2025, the top drivers for those strategic goals, trends and issues impacting their strategy, challenges with enrollments and/or registrations, barriers to innovation in education offerings, and top areas of investment for the year ahead.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:55] We have four main ideas to share in this episode, and each is grounded in the data from our annual survey as well as our experience with and observation of learning businesses and the global market for continuing education, professional development, and other lifelong learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:12] So let’s dive in. As you said, Jeff, we have four ideas or takeaways to share. But they all are united by a single theme.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:22] That’s right. That overarching theme that we’re seeing is resourcefulness. We heard a lot in the survey about the need for resources, resources being a challenge. And we feel that there are ways that organizations could better leverage their limited resources. We feel there are some real opportunities to do that.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:43] We’ll get into some of those opportunities as part of sharing these ideas, these takeaways. The first one that we have to share is AIding strategy. We’re oh so cleverly capitalizing the AI in AIding. I know you don’t have that visual since this is an audio-only podcast, but just picture it: capital A, capital I, AIding strategy. Because, for us, this is about the greater role that AI could, and we believe should, be playing in learning businesses. Based on the survey data that we collected, AI doesn’t seem to be as far along as it should be. We asked in the survey, “Where are you in implementing artificial intelligence in your education offerings?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:27] Organizations were not quite as far along as we would have liked for them to be—34.5 percent said they are just discussing AI internally and have no clear implementation plan.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:41] And then another 21.6 percent aren’t even having the discussions about AI yet. That adds up to a little bit over a majority of folks who either aren’t having discussions or are having discussions but haven’t begun to do anything, which seems to indicate there’s a lot of room for opportunity here.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:00] This is the time to be experimenting in a variety of ways around AI, seeing what you can do with that. Whether that’s helping you with planning, whether it’s helping you with creating, whether it’s helping you with your data analysis—there are a lot of things that AI can be doing. We’re trying our best to start putting AI to use in what we’re doing at Tagoras and at Leading Learning. I will say we came up with AIding strategy without AI’s help. We came up with that on our own.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:28] That’s impressive. We want to make sure that folks know that we get full credit for that. Interestingly, we re-aired a conversation with Mary Byers a little bit ago, but one of the things she talks about in that conversation that I got to have with her is around doing pilots. I think that, where we are with AI, this is a time ripe for pilots. If you aren’t doing anything yet, be thinking about what could you be testing out and trying and planning. And, if you are doing pilots, great. Make sure that you’re giving it the attention you need, that you’re looking at what the results are of those pilots, and then figuring out what that means for, perhaps, broader implementation of the pilots or other pilots to refine the idea. But the idea is start doing some things with AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:15] Whenever you’re doing those pilots, or you’re doing the minimum viable products, or whatever the case might be, make sure that you do have accountability assigned to that, that there are folks in your organization who are actually charged with we’re going to run this experiment that involves AI and that whoever is named to lead that experiment is accountable for following through on that experiment and reporting on the results and leading the way in whatever the follow-up plans are going to be from whatever you find out from the experiment.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:45] Jeff, as you hinted, when we said that all of our takeaways, all of the four ideas we’re going to offer, tied to this theme of resourcefulness, we saw in the survey that a lot of learning businesses feel like they don’t have adequate resources to do what they need to do, and AI certainly represents a potential for helping to fill some of that need for additional resources. Maybe there is work that current staff are doing that AI could reduce the time and the effort that they need to spend on that or ways to fill in some of what might be perceived now as a human resource lack.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:19] Yes, we glossed over them as we were heading into talking about AI, about the different areas where it can help you. AI can be very powerful in analyzing and leveraging data. We know from past surveys that, as organizations are more and more focused on the data that they’re getting from their learners and also the data that they’re getting from their markets to be able to make product decisions, AI can really, really help you take a closer look at your data and make decisions from it. Of course, you have to back up from there and say, “Do we have good approaches to getting data in the first place? Do we have the policies around data that we need?” It may require some foundational work, but AI can certainly help with data.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:58] We very often hear from learning businesses that learner engagement is a big issue for them, and AI certainly holds promise there as well. That can tie to using data, as you were just talking about, Jeff, so that we can then better understand and better serve learner needs. It could also mean leveraging AI to help with personalizing the learning experience—that holy grail of personalization that we’ve been talking about for at least a decade at this point. But AI begins to hopefully make that much more feasible because it does require fewer human resources to make it happen.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:33] Yes, and those are two of the top two issues that we heard from respondents who were using or planning to use AI. They’re going to use it for personalization, for better engagement, potentially, or they are going to use it around data. Another one of those is around creation. They’re planning to use AI to help them create—and we would extend that into helping to curate—the right offerings, the right products to meet learner needs, which again goes back to that idea of engagement. If you’re creating the right products and you’ve got a way to get the products out the door, you’re curating your products in the most appropriate way for your learners. You’re bound to be helping to bolster engagement.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:11] We’ve talked about our first takeaway AIding strategy. Our second takeaway that we have to offer is what we’re characterizing as revamping revenue, and more specifically the need to revamp revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:26] That came through loud and clear as a big concern for participants in the survey. They were concerned either directly about revenue or about increasing registrations and enrollment, which, of course, has that attachment to revenue that was also a big priority. They’re also concerned about marketing, investing more in marketing, having more resources for marketing. To go back to our whole resourcefulness theme here, there’s the need to have the resources necessary for increasing revenue. But one of the things we like to focus on is finding more ways to get revenue from what you’ve already got.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:09] We have some different ways that we’ve seen learning businesses use, ways that learning businesses can adopt and try out. One is simply by raising prices.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:20] I feel like that’s the third rail of learning businesses, of most businesses. People are always very reluctant to raise prices. With a lot of the world that we deal with—I hear this a lot in the trade and professional association world, for example—raising those member dues or raising prices of any kind is anathema. You feel like you’re going to lose a lot of people. But, in our experience, price elasticity for education is often much, much lower than organizations think, and that means that raising prices doesn’t decrease enrollments to any significant degree. There’s a limit to that. You can raise them so much that it will impact it, but there’s usually a margin there of 10, 20, even 30 percent that you can raise prices, and it’s not going to significantly impact your volume, but of course it’s going to immediately go to your top line.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:14] You can simply raise prices, or you can look to add some value to hopefully make that increase in price a little bit more palatable. You’re going to give the learner a little bit more value to go along with that higher price tag. And we have a tool called the Value Ramp that we’ve talked about before on the podcast. We’ve used it with organizations. It’s a very simple tool, but it helps you see how value and price relate. In our mind, usually that means that the higher the value, the higher the price. If you think that your audience might be averse to an outright price increase, then think about what value can you add? And value doesn’t necessarily have to come with a lot of effort or a lot of cost internally.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:01] That’s right. The idea there is, if you’re adding value, you’re moving a product up the value ramp, so you’re able to increase its price because the perceived value is higher. So the price can be higher. And then we also have tools like the Product Value Profile, which gives you a way to look at a product to figure out what are the levers you pull to actually increase that value and move it up the Value Ramp.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:19] Simply raising prices is one way to help you revamp your revenue. Another way to revamp revenue and get more out of what you already have is by leveraging different product and pricing configurations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:32] A survey question that we asked and didn’t say a whole lot about when we presented the results on this—those who participated got these results—we asked about a range of product and pricing models, and this included things from bundling to subscriptions to buy-one-get-one offers. We had a number of things that we listed, and we found that most respondents weren’t doing these things, and a low percentage plan to, so they weren’t experimenting with their product and their pricing models. This is another area, like AI, where there could be some significantly higher levels of experimentation because, if you do those sorts of things—the subscriptions, the bundling, the buy-one-get-one—you’re going to get more purchases from your current customers, and you’re also, in the process, going to attract new customers who like these new models that you’re trying out. But, again, most of the respondents indicated they’re not doing this or don’t plan to do this. We also didn’t see a lot of evidence that organizations are engaged in doing business-to-business selling—selling to institutions, corporations, government agencies, whatever the right target is in your particular market. There’s still not enough of that going on, and that’s another clear area for revenue growth that’s sitting right in front of most learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:43] Another way to help you revamp your revenue could be by focusing on retention, and retention, in our mind, goes hand in hand with engagement. We’ve already touched on the fact that learner engagement is often a concern and a goal of learning businesses. We know that it is easier to sell to a current customer than to go out and have to acquire a new customer, and so, if you can keep that current customer, if that current customer is satisfied, then focusing in on that, focusing in on the retention, focusing in on what is going to keep that customer happy, that’s a very good place to spend some mental energy and perhaps some dollars.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:23] Yes, and this is another one of those perfect areas where learning and business intersect. You want engagement, of course, because that’s going to support learning. But engagement provides a great customer experience in the world of learning, and that keeps people coming back. So that’s three: raising prices, leveraging different product and pricing configurations, and then getting serious about retention.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:42] We do have a learner engagement resource.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:51] Yet another free resource. We already mentioned the Value Ramp. We already mentioned the Product Value Profile. And then we’ve got this engagement tool. Listeners know we’ve got tons of free tools here at Leading Learning that are there for you to put to use on your own or with your team. So come and get those.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:07] The fourth area we’ll mention around revenue—in terms of leveraging what you probably already have or could get to pretty easily—is leveraging “other people’s networks,” which is a term we take from our colleague Tom Poland, who’s a real expert at doing this. You can think of other people’s networks, or you might think of other organizations’ networks. These could be the partnerships that you can form. If you’re an association, it might be with an academic institution or even with one of your subject matter experts. If you’re an academic institution, it might be with an association. But this is something that’s going to give you access to a whole network of people you may not otherwise have access to, which, of course, are your prospective customers at that point.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:51] These four ideas that we just gave you around revamping revenue, the good news is that most of these don’t require major resources. This is working with what you already have in terms of products available. But these are different ways of working with what you already have, and that’s how it ties, in our mind, to this resourcefulness theme that we set out at the beginning because we understand that so many organizations are feeling resource-strapped. It’s about how can you make sure that you’re getting every ounce of revenue, impact, and reach out of what you already have in your portfolio?

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:28] So far, we’ve got AI, which can help you make the most of your current resources, can really give you some leverage. And then we’ve got these revenue ideas where you can look at what you already have and say, “Where do we raise prices? Where do we reconfigure? How can we better retain? What are the partnerships that we can use to reach new customers?” Like you said, Celisa, that’s all sitting there to take advantage of right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:58] That brings us to our third takeaway, our third idea for you to consider, and we’re characterizing this one as employing alignment. We’ve been talking about, in this episode and in the previous episode, these big strategic goals of revenue and growing enrollments or registrations. The third top strategic goal that we saw was around strengthening alignment with workforce needs. Again, we touched on this in the last episode. And then also one of the trends or issues that respondents found most important for 2025—in fact, the top one—was workforce and employer needs (job readiness, upskilling, and reskilling). We’re taking those two data points from the survey and combining these because we believe that truly fulfilling workforce needs is going to require your learning business to align with employers.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:52] Yes, definitely. This is another area where taking a little time to look at what you’re doing right now and figuring out where you can invest a little bit and make some adjustments could have some big payoffs. We’ve said for years, for example, that demand for educational offerings—and we include courses, credentials, other types of offerings in that—that’s going to be heavily influenced by their perceived value in the employer market. That’s whether learners perceive them as valuable, which is going to be influenced, to a large extent, by whether employers see them as valuable. Are they actually helpful in getting and keeping a job or in their career advancement? If you don’t have a solid understanding at this point—and by that, we mean not just an opinion but actual data—of employer wants and needs in your market, you need to make it a top priority to do that assessment in early 2025 because that can drive what you’re then able to capitalize on in the rest of the year.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:53] This ties to market research. That’s a type of market research. And that is a big part of marketing, when you don’t just think about promotion, but you think about understanding the needs of the market that you’re serving. We know, as we’ve shared in the last episode, that many survey respondents are planning to invest in marketing in 2025. If you’re one of those, this is a place to spend some of those dollars, on that market research piece.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:19] We’ve said before our fear is that, when people say they want to invest in marketing, that means they’re going to invest in promotion—send more e-mails, run more ads, do all that sort of stuff. You may need to do that, but you also have to think about these other aspects of what makes up marketing, and that research into your market and into those needs is going to inform your product, your positioning, how you distribute it, how you price it—all those other Ps that are important in marketing.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:44] And this is a place—and you already began to talk about it, Jeff—where partnerships can come into play. If you’re an association, you might be working with a college or university to create a learning path for the profession and then embed that credential in either a degree or even a non-degree program. Be thinking about those possibilities. As part of that, get clear on is there someone in your learning business with responsibility and accountability for this kind of thinking, this kind of business development? Jeff, you were talking earlier about who’s in charge of some of those pilots for AI. Similarly here, who’s in charge of thinking through what it means to align with employer needs?

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:29] Because this does go beyond what typically gets categorized as selling, which is convincing somebody to give you the dollars. You’ve got to build the relationships. You’ve got to build the relationship with the partners—if you’re an association with an academic institution or vice versa—to have the market presence, to have what you need in terms of an offering that’s attractive in the marketplace. And then you’re going to have to build relationships with the employers in your marketplace. Even if you already know them—hopefully you do—you’re not going to be able to just bang on the door and say, “Hey, give me whatever for these courses.” You’re going to have to build the case with them. You’re going to have to build the relationship. And, like you said, Celisa, somebody has to be in charge of doing that.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:05] To tie this back to the overarching theme of resourcefulness, for us, hopefully you know who those entities are that you need to be in contact with if you haven’t already formed those relationships. And maybe you do already have those relationships to then build on. But, if you don’t, odds are you know who you should be talking to in your market to better understand employer needs and wants. Hopefully this isn’t about a huge, huge undertaking to understand employer needs. It’s much more about going to the points and the references, people that you already know, and being much more methodical and consistent and deliberate about what you’re asking them and how you’re asking it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:44] And to tie this back again to the revenue discussion, aligning with workforce needs is going to be both short-term and long-term valuable with revenue. Partnering with other organizations, extending your network to be able to reach the workforce with the right products, and getting to the people is going to be valuable. And then also, to the extent that you need to develop new products or modify your products to be able to serve employers well, those employers themselves are often the surest place to look for pre-selling or underwriting of what they need because, if it’s not something that they want to build themselves, but they see the value, and it’s very likely they’ll be able and willing to underwrite whatever you’re developing. You’ll have a built-in market for the offering with that particular employer, and you’re likely also going to be able to take it out to the broader market and meet other employer needs.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:37] That brings us to our fourth and final takeaway. In our experience, learning businesses are often seen as, or certainly often see themselves as, trusted and impartial providers, and they really pride themselves on that. This is very common in the association world. And so our fourth and final takeaway we’re calling trusting speed because the way that some learning businesses have built that trust is by vetting content, by involving multiple subject matter experts, by establishing a body of knowledge. Those things can take time. This is around thinking about how can a learning business act nimbly and with speed and keep up with evolving learner expectations and the reality that learners are increasingly turning to Google and YouTube and now ChatGPT and other forms of AI for quick, targeted answers? Because of that slow way that learning businesses have, in the past, tended to build their reputation as being that trusted source, now we know that there’s this need for speed.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:48] Speed is tied to trust at this point because, if you’re not able to be there quickly with what that learner needs to meet his or her needs or their organization’s needs, that trust is going to start eroding. Even if you do have the history and all of the weight behind you, if a subject matter expert who’s got an entrepreneurial…or the regional university, if you’re in the association market, or the association, if you’re in the academic market, is being more rapid than you are in figuring out what’s emerging and what the learners need. And maybe they’re leveraging AI, as we talked earlier, to help them figure out the products and create the products and get them out into the marketplace. To the extent that that’s happening, they become the new trusted source. Organizations have to dig in and think about where can we move more rapidly, and how can we move more rapidly to meet our learner needs?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:44] This is the Leading Learning Podcast. For us, leading learning is often about trying to be the pacesetter in the field or industry that you serve. And so, if you are not the first to market, if you’re not speedy, then can you be seen as the leader? It’s an interesting question, a little bit of an existential question, perhaps, for learning businesses to consider. Much of what we’ve touched on in this episode and in the past episode ties back to our Learning Business Maturity Model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:19] It does. And, quick reminder to folks, that model has five domains in it: strategy, leadership, marketing, portfolio (your learning products, your learning experiences), and capacity. All of those have come up in one way or another here.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:37] They definitely have. Capacity, that you mentioned last, very clearly ties to this theme of resourcefulness that we said all of our takeaways tie to. We’ve been talking about revamping revenue, which definitely gets at the portfolio. We’ve been talking about market research and the need for that. And so much of what we’ve talked about has been around strategy and what is it that you’re focused on in 2025? And then to execute on strategy, you have to have leadership. We just wanted to re-mention the Learning Business Maturity Model because that’s another resource.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:18] We’re not done yet—keep listening because we’re going to recap what we’ve talked about, and we’re going to offer some reflection questions because you and we both know that spaced repetition and reflection are important tools for learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:32] At leadinglearning.com/episode444, you’ll find show notes for this episode, a transcript, and options for subscribing to the podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:41] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please do us and a colleague the favor of sharing this show with one other person who you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:52] Walk right up to them and say, “You need to listen to the Leading Learning Podcast.” Or pick up the phone and call them. Text them if you have to. But find that one person who’s going to value the podcast, and make sure they know about it. Now, to recap this episode, we offered four ideas, all tied to the theme of resourcefulness. We described these as AIding strategy, revamping revenue, employing alignment, and trusting speed.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:25] To help you understand how these ideas might play out in your learning business, we want to offer some reflection questions for you to consider on your own and then, if you have one, with your team.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:38] Based on that first takeaway, ask yourself, where is your learning business with AI? If there are no pilots or tests going underway yet, what can you do in the coming year? If you do have pilots or tests going, what can you do to continue those or to run new ones?

Celisa Steele: [00:25:59] Related to that second takeaway, revamping revenue, what might you do to diversify or increase revenue? Think through, out of what you already have in your portfolio, what might you do to get more dollars coming in from those same products or potentially to diversify so that you’re less dependent? That could be less dependent on a business model, not necessarily on specific products. It could be, if you’re only doing direct-to-consumer selling at this point, looking at business-to-business, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:30] On that third idea, employing alignment, how clear are you on the needs of employers in the market you serve? Is it time to collect some data? That could be through an online survey or perhaps better yet some one-on-one in-person or online discussions with key employers.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:52] Related to the fourth takeaway that we characterized as trusting speed, what else might you try? Where might you make some fast progress to test an idea or concept?

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:07] Those are our takeaways and reflection questions. Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele share key data points from Leading Learning’s latest year-end survey of learning businesses. They cover top strategic goals and the strategic drivers behind those goals, trends and issues impacting strategy, challenges with maintaining or growing enrollments and registrations, barriers to innovation in education offerings, and top areas of investment for the year ahead.

Your learning business can use this data for benchmarking and to help frame internal discussions about what you’re doing, what you’re not doing, and why.

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Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

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

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

Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] While what works for one learning business won’t necessarily cut and paste seamlessly into another learning business, we know there is value in understanding what others are doing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:29] When it’s not taken as a dictate, data about what others are focused on can help you get clearer on what you’re doing and how best to achieve your strategic goals.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:39] We are big believers in the value of data, and, to that end, since 2018, at the end of each year, we’ve done a survey of learning businesses to assess what they’re doing and what they’ll be focusing on in the year ahead.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] The result of those surveys is data that learning businesses can use for benchmarking and to help frame internal discussions about what they’re doing and why and not doing and why not.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:03] In 2024, we rebuilt the survey, and episode 440 goes over the structure of the survey and covers the questions and topics in more detail. In this episode, number 443, we’re sharing some key data points.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:19] Before we get to the data, let’s talk a little bit about how we got it. We put out an online survey between November 12 and December 3, 2024.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:31] We cleaned up the data that we got, and, in the end, we had qualifying responses from 120 learning businesses. The majority of those responses came from associations—53.3 percent. That was the largest grouping of respondents.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:50] We do a lot of work with associations, so that makes sense. But those are not the only learning businesses out there nor the only types of organizations we serve. We got almost 31 percent of responses from commercial organizations, and about 7.5 percent of responses came from educational institutions.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:09] But all of those respondents, everyone who responded, represent entities that sell continuing education, professional development, and other types of lifelong learning experiences to adult learners—what we call learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:23] We do call them learning businesses, and we talk a lot about that on this podcast. You can find entire episodes on the concept of the learning business, so we won’t dig into it too much more here other than what you said, Celisa, that these are market-facing organizations creating and selling continuing education, professional development, and other lifelong learning experiences to adults. We thought that a place that we should start with this group going into the survey—because it’s the place that we like to start in general when we are working with learning businesses—is strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:55] That’s right. After a few quick demographic questions, we asked about their top strategic goals for the year ahead. We asked about a primary strategic goal and then a secondary strategic goal. If we look at those strategic goals, let’s talk about the top three that came up.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:14] We’re not going to go into every single data point here. Those who participated in the survey are getting deeper data than this. But this is a podcast; we’re not going to go into a ton of numbers here. But those top three, the primary strategic goals that the survey respondents indicated, the first one was increasing revenue. We had 30 percent of respondents say that that was the primary strategic goal for them.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:37] The second most cited strategic goal? Growing enrollments and/or registration. Increasing revenue, 30 percent. Growing enrollments and/or registrations, 28.3 percent of respondents. So you put those two together—and often they are deeply intertwined in a learning business; often the way you’re going to increase your revenue is by growing enrollments—but, if you put those two together, then you get well over half of respondents choosing one of those two as a top strategic goal.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:05] A lot of focus on growing the numbers of people who are being served by learning experiences and the dollars that are being generated from doing that. Those were number one and two in terms of primary strategic goals. Number three was strengthening alignment with workforce needs. That was a good bit behind but still did finish in the top three, with 16.7 percent saying that they were going to be focused on that.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:30] After we got folks to think about their primary strategic goals, to share those, we then asked about what’s driving those strategic goals. What’s on their mind that’s making them think, “Okay, let’s increase revenue, or let’s increase enrollments and registrations”? Again, we’ll share the top three strategic drivers that survey respondents cited.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:55] And number one, by a hair, was a desire to be seen as setting the pace in the field or industry that that learning business serves; 59.3 percent indicated this. We’ll probably come back and talk about this one a fair amount along the way, but we found it interesting that that was a big driver for so many people responding to the survey.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:19] In essence, it’s a brand issue to be seen as setting the pace. That is about you want to be the brand that people are turning to, that people are looking to as the source for their learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:31] I think there’s a recognition that that’s required now, to get their attention and then convert them into customers, as you have to be in that position in this noisy, lifelong learning market that we all operate in.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:43] That was the top strategic driver. The second most cited strategic driver, just behind the other, is evolving learner demand. That desire to be seen as setting the pace, 59.3 percent. Evolving learner demands, 58.5 percent. Very close. Just one percentage point, a little under, apart there. That makes a lot of sense. There definitely are evolving learner demands and learner needs. And learners, post-COVID, have different expectations about what it’s like to learn online or learn, period. We have generative AI changing how people are expecting to learn things as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:22] I think the first two are somewhat connected too because you want to be seen as the organization that can meet evolving learner demands, which means you’re seen as being out there, setting the pace in your field or industry. And, tying it back to those top strategic priorities, if you want to generate revenue, if you want to drive enrollments, both of these are very important drivers of being able to do that.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:44] And then the third most cited strategic driver is the need to increase financial sustainability and/or profitability; 53.4 percent of respondents chose that strategic driver. That does tie very clearly to this need to increase revenue and to increase enrollments and registrations. That’s all tied up in this financial sustainability and, hopefully, profitability.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:08] In all of this, there’s an underlying sense of shifting terrain in terms of learner needs, in terms of employer needs, and probably a little bit of anxiety about what it takes to stay ahead in the marketplace that we’re in right now for continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning.

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

Celisa Steele: [00:07:27] We also asked about top trends and issues impacting learning businesses’ strategy in the year ahead. Which of the predefined options that we gave them are most important to their strategy in the year ahead? The top one was workforce and employer needs—things like job readiness, upskilling, reskilling. We had folks use a Likert scale for this. Five was that the issue was critical for their strategy in 2025, and one was that it was not important. This had a weighted average of 3.93—very close to very important. It had the highest percentage of respondents saying that it’s critical—39.2 percent of respondents rated this as a five as critical for their strategy in 2025.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:20] And we saw workforce alignment as a strategic priority. I think this is the trend that’s lying behind that. Second, we saw learner preferences for flexibility. Flexibility in a variety of ways. We’re dealing with adult lifelong learners who need different ways of approaching learning, from schedule and formats and everything else. That scored on that Likert scale you were talking about, Celisa… By the way, head nod to Will Thalheimer for getting us to say…

Celisa Steele: [00:08:49] For correcting our pronunciation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:50] …LICK-ert instead of LIE-kert. But, in any case, in that scale, learner preferences for flexibility came out at 3.62, so also knocking on the door of very important overall. Certainly, it relates to revenue. It relates to enrollment. It relates to engagement. The issues that we’ve already been hearing about in terms of strategic priorities and drivers.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:11] And probably also evolving learner needs that we were talking about before. There’s this stronger preference, this stronger expectation that there will be flexibility in what you’re offering with learning. And then the third top trend or issue that was cited by survey respondents is providing more personalized learning experiences. That had a weighted average of 3.36—a little bit closer to important than very important. But, again, that probably speaks to the evolving learner needs and demands, that they’re expecting more flexibility, they’re expecting more personalization. They want to get to the content that they need and not necessarily have to wade through a bunch of other information to get that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:55] Personalization has been an issue out there for years. It’s something we asked about in our former iterations of this annual survey. It was always very strong there. It’s just one of those areas. It means different things to different people. We did ask a little bit about what it means to people with some questions later on in the survey. We won’t get into that data here. Again, if you participated, that’s the kind of data that you’re going to get. But, certainly, with AI coming along—and we’ll talk a little bit about AI along the way here too—what’s possible with personalization is changing. It’s making it even more top of mind for people.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:27] You brought up AI just then, and it was one of the trends and issues that we asked about. It was not in the top three, and that was somewhat surprising to us. We’re going to talk more about AI in a second episode. This is one of two episodes we’re going to devote to exploring these survey results and what they might mean for learning businesses. We’ll get a little bit more into what we learned about learning businesses’ use of AI in the year ahead.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:53] My hopeful take on that is that people are seeing AI more as a means to an end rather than something to focus on in and of itself. That may be a little too hopeful because we also know from our data that organizations aren’t engaging with AI at the level that they should be at this point.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:07] We should start calling you Pollyanna from now on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:09] Yes, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:10] After trends and issues, we asked about challenges, and we couched the question about challenges as specifically about challenges with maintaining or growing enrollments and/or registrations for education offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:25] The one that topped the list here was insufficient internal resources. It was number one by a pretty good extent—53.8 percent said that that was their top challenge.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:39] Next behind that—and again, like you said, that was 53.8 percent for insufficient internal resources—at 40.3 percent, limited marketing resources. Some people have internal marketing teams, so that insufficient internal resources might also have a slice of that that’s about marketing. But then some organizations make use of external marketing organizations and firms as well. Whether it’s internal or external, there’s a sense that there aren’t enough marketing resources.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:12] Resources are an issue. I always find it a little bit puzzling in our world because the organizations we deal with are revenue-generating organizations. Presumably you invest in what a learning business is doing, and you get a return from it. You’re going to get the higher revenue that everybody is seeking by having those resources there. But there’s perennially a struggle for resources, and the learning businesses, it’s almost as if they were being treated as cost centers, which is what would be the case, for example, in corporate L&D, as opposed to business units or full businesses themselves, revenue-generating entities.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:53] The third challenge with maintaining or growing enrollments and/or registrations: increased competition, 37.8 percent. We’ve talked in many prior episodes about how the barriers to entry into this market are so much lower now. Now you have subject matter experts competing with an association, for example, whereas that SME needed the association in the past. Now there are tools and avenues for that subject matter expert to directly reach learners. So there is increased competition, and that is clearly on people’s minds.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:30] We have three major segments represented in the survey: trade and professional associations, commercial organizations (which could include solo entrepreneurs), and academic institutions. Increasingly, those three segments are competing with each other. They’re stepping on each other’s traditional territory. That’s a factor in this as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:50] After challenges, we turned to barriers to innovation. We asked, “What are the biggest barriers to innovation in your education offerings?” We had some predefined choices. We also let folks define something else if they had something else on their mind that wasn’t among the choices we gave them, and we had them select up to three. Again, we’ll share those top three barriers to innovation. The first one: focus on short-term goals over long-term planning, 48.3 percent.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:22] That’s a perennial issue with innovation that’s certainly not confined to learning businesses. You hear this across the board in businesses or in organizations that want to innovate, that it’s hard to take that longer-term view that innovation might require. You’re trying to fight the current fires and can’t really back up and think a little bit more creatively.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:41] Right, and so back to limited resources. If you’re feeling like you don’t have sufficient resources to do what needs to be done, it can be hard, like you’re saying, Jeff, to create that space to think and rethink what you’re offering, and to potentially innovate. But we are big fans of taking that bigger-picture view at least as seriously as your short-term to-do list. This is a place where there might be opportunity for leaders to step up and make sure that that vision for what you want to be seen as is clear. If you want to be seen as setting the pace in the industry or field that you serve, which we saw as a top strategic goal, then you want to make sure you eliminate as many of these barriers to innovation as possible.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:25] Yes, chances are some innovation is going to be required for that. Number two on this was concerns about return on investment, 40.7 percent. About 41 percent said that that was a concern, and I think that often is an issue. You often have to make the case. You always should make the case for innovation, particularly if it’s going to involve significant investment of time, money, other resources. I’ll make a little plug for us here too. This is where the type of consulting work we do comes in. We come in and work with organizations to identify what those opportunities are and how to build the business case around them. If anything can alleviate concerns around innovation, it’s building that strong, data-based business case for it.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:14] You said that the concerns about ROI came in second. True. But tied with the concerns about ROI was insufficient technology infrastructure—40.7 percent of respondents also cited that. Again, we, through our consulting engagements, do get to hear a lot about people’s learntech stack and their tech stack in general. And it’s true that there aren’t a ton of organizations super satisfied with the tech stack that they have. Finding technology infrastructure that meets your needs is a bit challenging, especially as we have changes like generative AI that are changing the ground on which we’ve stood for so long and reshaping things.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:01] Yes, a lot of organizations do need to not just replace or get new technology but rethink their relationship with technology that, in and of itself, needs some innovation. Certainly, insufficient technology infrastructure can be a barrier to innovation, though I’m always a little suspicious of that. It always feels a little bit like a red herring. It’s easy to say, “We don’t have the technology to do that,” but there’s nothing per se that requires technology for innovation. Just my one man’s perspective on this particular data point.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:35] Then we also asked about areas of investment. We asked, “What are the top areas you’re going to be investing in in the year ahead?” We provided some options, and we asked respondents to select up to three of those areas.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:50] And we have very good news if you represent a marketing agency.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:54] That’s right. Coming in at the top of the list was enhancing marketing and outreach efforts; 58.6 percent of respondents selected that. That’s the only option that got over half of respondents saying that’s where they wanted to invest in the year ahead. I think it’s very consistent with some of the other data that we’ve already been sharing here. When we get back to some of those challenges with enrollments and/or registrations, we had insufficient internal resources and then limited marketing resources. This idea of enhancing marketing and outreach efforts seems to be speaking to that sense of “Oh, we don’t have enough resources, particularly marketing resources.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:32] There’s the perception that this is the answer to the revenue priority and the enrollment priority, if we can market more. Which gets us thinking. We know from experience that—we’re extrapolating from the survey data in saying this—but so often, when people are talking about marketing, they’re really talking about just one of the four Ps of marketing: promotion. If we spend more money and effort on promotion or get better at promotion, somehow that’s going to take care of things for us. But, of course, the underlying product (what it is that you’re selling), all of its qualities, its distribution, its positioning out in the marketplace, its pricing, those are also aspects of marketing. We do wonder if organizations are thinking about marketing in full and taking those into account when they’re talking about enhancing their marketing and outreach efforts here.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:25] Right. The short version of what you said, Jeff, is, “Will more promotion make a difference if the underlying product isn’t valuable or isn’t seen as valuable in the market?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:35] Thank you for providing a shorter version of my thoughts there.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:42] And then the other top two areas of investment are, second, increasing learner engagement—45.7 percent of respondents want to invest in that—and then, quite a bit behind it, 31 percent of respondents want to increase efforts to partner with other organizations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:59] The first of these, increasing learner engagement, we’re always hearing about learner engagement. We’ve created resources around learner engagement. Big issue over time. And it’s good to see that organizations are focused on investing in that in the coming year. Of course, then you have to back up and say, “Well, what does that mean? What does engagement mean? How do you invest in increasing it effectively?” Again, something we can help with, but we also have plenty of resources around that.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:24] The other thing about increasing learner engagement is that there is this idea that “Oh, if we increase learner engagement, that will translate into greater revenue, into more enrollments and more registrations.” That’s an interesting theory, and it seems like a reasonable theory, but it’s the kind of thing you want to test. If your top strategic goals are around revenue or growing enrollments, will investing in learner engagement actually produce the additional revenue or increase your enrollments?

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:54] Our feeling—and we’ve seen this play out time and time again—is an investment in engagement is an investment in retention. You keep those same customers over time. It costs much less to keep a customer than to get a new customer. So it is a wise area of investment. It’s often a hard sell, though, because it sounds easier to say, “We’re going to hire this marketing firm to run some promotions for us” than it does to say, “We’re going to look at our product and figure out how we’re going to make it more engaging. Indirectly, that’s going to pay off over the long term.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:24] I was pleased to see the increasing efforts to partner with other organizations. Anybody who’s been following us knows we’ve talked a lot about partnerships, particularly between associations and academic institutions, but this would also apply to partnerships between commercial organizations and academia or commercial organizations and associations. There’s a lot of leverage to be gotten out of partnerships.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:46] If you go back to that competitive landscape we’ve talked about, being able to collaborate effectively with other organizations, to essentially get the new version of a competitive advantage out there in the marketplace, we’re big believers in it. There was some data that we asked early in the survey, as we were collecting some initial demographics, about whether folks who identified being with an association had ever partnered with an academic institution around their educational offerings. And we asked the reverse, whether higher education institutions had partnered with an association. In both cases, more than 50 percent of the respondents said they had, which was more partnership activity than we anticipated. Suffice it to say, this is an area that we’re going to continue to be doing more with in the coming year, and we think it is a wise area of investment.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:33] We’ve talked about the top strategic goals and the strategic drivers behind those goals. We’ve talked about top trends and issues, challenges with maintaining or growing enrollments and registrations, barriers to innovation in education offerings, and then those top three areas of investment. Jeff, as you said, this is just a slice of the overall data that we got from the survey. We do, as we mentioned earlier, run this annually. When we next send it out, please do carve out time to respond, to contribute to this data that then is useful to you and to other learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:19] We’re not quite done yet. Stick around to the very end for our recap of key takeaways and some reflection questions for your consideration, on your own or with your team.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:31] At leadinglearning.com/episode443, you’ll find show notes (which will include our takeaways and reflection questions), a transcript, and options for subscribing to the podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:41] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please tell one other person about the show. Find that someone who you feel would appreciate and get value from it, and tell them to tune in to the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:57] In terms of takeaways, the data makes it crystal clear that increasing revenue and growing enrollments and/or registrations are the top strategic goals of well over half of learning businesses. And those two goals are, of course, usually intertwined for learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:15] Another clear takeaway is the need for marketing. We see in the barriers a sense that marketing resources aren’t adequate, and we see that marketing is the top area of investment. Again, we advocate investing in marketing in full, not just promotion but pricing, positioning, placement. What P am I forgetting here? The underlying product itself. Invest in all areas of marketing.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:42] We encourage you to reflect on some questions related to the survey data that we’ve been sharing. What are your top strategic goals for the year ahead? And what’s driving those goals?

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:54] What are the top trends and issues you’re focused on in the year ahead? What’s the connection to your top strategic goals?

Celisa Steele: [00:25:03] What are your top areas of investment for the year ahead? Where are you putting dollars in 2025, and how connected are those areas of investment to your strategic goals?

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:14] Seriously, carve out some time on your own to reflect. You could hit pause now or schedule some time on your calendar. Make notes on those questions, and then discuss them with your team if you have one.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:27] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Innovation is an aspiration of many organizations, including learning businesses.

This episode, number 442, features a conversation with Mary Byers. Mary is an author, speaker, facilitator, consultant, CEO coach, and mastermind facilitator, and she’s deeply knowledgeable about innovation. Mary wrote Race for Relevance: Five Radical Changes for Associations, and her work focuses on helping organizations remain relevant in a rapidly changing environment.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Mary Byers: [00:00:00] We hear a lot about going back to “normal,” going back and just doing things the way that we used to. Going back to comfort is essentially what we’re asking. But I’m encouraging any time you hear the words “go back” out of your mouth to gently switch that and change it to “go forward” because I think “go forward” is positive and optimistic and forward-looking and forward-thinking. And I think those words “go forward” just have power and momentum and energy in them.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:36] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:37] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:46] Innovation is an aspiration of many organizations, including learning businesses. This episode, number 442, features a conversation with Mary Byers, someone we consider to be an expert in innovation. This is an encore airing of an interview from our archives. Mary Byers wrote Race for Relevance: Five Radical Changes for Associations. The book was originally published in 2011, but a new version, expanded for the post-pandemic world, came out in 2021. Mary’s main area of interest and focus is innovation and evolution in all things, organizationally, educationally, and otherwise. Mary’s work centers on helping organizations remain relevant in a rapidly changing environment. Celisa and Mary originally spoke in September 2021.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:45] When you think about what it takes for a learning business to succeed, what kinds of skills, knowledge, and behaviors come to mind for you?

Mary Byers: [00:01:55] There are three things. First is the need to be committed to continuous evolution. Complacency leads to irrelevance, and, when we rest on our laurels, when we get comfortable, those are also signs that we might be on the way to an irrelevant future. The second thing I would say is we need to be comfortable launching small pilots and recalibrating if necessary. Rarely do we get things 100-percent right out of the gate, so flexible organizations are successful organizations. And then, finally, we need to be comfortable dancing with uncertainty. Those three words, “dancing with uncertainty,” popped into my mind way back in December of 2016, and, though they seemed really important at the time, I realized too that we’re all dancing with uncertainty all the time anyway. I think the more we lean into that and the more we acknowledge it, frankly, the more realistic we’re going to be as we approach our work.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:05] I think that’s very interesting. And, of course, dancing with uncertainty makes me wonder who’s leading?

Mary Byers: [00:03:11] In most dances, in the traditional dances, we have one leader and one follower, but I’m not sure today that that’s always true nor always good. I think we need to take turns leading and following.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:27] Out of those three things that you just mentioned—that commitment to evolution, being willing to launch small pilots and then revisit and revise as needed, and dancing with uncertainty—are there ones where you see learning businesses struggle more, organizations struggle more? And then ones where they are more open to embracing that attitude or that mindset?

Mary Byers: [00:03:55] Where we struggle, honestly, is keeping the pedal to the metal on continuous evolution and being comfortable with small pilots and recalibrating when necessary. Where we excel—and these aren’t things that actually help us—is in protecting the status quo, in meeting deadlines, and doing the comfortable things. We need to get comfortable with discomfort, especially going forward in the educational arena.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:28] In that sense, it sounds like those three things that you enumerated—that commitment to the evolution, launching the small pilots, dancing with uncertainty—are the areas where you tend to see organizations struggle, and it’s more that defending the status quo that’s more comfortable that they tend to gravitate towards more naturally, if I’m hearing you correctly.

Mary Byers: [00:04:46] Yes, absolutely. Another area we struggle in is in the area of risk tolerance. We can’t move our educational efforts forward if we do the same things in the same way. So much has changed. Whether you’re talking about in-person learning, online learning, or a combination of the two, we have to be more aggressive overall, period.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:10] When you think about the skills and behaviors that it takes for organizations to succeed, is there a hierarchy in your mind? Are there some skills or knowledge sets that are more important than others? And, if so, which ones are the most important?

Mary Byers: [00:05:29] The willingness to experiment is one of the most important in my book, but that comes along with risk and no guarantees. And, because we’re not comfortable with uncertainty, there’s tension between those two things. Many cultures don’t support this aspect of innovation and reward consistent performance instead, so I think there is tension there.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:55] I’m curious—if we’re thinking about these things that organizations need to be able to do, learn how to do in order to succeed, how do you see organizations helping their internal team get those needed skills, knowledge, behaviors, mindset?

Mary Byers: [00:06:12] The ones that are doing it well are being very intentional and deliberate about having conversations about needed skill sets. I can’t speak as much to how every organization is doing it because they’re all different, but I suggest that each team member have a personal learning roadmap, and I’ll provide a copy of that for you for the show notes. Reskilling is something I’ve seen an increasing need for over the past five years, but we’re not very good at being deliberate or intentional around this. The personal learning roadmap asks an individual to sit down and identify, “Where are the areas that I need to learn and get better at in order to continue to be on the cutting edge of my job and to be able to contribute to the work that we are doing?”

Mary Byers: [00:07:06] And then the roadmap asks each employee to identify where they can learn these needed skills. Is it an online program? Is it by reading a book? Is it an in-person program? Is it on-the-job training somewhere? Is it shadowing somebody? And then, after that, we talk about strategy on the roadmap. Where can I get the resources for this, whether it’s time away to learn, whether it is help with registration financially, whatever the requirement is? I believe that every employee needs to have a personal learning roadmap for two reasons. One, if you’re an educational organization, and you believe in continuing education, then you really should walk the talk and make sure that your employees are engaged in continuous education. But also it’s a way to be intentional and deliberate and have a plan each year for what we need to learn how to do and where we can get the resources to learn how to do it. Because, as I said earlier, complacency leads to irrelevance, and that’s true not only for organizations but also for individuals.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:22] I especially appreciate your point about walking the talk because I do feel like, unfortunately, for a lot of learning businesses, they’re so focused on serving their learners and their audience that they don’t necessarily think about their own internal needs. The idea of that personal learning roadmap, getting very clear with some specific goals, revisiting that periodically, and making sure that those goals are still accurate or updating them as needed, that all makes a lot of sense to me.

Mary Byers: [00:08:53] Internally, employees aren’t just employees. They should also be learners as well. So you’re right. A lot of times we think of employees as serving our learners externally, but we also need to think about employees as learners internally as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:19] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:54] Having read Race for Relevance, I feel like you put a lot of emphasis on data and the role that it can play in decision-making within organizations. I’m hoping you could talk a little bit about the role that you see data playing to help organizations make decisions.

Mary Byers: [00:10:14] I think it is critical, and that keeps us from guessing. As we’re talking about experimenting and innovation, if we’re using data, we are taking less risk because we’re not guessing. We’re using what we know to be true. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Heat maps of attendees and where they are domestically or internationally can show where we should be hosting in-person meetings if, in fact, in-person is part of your strategy. Saving the chat from virtual meetings can help identify potential new topics and where people are interested in moving next with their own learning. Registration data can tell us what topics are more popular now. Capturing artificial intelligence and creating word clouds of online conversations can help us figure out, again, what topics individuals might be interested in, even the suggestion of other topics.

Mary Byers: [00:11:23] I recently registered for an online learning program myself, and what I loved is the organization said, “When you pay for this, we’re also going to recommend a couple of other related classes that you might be interested in. And, if you sign up for three or more, you’ll get a discount.” They were packaging their material together in a way that was meeting my needs very, very specifically. If I wanted to do a deep dive, they were making it so easy for me to be able to do that. And that’s why I think data is so important because it can help you meet learner needs more efficiently. It can create efficiencies internally as well. The thing about it is that data isn’t always sexy, however, and I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s underutilized. That’s one of the reasons. The second reason is we aren’t set up to capture data, and, if we have the data, we don’t always use it in a way that makes it easy to understand. And sometimes we have data that we don’t even know we have.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:34] I was thinking as well that there may be a potential barrier around the internal skill sets, and we were just talking about the skills that the internal team needs. You have to have the data. You have to know you have the data. And then you have to have some people who are skilled enough to be able to interpret it and come to some of these logical conclusions about what that data might be suggesting in terms of actions to take.

Mary Byers: [00:12:57] That is absolutely right. There are different skill sets needed. If you’re a curriculum developer, and you got into the learning business because you’re focused on the education part of it, this data part of it might not be nearly as interesting to you. But, if you have somebody internally who loves numbers, loves analytics, even if you have a data scientist that you can work with externally—and there are those individuals who will help you with this—they can help you make sense of the data, the trends that the data is showing you, and help you make some decisions, again, based on what you know to be true rather than what you think or hope to be true.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:40] In thinking about data, I’m thinking about numbers and quantitative data, and so that makes me think of costs. One of the things that you write about and think about is this idea of organizations and the true cost of programs. Would you talk a little bit about how organizations should go about really understanding the cost of the programs that they’re offering?

Mary Byers: [00:14:05] It is not enough to look at the direct cost; we have to consider overhead and staff time as well. Many organizations are not set up to track this way, so it isn’t easy. And, if we are under pressure, under deadline, sometimes we don’t give ourselves the freedom and flexibility to step back and assess staff time, either to track it or to determine even at a very simple level what the average staff hour is. So, when we look at how many hours staff contributes to building a new course or spends on an in-person meeting, we don’t apply what the personnel costs are to that. Therefore, many organizations think they’re making money on it, but, if you add in your overhead and staff time, they’ll find that things they think are profitable really aren’t. I think we have to be much more deliberate and intentional about how we’re tracking our costs so that we get a true picture of whether we’re making money, breaking even, or losing money on some of our offerings.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:19] Tied up in this understanding of the true cost of programs is an argument that you make around volume not equaling value. Would you talk a bit about the arguments that you see for an organization having a narrower product and service line?

Mary Byers: [00:15:38] The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) tells us that 80 percent of value comes from 20 percent of programs. That’s pretty powerful if you think about it. It means that you could lean into 20 percent of your programs and probably be more profitable right off the bat. For a learning organization, this means that a few of its programs are going to be the most popular and likely provide the most revenue. What I see, however, is that we’re very slow to retire programs, and that leads to educational clutter. So, if I am coming to your organization for some sort of education, if I am seeing a lot of offerings, too many decisions, I’m likely to look elsewhere for my training. We need to think about regularly, purposely abandoning less popular or dated courses, and I’ll give you a powerful example of this. Steve Jobs got rid of 70 percent of the Apple product line after he came back. He was gone for 12 years. They were in the red. They brought him back. By getting rid of 70 percent of the Apple product line, he turned a $1 billion loss in 1997 to a $309 million profit a year later. I can’t think of a more powerful example, and it’s an example of using a shrink-to-grow strategy, which is counterintuitive.

Mary Byers: [00:17:19] I think having that understanding, the 80/20 rule, is important, but I also think it’s important that we have a strong search function so that, if I am coming to you and looking at your events, I can find what I’m looking for quickly and easily, without having to hunt through layers and years of programming. The other thing I would encourage leaders to be thinking about is creating packaging so that, if I am buying one thing, I can get other related material for one fee. That’s also a possible way to increase revenue and increase impact with your learners. And then we also want to be thinking about learning pathways or learning journeys so that, if I’ve started with an area of interest, what would you recommend next? Maybe it’s a series of three, four, or six programs that I can take, and then I will have done a deep dive, and I will have had a good understanding. The bottom line is also don’t make your learners work to learn from you or with you. Help them access your programs, your services, your curriculum.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:36] You’re so right to point out that we can be slow to sunset products. I think that’s very true. And then you point out that, when we fail to do that, we create clutter that can then be a barrier to our learners. Even if we have great content, if they can’t find it, if they can’t discover it, then we may as well not have it. I appreciate the comments too around how can we package and bundle offerings so that it’s very clear that, if you’re interested in topic X, then here are other offerings that we have in that realm, which can also then be part of that journey. If you’re interested in X, you learn a little bit, and you can go deeper with Y and learn more there. All of that makes so much sense to me. And then the shrink-to-grow thing, I wanted to touch on that because I feel like too that when we’re talking about the true cost of programs…one of the things I remember from Race for Relevance was talking about the opportunity cost. When you are pursuing more than you should, then that means you don’t have bandwidth or resources to pursue something else.

Mary Byers: [00:19:42] That is so true because, if you’re busy doing one thing, you can’t be doing another—and, if another would hold more value for your audience, that is a sad way to be using time. We want to be using time at the highest and best use, not only of the curriculum developers but so that you’re meeting the highest and best use of your learners. You want to make sure that there’s a good marriage between what you’re offering and what they’re desiring. You mentioned something that I think is worth reiterating there, and that is the sunk cost. A lot of times we won’t abandon, sunset, or retire programs because we have a high level of sunk cost in them, so we want to keep going until we turn a profit. That’s why experimenting is so important. If you put a small piece of learning out there, and nobody’s interested, you don’t have to build it out. You can go on to find the next piece of learning that somebody would be interested in. Therefore, your sunk costs will be very low, and it’ll be easier to retire or sunset a program eventually.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:02] I know that you’re a fan of a digital-first approach, a digital-first mindset, and I think we hear about digital first a lot these days, which means that it can be one of those phrases where sometimes we think we know what it means, but maybe we have a slightly different idea in mind than what the person saying it intends. I’m wondering how you would describe a digital-first mindset and what that might look like in the context of a learning business.

Mary Byers: [00:21:29] Most simply, I define it as embracing technology in order to deliver what learners want, when they want it, and how they want it. I don’t necessarily mean only in a virtual environment. I’m talking about embracing technology so that when you are in person, you are delivering what learners want, when they want it, and how they want it. Knowing this, however, requires a close relationship with your audience, constantly asking them, listening to them, and inviting input. Many organizations are behind in building a robust technology framework, and part of that might be they lack the dollars to make the investment; they might lack the expertise to make the investment. Frankly, it could be as simple as they’re intimidated.

Mary Byers: [00:22:22] They don’t really understand what the potential impact is. And, because they don’t have a depth of experience in that arena, it’s easier to put it off until you have time. The reality is that none of us have time to embrace a digital mindset or create a digital mindset while we’re doing the work of today’s business. So we have to have two-horizons thinking—what kind of deadlines do we have coming up immediately and then a longer-term deadline. What kind of infrastructure do we need to be building, from a technology standpoint, so that we can support our mission and support our learners?

Celisa Steele: [00:23:02] I like that you emphasized the fact that it’s use of technology, which could impact even the in-person delivery, and I do think that fits so well with the world as it has evolved because technology does feel so enmeshed. Even when we’re going to in-person events or meeting face to face, we often set that up digitally first, or we have digital resources that go along with that. So I appreciate that reminder that it doesn’t mean that everything happens online or digital only; it’s more about technology facilitating all that we do.

Mary Byers: [00:23:36] One of the things that I love about your work, Celisa, is you have said repeatedly that the needs of in-person and virtual aren’t always one and the same. When we’re doing hybrid events, we need to be considering the needs of the two audiences. There are certainly places where they intersect, but we have to be cognizant of what our goal is and then work backwards in figuring out how to best meet that. As you said and just reiterated, sometimes technology, even in the in-person experience, can help accelerate learning, can help make learning interactive, can make it fun, can make it memorable. We need to be thinking not just about the online experience but how technology can support the in-person experience as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:28] You’ve already been offering advice, but I want to ask more broadly, more generally, what advice do you have for a learning business that’s looking to grow and to move up to the next level?

Mary Byers: [00:24:43] There are three things I would encourage them to be thinking about. The first is don’t wait to determine and articulate your strategy. Put it in writing, get it down on paper, share it with your team, and make that the focus of your longer-horizon thinking because the decisions that you make and the actions that you take today will determine where you’re going to be in three, five, and ten years. The second thing that I would suggest is be prepared to invest and invest regularly. I’m not just talking about money, but I’m talking about time, and I’m talking about expertise. Time, money, and expertise are the three most critical resources. But a lot of efforts are under-resourced or inadequately resourced, and that’s why they fail.

Mary Byers: [00:25:36] And then, third, I would encourage learning companies, learning organizations to consider finding collaborative partners. In many cases, the expertise we really need, if we’re going to grow exponentially, isn’t necessarily on staff, but a collaborative partner (whether a vendor or another organization) can help us go further faster. I have a candid case study about this. In July of 2020, I was on a call with a client who had been approached by a vendor whom many on the call knew and thought very highly of, and he was making a presentation about what his company could do, and this is what he said in a soundbite.

Mary Byers: [00:26:27] He said, “We aspire to be the Netflix of education.” He was committed to coming alongside teachers to help them make their education more interesting using video—whether it was small video vignettes throughout in-person, whether it was a flipped classroom, so that you would view a video before you got to the classroom to talk about what you had learned and make sense of it. And the organization that he approached, he was asking for a very small financial commitment, and, more, he was looking for them to be guinea pigs to help walk through this launch with him. They had very little to lose, but there was a lot of hesitation about it because it had never been done before. They weren’t sure about it.

Mary Byers: [00:27:25] It was everything I could do to keep from screaming, “Say yes! Use this as a small experiment, as a small pilot. Set it up. Just do one course with them and see what it looks like. See how students respond. See how teachers respond to it.” It was the perfect opportunity to innovate without having to spend a lot of time or money because they had a collaborative partner with them, and I think collaboration is the new currency. They did end up saying yes to this, and I was grateful for that because I thought that was going to help them start their relaunch, their innovation journey, and make it part and parcel of who they were culturally.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:12] I love that example. Like you said, it made it easy for them to say yes, to try it out, to have that pilot, and then see where things go because they’re going to get some data from that pilot and then be able to understand what that data is telling them about whether to go deeper or perhaps to pull back. But it sounds like a perfect first step to make.

Mary Byers: [00:28:34] The only thing that I would say is that sometimes the data that we get back from an early experiment isn’t mature enough to be helpful. If you try one semester or one course of this learning, and the data just isn’t there to support it, I tell people not to pull the plug too soon, especially if you’re launching something new that’s never been tried before. If it’s an educational meeting, it may need two or three years to get legs under it. If it is a course, it may need multiple semesters to get legs under it, partly because it doesn’t have any word-of-mouth going into the initial attempt. But the more you do it, the more you can get testimonials, the more you can get social proof, the more you can get social media working, the more you can be promoting, and then the momentum may take off. So, yes, there is a time to retire, sunset, and purposely abandon, but it’s not always right after your first attempt in trying something new.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:39] That was a very useful addition there to point out that, yes, depending on where you are in an initiative, the data may need more time to become more reliable and to give you a stronger sense of where to go. But you should be collecting it all along, and then you’ll have it to draw on when you do get to that point of decision-making.

Mary Byers: [00:29:59] Absolutely, I agree.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:01] You obviously have such a wealth of experience and background in innovation and helping organizations. You’ve shared a lot with us already. Is there anything else that comes to mind that you want to make sure to have a chance to say to listeners?

Mary Byers: [00:30:18] Yes, I would encourage people to be thinking about developing a go-forward strategy. We hear a lot about going back to “normal,” going back and just doing things the way that we used to. Going back to comfort is essentially what we’re asking. But I’m encouraging any time you hear the words “go back” out of your mouth to gently switch that and change it to “go forward” because I think “go forward” is positive and optimistic and forward-looking and forward-thinking. And I think those words “go forward” just have power and momentum and energy in them. And that’s what all learning organizations need to have. They need to be looking further down the horizon than anybody else is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:10] Mary Byers is an author, speaker, facilitator, consultant, CEO coach, mastermind facilitator, and deeply knowledgeable about innovation.

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The post Redux: Studying Innovation with Mary Byers appeared first on Leading Learning.

A learning business must understand learning theory and put that theory into practice if it is to create offerings that result in positive change and impact.

This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 441, features a conversation with instructional psychologist Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark and co-host Celisa Steele.

Ruth has spent her spent her career translating academic research into practical guidelines and advocating for the use of evidence-based approaches to learning. She’s the author of many articles and books, including Evidence-Based Training Methods and E-learning and the Science of Instruction.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:00:00] I always would recommend you err on the side of having shorter amounts of content or slides or screens in a topic. I myself, even in my pleasure reading, I’m more and more drawn to books that have short chapters. I just find it a whole lot easier and more enjoyable to read and review it. I think in learning, when you have relatively short little topics, you feel a sense of achievement, and you don’t feel so overwhelmed by long, lengthy lessons.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:34] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:43] Understanding learning theory and putting that theory into practice is fundamental if a learning business is to create courses and other offerings that result in positive change and impact. This episode, number 441, features a conversation with instructional psychologist Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:01] This is an encore airing of an interview from our archives. Ruth has spent her career translating academic research into practical guidelines and advocating for the use of evidence-backed approaches. She’s the author of many articles and books, including Evidence-Based Training Methods and E-learning and the Science of Instruction, both of which we highly recommend.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:25] Celisa and I had followed and appreciated Ruth’s practical writing for years, so it was a true pleasure to have her on the Leading Learning Podcast. Celisa and Ruth originally spoke in May 2021, as part of a series we did on learning science for learning businesses. Their conversation starts with Ruth sharing about her background in science and how that shaped her approach to adult learning.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:01:57] As an undergraduate and master’s, I was in the sciences—chemistry and biology—so science has always been a particular interest of mine. As I migrated into the learning domain, the role I gradually adopted was that of a translator. What I do is review research articles, research presentations, usually from an academic—professors and researchers—and then I translate those through books and through workshops into practical guidelines, particularly applicable for adult learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:33] That has been a big focus of you taking that research around learning and then making sure that it’s translated and available to practitioners to apply. How do you explain or describe the value of evidence-based practice?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:02:51] In workforce learning, we’re investing a lot of money in learning events. The largest part typically involves the staff time that they devote to learning events, and everybody’s very busy. Whatever limited time you have to deliver training events, you want to maximize the value of that training. And I think one of the best guidelines then is to draw on instructional methods that have actually been empirically researched and proven. That, I think, is the main value—to get a return on investment.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:37] That return on investment really speaks to the organizational value, that they’re spending these dollars, they’re making staff available, they’re allowing the learners this time to learn. Do you also see, or how would you describe the value for the learners themselves in being able to engage in something that is developed according to evidence-based practices?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:04:00] I agree. Learners can get a lot more value from a well-designed and empirically based set of instructional methods. They may or may not appreciate it at the time, but often, in traditional types of training, we have lots of long lectures, and the learners are very passive. I think learners will get much more engaged by using the appropriate instructional methods.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:27] Do you see more practitioners making sure that their decisions and their designs are backed up by solid research than, say, a decade or even two decades ago?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:04:38] Yes, I go back several decades, so it’s a good question. The answer is yes and no. One of the things that happened in the ‘90s was the emergence of evidence-based medicine, and, as the off-spin of that, practitioners in the allied health sciences—in the training part of it and in medical schools—began to attend a lot more to evidence-based learning. I think that gave us a boost, at least in that professional arena. However, at the same time, in many cases, training organizations have high turnover. And, in many cases, they have limited numbers of professional guidance. By professional, I mean people who have master’s or doctorate degrees or extensive experience in instructional design and instructional psychology. In some ways we’ve moved forward, but we still, I think, have large gaps and probably an ongoing challenge with promoting and disseminating the concepts of evidence-based learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:44] How do you personally keep up with new research and developments in learning science and then the implications of that learning science and those new developments on learning design?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:05:55] This is one of the things that I really enjoy doing. I have a list of about 10 to 12 journals. These are mostly academic journals that publish fundamental research. I check through these journals every month, look at their table of contents, and I have maybe 20 themes that I particularly monitor—for example, the best use of graphics or evidence-based techniques for engagement. So I file those, and then, when I get ready to prepare a chapter or a book, I can draw on those. I will say this takes quite a bit of time, and I think most practitioners don’t have time to look up and read original academic research. I’m hoping to fill a gap there by doing that reading for learners and summarizing that information.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:51] It is a great service. I know, from having spent time with some of your writing, just how useful it is to have you pull together from these various sources the evidence and then spell out the implications of that. Maybe you are already getting at this by saying that a lot of folks don’t necessarily have the time to do what you’re doing in terms of keeping tabs on these different journals and checking in monthly and reading and figuring out the implications of that—that can be hard—but do you have advice for learning businesses that are looking to stay on top of learning science and learning-related research? Any tips for how to do that effectively and efficiently?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:07:33] There are some organizations like yours that their business is about making these kinds of translations. Some of the professional societies, like ISPI [the International Society for Performance Improvement] and also one I’m involved in recently, Learning Development Accelerator, have publications, Web sites, conferences (online and in-person) that try to translate this research into practical guidelines and illustrations for practitioners. I would advise people to take a look at books and online conferences, Web sites, discussion forums on LinkedIn that are grounded with evidence-based practice.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:15] I’m most familiar with the book that you co-authored with Richard Mayer, E-learning and the Science of Instruction. As that title suggests, it really focuses on the mode of e-learning. How different is it to design effective learning for different modes? What are the salient differences when designing for e-learning versus classroom instruction, for example?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:08:40] That’s a great question about how best to exploit the features, or what we call affordances, of different media. The good news is there is a common body of research that, whether you’re in the classroom or whether you are designing for e-learning, you want to apply those guidelines. But, as far as differences, one of the main things in e-learning is the difference in learner control. If you are in asynchronous e-learning, you have the opportunity to go at your own pace, to go back and review something else compared to, in the classroom, typically, you’re going along at the instructor’s pace, not necessarily your own. That’s a major thing to keep in mind with e-learning: the learner control aspect.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:09:34] Also, in technology, you have an opportunity. Perhaps it’s a little easier to do things like simulations. One of the latest things now is immersive virtual reality and those kinds of things. So I think you have some opportunities in e-learning. But the classroom also has great opportunities as far as social presence. You have individual people there, and you can get them engaged both with one another and also with yourself. I think all media have strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps sometimes the best solution is a blended solution, where you combine some asynchronous e-learning with synchronous classroom-led training.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:20] To pick up on what you were just saying there, that all these media have different strengths and weaknesses, I’m going to ask a direct question. I’m pretty sure I know the answer too. Is there a gold standard in terms of mode? If you have the choice, always go with X, whether that’s classroom or e-learning or some other mode.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:10:43] It’s interesting, having tracked this. Some professional organizations have published for probably 20 or 30 years, more like 20, the proportion of use of e-learning versus classroom. I had some colleagues way back who said, “Oh, e-learning is going to overshadow everything, and classroom instruction is going to go away.” Well, that has not turned out to be the case. Some of the more recent data I’ve seen shows, yes, e-learning has steadily grown in terms of the proportion of its use, but there are certainly also examples of classroom training. So what we try to do is blend the best of all worlds and involve classroom as well as e-learning. By the way, when we say classroom, it doesn’t always have to be the physical classroom; we have technology now for the virtual classrooms too.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:39] Right. It’s an excellent point that these modes begin to blur as well as potentially the intentional blending. But it is interesting as technology makes more possible—and we’ve certainly seen that over the last year or so as more people have been forced or had the opportunity to engage in doing more online.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:05] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:39] I would love to dig into some of the research-based principles that you promote. Would you tell us about the coherence principle? And then, if you have them, I’d love to hear any suggestions for how to avoid the pitfall of adding extra material.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:12:57] Coherence is a really important guideline, well researched. Basically, a lot of times, the information, the skills, the knowledge that we are charged with is not the most stimulating or exciting, and yet we’re all used to being immersed in high-intensity media, games, simulations of different kinds, and so it’s tempting to try to spice up or elaborate on your content. A couple of often misused techniques might be graphics. Often a simpler graphic is better, easier to produce, and also more effective instructionally compared to a high-end graphical interface. Another one is stories. Stories are wonderful because they’re very memorable. On the other hand, if they are not directly related to your learning outcomes, they can become distractions and actually disrupt learning. Another challenge can be with your subject matter experts, just because they know so much. Often, they want to provide everything there is to know about a certain topic, and I think one role we could play as instructional professionals is to narrow down “what do we really need to know?” versus “nice to know.”

Celisa Steele: [00:14:13] You mentioned the subject matter experts, that they can have that tendency to share everything that they know, and so then the work as the instructional designer is to help focus that and figure out what is relevant. Do you have any suggestions for how to work with subject matter experts to really whittle away the nonessential and get to the core content?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:14:44] It’s always a challenge, and it probably hasn’t changed that much, but you can have a radar out. For example, a lot of times they love war stories. War stories can be great, but if you have hammered out a mutual understanding of “Here’s the learning objective; here’s what we want to achieve,” then you can say, “Okay, is this story really relevant to that, or is it a tangent type of thing?” Also, you can have groups of people who review the material, and typically, you have a certain amount of time, and you yourself, as an editor, can go through and cut out extraneous materials, given the challenges of time, and given that most learners are going to want to accomplish what they need to accomplish in the most efficient way possible.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:29] I’d love to hear you talk about the redundancy principle. I feel like we hear often that repetition is the mother of all learning, and redundancy could be seen as a kind of repetition. So what’s the danger in redundancy?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:15:48] Let me begin by being very specific about what the research has shown and what we mean when we say the redundancy principle. That principle actually refers to a situation where you have a screen or a slide that has a graphic of moderate to high complexity. And then you need to explain that graphic—you could use text on the slide or on the screen. You can have audio narration of that text. And redundancy, which is to be avoided, is a situation. You’ve probably all experienced it. I’ve seen it on TV, where there’s a whole lot of text, and then the audio or the narrator narrates exactly those sentences—that’s what’s known as redundancy. I think that’s a little different from redundancy in which you’re trying to review and work in earlier threads into later portions of your course.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:16:46] So this is specifically redundancy in terms of the modes of audio, text, and visual. And the reason for it is, if you have a graphic of moderate or high complexity that’s going into the visual center of your brain, and then you also are having on-screen text that’s also competing with that limited visual resource, you can also be out of sync. I know, when people are reading things on a screen to me, I can read it myself a lot faster. And yet, often, as instructors, we feel, “Oh, I’ve got to say something, so I have to read this to people.” It actually overloads the visual center of the brain, and it’s a disruption, in that, it can be out of sync with what the person’s natural reading rate is. So that’s a more specific guideline about the redundancy principle.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:38] I think that’s very helpful. Part of what you’re talking about there is, if we have redundant content, at the same time this audio and the visual happening, it’s a greater cognitive load, a higher cognitive load.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:17:55] Exactly.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:56] I feel like chunking—which I think fits with your segmenting principle here—gets a lot of lip service, but I’m also not sure that people really understand how to chunk. I would be interested to hear what advice you have for how to effectively segment learning.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:18:16] It’s a really good question. As we talked earlier, the huge advantage to asynchronous e-learning is, if you keep each of your content points or slides or your topics relatively brief, then learners can control their own pace. In those situations, learners themselves can segment what you have provided. I think it’s much more demanding and difficult in something that is more instructor-paced, such as a video, a classroom, or [a] virtual classroom environment. One thing to keep in mind is your target audience. If you have relatively experienced learners—by that I mean experienced in the content and the domain that you’re talking about—then this whole chunking principle is not quite so crucial because they themselves can manage greater amounts of instructional content. But particularly, when you have novice learners, you want to employ a variety of techniques.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:19:20] For example, using a lot of white space. Even on a page or on a screen, you don’t need to write sentences; maybe you can just put one or two words there and use your narration to elaborate on it. Your graphics—you could maybe do a build. If it’s a complex graphic, you’ll build it up gradually, either on the screen or on the slide. Those are the main things. In general, it’s really hard to know is this exactly segmented correctly? And it probably isn’t for each individual. But I always would recommend err on the side of having shorter amounts of content or slides or screens in a topic. I myself, even in my pleasure reading, I’m more and more drawn to books that have short chapters. I just find it a whole lot easier and more enjoyable to read and review it. I think in learning, when you have relatively short little topics, you feel a sense of achievement, and you don’t feel so overwhelmed by long, lengthy lessons.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:19] Outlining and segmenting—are those related concepts getting clear on the content you’re covering? And, if you organize it, is that going to help you as you segment it, or is it something different than that outlining process, in your mind?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:20:34] Outlining is one very powerful tool, and it’s a good place to start because it’s a relatively straightforward technique. You can do it mostly with text and then begin to get clear: “First, we have our learning objective. Now here’s our content. Now let’s outline how we’re going to break this down into modules and then modules into lessons.” It’s a useful tool. Another useful tool can be storyboarding. So maybe the outline first, and then you start to sketch out some storyboards where you’re going to show your graphic and your content—high level first, and then breaking out more detail.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:12] One of the things I really appreciate about E-learning and the Science of Instruction is that you can look at the table of contents, and it serves as a review session. You’re looking back at the topics and then the subtopics, and it’s bringing it all back to mind. So I really appreciate that.

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:21:27] And that was actually an evidence-based technique. So they’ve shown, if you start a lesson or a chapter quickly, with a quick little outline or “Here are some major topics,” it serves as an advance organizer, and it helps with the reading or the learning process.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:44] We’ve touched on several different aspects of effective learning, but, if I asked you to pick just one, what aspect of effective learning do you wish was more broadly understood and supported by those designing and providing learning to adults?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:22:03] One of the major understandings that help us would be to appreciate the limits and the strengths of working memory. We have the two memories: the working memory, which is very limited in its capacity but very powerful in its processing ability, and we have the long-term memory, which is where we store a lot of the knowledge and skills that we’ve acquired. By leveraging these two memories effectively, that will lead us through a lot of the instructional techniques that we have discussed. For example, we talked about managing cognitive load through the coherence principle. We talked also about promoting engagement. With engagement, you’re actually forcing the working memory to process that information in a job-relevant way and then getting the feedback on it so that you can then correct or improve your responses or say, “Hey, that’s okay; I really got that information.” So I think understanding the fundamentals of the mental processes involved in learning and how we accommodate those would be a useful design understanding.

Research Evolves

Celisa Steele: [00:23:16] Is there anything else that comes to mind that you haven’t had a chance to say, that you’d like to share?

Ruth Colvin Clark: [00:23:21] Thank you. I think that you’re taking the time here to promote evidence-based practice. The more we can all do that and engage in that, the better off we, as a profession, will be, and we will continue to grow. The other thing I will say, in general, research evolves. Some of the things you and I talked about today—for example, the redundancy principle or the coherence principle—those are going to change as we get additional research. We’ve all been through a very interesting year with the COVID virus, and seeing how research has changed—sometimes quite rapidly over time—recommendations and guidelines for people. And that’s true in our field as well. So I think it’s an evolving area, and hopefully we’ll continue to have people like yourselves who will be disseminating that information for practitioners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:22] Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark is an instructional psychologist and author of many articles and books about evidence-based approaches to learning, including Evidence-Based Training Methods and E-learning and the Science of Instruction.

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