Leading Learning

In Leading Learning Podcast episode 440, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele share the questions and topics probed in Leading Learning’s annual survey on learning businesses—questions and topics that can provide a solid basis for strategy conversations in your learning business.

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.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Whether you’re setting strategy, revisiting an existing strategy, or planning how to deliver on a strategy, the end of the year is a natural time to do the work.

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

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

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:24] It’s nearing the end of the calendar year, and, whether the calendar year is also your fiscal year or not, now is a great time to be thinking about strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] Dan Pink has a very interesting book called When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:40] He has a lot of interesting books.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:41] He does, and I was lucky enough to get to talk with Dan Pink about several of his books for the Leading Learning Podcast. But the reason I brought him up now is because, in When, he writes about how there’s natural momentum for certain activities at certain times. And thinking about the year ahead at the end of the current year feels natural. It’s common. And so we want to use this episode, one of our last of this year, to talk about strategy and planning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:11] This is indeed that time of year when so many organizations, at least [those] that we deal with, really are starting to try to think strategically about the coming year and to formulate a plan around that strategy. We’ll talk a little bit about the difference between strategy and planning here in a minute. But part of what you need to develop a strategy is good information to go on, good data to go on, and there are a lot of places to get that. But one of those places is…

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] …hopefully Leading Learning. We have been running an annual trends and issues survey among learning businesses for…I guess I should have counted it up before we sat down to record.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:47] It’s been a while.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:48] Many years at this point. We typically run that survey in the final quarter of the year and then share those results at the end of the year and in the beginning of the new year so that you do have some of that benchmarking data, some awareness around what other people are thinking about that are in similar circumstances.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:08] For the past several years, we’ve been asking essentially the same set of questions. We’ve been asking about a set of areas that we know are important to learning businesses, where they might be focusing some of their efforts (things like microlearning and blended learning, the types of areas that we know organizations are focused on), and asking them, “Are they doing this now? Will they be doing it in the coming year?” And we’ve gotten some great data from that. We’ve gotten some real insight into what organizations are doing. And I think there are 14 different areas that we’ve asked about.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:41] Yes, I think 14 most years. One year we had 15 and backed away from it. But I think that had to do with blockchain, the one that we wound up taking out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:48] We finally decided nobody was doing anything with blockchain.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:51] But what we did find out is that people are now doing a lot in those other 14 areas. What started as more fringe trends—things that people might be thinking about but hadn’t necessarily done a lot with when we first were asking about them—had tipped over into standard practice, into something that most learning businesses were doing. It began to feel less helpful to ask how many people are already doing this or planning to in the coming year once we hit that majority—and often a strong majority were already doing it or planning to in the next 12 months.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:29] Things like microlearning or virtual conferences or using data to make decisions around their learning—these are table stakes now. As we’re saying, most organizations are doing that type of thing. This year we decided to tear it down and build back up, completely revamp the survey, and try to get at what we think is most important right now or what might be most helpful right now with an eye towards “How does this help with potentially coming up with a strategy or informing your strategy for your organization?” We went through a pretty intensive process to try to come up with a concise set of questions because we know how hard it is to get people to respond to surveys. This one is no different.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:12] And thank you to any listener out there who took the time to complete the survey. We are truly grateful that you gave up some of your time in the survey. On average, it takes less than 10 minutes to complete. We’re grateful, though, because we know, again like you’re saying, Jeff, it can be really hard to actually get people to participate. So thank you to those that did.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:31] I would say “contributed” some of your time because you’re giving; you’re giving to the community when you do this. If you work in this learning business world that we talk so much about and that we work in, you’ll recognize there’s not a lot of data out there. You can get higher ed data, or you can get association data, but data that’s specific to the providers of continuing education and professional development who are having to market and sell this and serve learners, specific data around that is practically non-existent other than what we’ve been doing for several years and are now trying to build upon and improve upon. If you want that data to exist, if you want to be able to use it in your planning, to make your case for budget, for all of those sorts of things, the only way to get there is for all of us to contribute to it. As you were saying, Celisa, thank you to those who have. If you have not participated in this type of research in the past, please, please, when it comes around, make a few minutes to do it.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:25] Now we’ll put away our soapbox. Jeff, back to revamping the survey. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the process and the thinking that went into that. We’ve already talked about it at the highest level—that we recognized a need to rebuild it from the ground up because it seemed like the data we were getting back was no longer as valuable as it had been initially.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:47] We did this in close collaboration with one of our new best buddies—good old ChatGPT. This was not simply a “Hey, ChatGPT, write us a survey” sort of thing. We’ve been in a continuous dialog. I have a conversation set up with ChatGPT that I’ve been feeding data and thoughts into for several months now, taking the data we’ve collected from different events, from conversations we’ve had, from things we’ve written—feeding that all into this conversation and continuing to ask questions and probe and have conversations and getting to the point where ChatGPT has a good understanding of this whole learning business world that we work in.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:30] We’ve developed personas for the type of people who are leading learning businesses. It’s very, very well informed at this point. And so the conversation was, “We want to go out and survey around what’s going to be most important for this group, for the learning business in the coming year? Where are people going to be focusing? Where should people potentially be focusing?” and have that conversation. And that led to, I think it was the sixth iteration of the survey that we finally went with after a lot of back and forth and actually arguing with ChatGPT. I prompted ChatGPT to be much more critical of the survey at one point and really tried to poke holes in it, and we ended up with what we now have used for this year’s survey.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:14] Once you get past a few upfront general questions about the kind of organization you represent, then we get to strategic goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:24] One of the first things we wanted to ask about in the survey is what’s your primary strategic goal for the coming year? And, for that matter, what’s your secondary strategic goal for the coming year? This was a place where, because we have done so much work in this world of continuing education, professional development, the broader learning business, we had a pretty good idea of what the choices might be. We did lay out some choices for respondents to select from, and we did also leave it open for people to say, “No, it’s none of those; it’s something else.” But maybe we can talk about what those choices were.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:00] We offered seven defined choices based, like you said, Jeff, on conversations and our observations of learning businesses and what they’re dealing with. Those seven are increasing revenue; enhancing learner engagement; growing enrollments and/or registrations; strengthening alignment with workforce needs; advancing equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility; improving marketing reach and effectiveness; and then, finally, increasing operational efficiency. For us, starting off with these strategic goals puts a frame around all the following questions. In the past, when we had asked about trends and issues, we got pretty quickly to those trends and issues. I think this puts people in a different mindset to start off by asking about strategic goals, and this aligns with our own thinking. Rather than chasing any particular trend or issue, hopefully, whatever you’re doing, even if it relates to a trend, has some connection, some tie to a strategic goal.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:04] Of course, this is a critical element of developing a strategy. You have to know what your aspiration is for whatever time period you’re defining for this. So what is it? What is it you’re really trying to achieve in the coming year? If you’re not clear about that, if everybody who’s involved isn’t clear about that, it’s hard to get clear about what you’re going to do tactically to achieve it. You might end up being all over the map, which we find happens with a lot of organizations.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:31] At an event we hosted last week, the difference between strategy and planning came up a lot. I think a lot of organizations, including learning businesses, can feel mired in the planning. It’s much more about the to-do list and getting things done and checked off rather than understanding the strategic “Why are you doing any of those particular things?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:55] Yes, those should all track back to the choices you’ve made. Strategy is about making a set of choices around who you’re going to serve and your general approach to serving them. You have to have that well defined before you can then start talking concretely about what we’re going to do—X, Y, and Z—according to this time schedule. Those were what we defined as potential primary strategic goals. But, of course, part of the reason that we’re raising all of this in the first place is to prompt you to reflect a little bit. You heard what we asked about as potential strategic goals for your organization, and you may even want to pause right now and think about it. Are you clear on your goals for next year? Of the goals we suggested, do any of those align with what your primary or secondary strategic goals are? Or is it something else? Make sure that you’ve been clear about those choices and the people that need to know about the choices have been made are aware of them.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:52] We also asked about drivers behind the strategic goals. Again, for me, the idea of drivers is that those reflect the broader context in which your business is operating, in which you’re trying to realize those strategic goals. Being aware of that broader context is important because it ties very directly to some of the choices you might make about how you achieve any of those strategic goals or even potentially help to keep you aware of the need to shift any of your strategic goals, based on if any of the drivers might change, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:28] I think of this in terms of one of our favorite theorist writers about strategy, Richard Rumelt. He says that strategy always starts with a diagnosis. You have to have the diagnosis correct. Having an understanding of your drivers is an essential part of that diagnosis because, when you’re making the choices about strategy, you’re trying to respond to that context, to that diagnosis that you’ve made. And so this question is asking people to say what are they seeing? How are they diagnosing their situation and seeing the major strategic drivers for their education business?

Celisa Steele: [00:12:06] We offered seven choices again. (I believe it’s seven. Anyway, we’ll see if my counting was correct.) But this one was a multi-select. For the primary and secondary strategic goal, we were looking for one thing in response to each of those questions. For this question, they could select as many of these as they felt really informed their strategic goals. The options we have include evolving learner demands, a need for stronger competitive positioning in the market, a need to increase financial sustainability and/or profitability, better alignment with mission, a desire to be seen as setting the pace in the field or industry served, compliance with industry standards or regulatory requirements, and then, the last one we named, internal pressures—that could be from management or administration, from a board, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:58] Having heard those—you can pause and repeat if you want to. That’s the beauty of listening to a podcast. Or you can go read the show notes when we’re all done with recording this and reflect on those. Reflect on your own and/or reflect with your team. Do any of those reflect your strategic drivers? How many of those reflect your strategic drivers? Because there’s bound to be some overlap. And there may be some other ones that are specific to your situation. But that’s the key here: objectively understanding your situation, diagnosing it well, and having those strategic drivers inform the choices you’re making about strategy, those goals that you’re going to pursue.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:41] After looking at strategic goals and looking at the drivers behind those strategic goals, then we got to trends and issues. This is the part of the survey that, in some ways, most closely parallels previous iterations of the survey, but even this list of trends and issues we refined and tweaked this year. We asked about eight specific areas. We asked essentially how important these are on a five-point scale from “not important” all the way up to “critical.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:14] These again, for me, are a part of that diagnosis. They’re part of the overall context, understanding your drivers and also those trends and issues that are going to play into your strategic choices. The things we asked about—first one is probably no surprise—advances in artificial intelligence; then workforce and employer needs (for example, job readiness, upskilling, and reskilling); then learner preferences for flexibility, which might include formats, scheduling; then providing more personalized learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:48] And then the last four that we asked about: increasing competition from other learning providers; growth in microcredentials, digital badges, and other forms of alternative credentialing; virtual and/or hybrid events; and then diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in education offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:10] There’s also an open box on this. If there’s something else that you feel is impacting you in terms of trends and issues and that is going to inform your learning business strategy in 2025, you have an opportunity to put that in.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:26] Yet again, this is an opportunity for you to pause the podcast and do some reflecting, whether right now later and whether you want to do it on your own or with your team, if you do it later. But do think about what are the trends and issues that are informing, impacting, and influencing your strategy in 2025. It might be some of these eight that we mentioned. It might be some other things. But again this is all about being aware and being on the same page with your team. And so this is a good exercise of making sure how clear are you in making sure that others would agree with the same answers that you’re giving here?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:11] 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.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:46] Having asked about drivers and about trends and issues, we turn to asking about challenges that learning businesses might be facing. What are the top challenges? We characterize these as specifically in maintaining or growing enrollments and/or registrations for your education offerings in the coming year because we know that is in fact going to be a major focus for most learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:14] We offered seven choices. In the context of the survey, we said pick up to three. As you’re reflecting and thinking about your own top challenges, we would encourage you again to…. If you’re nodding your head and saying yes to every one that we’re going to read off here in a minute, that may be true, but perhaps there’s some value in prioritizing and thinking through which of these challenges are posing the largest problem or challenge for your learning business. You might think about it as up to three. Which three are giving you the most trouble? We asked about limited marketing resources, increased competition, pricing challenges, lack of learner engagement, difficulty proving return on investment to learners or to the other stakeholders like employers, content that’s become outdated or declined in relevance, and then insufficient internal resources—that could be staff (maybe you don’t have the right human resources) or that could also be budget (maybe you don’t have the dollars to do what you want).

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:18] Once again, an opportunity to reflect here. How many of these challenges align with what you’re facing and what would really drive your strategic choices? Again, as you were saying, Celisa, we asked folks to prioritize these, to only pick three because that’s part of being able to make those strategic choices. You have to decide what is most important, at least for some period of time, to focus in on what challenges are you going to try to rise to in the coming year? And there might be others. We do provide that other possibility here as well, depending on your specific circumstances.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:54] After challenges, we turn to barriers. We characterize the barriers as being about innovation in your education offerings. Again, we ask you to prioritize. We asked survey respondents to prioritize, to think about, “What are your top barriers?” Out of the list, we asked them to pick up to three. This was a shorter list, though. We only offered five preset choices and then again an open-ended opportunity there. But the five start with internal resistance to change and then difficulty finding skilled staff or resources.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:32] And then we asked about concerns about return on investment, focus on short-term goals over long-term planning, and then insufficient technology infrastructure. As you said, this is a somewhat shorter list for folks to choose from, Celisa. It reflects our experience with organizations. In the first place, we hear people talk a lot about how they’re not able to innovate within their learning business; that is a challenge for them, which is why we wanted to ask about this in the first place. But then these are some of the most common barriers we feel like we hear from folks. Again you can reflect. Are these the types of barriers you’re facing, or is there something else that’s holding back innovation in your organization, your learning business?

Celisa Steele: [00:20:17] I’ll note that one of those options focuses on short-term goals over long-term planning. We opened with talking about the balance between strategy and planning and the long term versus short term. We hear that in this answer choice. We’ve seen a lot of organizations trying to strike that proper balance between long term and short term, between strategic and more tactical decisions and actions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:43] Right. Some challenges and barriers there. We thought it’d be good to cap off those two questions with a question about confidence. We ask, “Given your learning business’s current resources”—and we focus specifically on resources; we know there may be other factors—“how confident are you in achieving your top strategic goals for 2025?” We’ve asked people to say their goals, think about the drivers for those goals and the trends and issues and some of the barriers and challenges they’re facing, and so now, at this point, knowing what they have to work with—their team, their technology, their resources—how confident are they? And this was a five-point scale, so we said, “not at all confident,” “not so confident,” “somewhat confident,” “very confident,” and “extremely confident.”

Celisa Steele: [00:21:40] This is interesting to think about in the context of assessments that take place in learning, where there is an approach to assessment that asks a learner, particularly in the context of multiple choice, to not just select a multiple-choice answer but then to say how confident they are that that answer is right. That can be a useful tool, as a learner to then recognize, “Okay, I was really confident about that one, but I got it wrong,” so it can point you to what you need to go and assess. Obviously, in this case, there is no exactly right or wrong answer, but I think this idea of tapping into confidence is valuable because you can have your plans, you can have your strategy, but there’s a certain amount of mindset that goes along with being able to make that achievement, which ties to confidence.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:24] I think too, if you recognize that you’re not particularly confident, that then leads to a question about, “Okay, well, why am I not so confident? What might we be able to do that would change how confident I am in our ability to achieve this?,” which might get to staff or budget, or it might be then a lever you can use with making the case for additional allocation from the budget, potentially. But it’s again this awareness and being clear on the drivers and on your own confidence level around achieving what you’re setting out to achieve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:00] This doesn’t happen enough in strategy formulation sessions or in planning sessions that follow on from strategy, asking the people involved, “How confident are we really about this?” Just pausing and saying, “Do we have this right—both the overall strategy and then the tactics that we’re going to use to pursue the strategy?” And, as you said, if you’re not at all confident, you might want to ask why. But I think the reverse is also true. If you’re very confident, you need to ask why because you may want to do some worst-case-scenario planning. What could go wrong here that we’re not giving enough weight to right now? That’s just one small question in this survey, and we focus specifically on resources. There are other things, like the environment around you, your context that you’re operating in; they could be big factors. Spend some time talking about your confidence overall, though, when you’re doing this strategy work.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:53] And then we asked about areas of investment. This aligns with our philosophy in the way we ask a lot of questions. We do a lot of surveying as part of our consulting work. But one thing we always like to ask about is actions and behaviors more than preferences or plans. And so, in the survey so far, we’ve been talking about trends and issues, and here this is around investment. What areas are you planning to most actively invest in in the coming year? It’s putting your dollars where your mouth is. What are you actually serious about? What are you going to spend some of that limited budget on?

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:33] Of course we can always see how things actually go during the year—if we’re seeing that—and then how questions are answered the following year if we ask this question again. We’ve seen that with past versions of the survey. But what we ask here…I’ll take the first few, and you can take the second few, Celisa, because we give a number of choices here, out of the investment areas. We start with increasing learner engagement; then measuring learning outcomes more effectively; developing employer-aligned offerings; implementing artificial intelligence; and expanding microcredentials, digital badges, and/or other alternative credentials.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:13] So that was five. We have another five that we listed there: increasing efforts to sell to corporate and/or organizational purchasers, increasing efforts to partner with other organizations, enhancing marketing and outreach efforts, improving capabilities and data analytics, and then the last option we listed was providing personalized learning experiences. Again, we wanted people to think in terms of priorities, so we asked them to select up to three, and there was again an open-ended box there. I think this is a really good question to talk about with your team. What areas are you investing in in the year ahead? See how that matches up with your strategic goals. This is a good place to look for alignment. If you have a clear strategic goal, are the areas where you’re investing supporting that strategic goal and making sure that those really do match up?

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:10] Yes, probably all of these areas could align with a variety of strategic goals. But, for example, if your primary goal is to increase revenue, and then you say that you’re going to invest in increasing learner engagement, you want to make sure you understand the bright line between learner engagement and revenue. What’s your operating theory as to why increasing learner engagement is therefore going to drive that bigger goal of revenue, and how are you going to measure that? You’ll be able to measure revenue growth, but then how are you going to measure that increasing learner engagement supported that revenue growth? You need to get down to that level of detail to get your plans and your strategy in alignment.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:53] Related to measuring, we asked about evaluating success and how learning businesses are evaluating the success of what they have in their portfolio. We asked about a number of different ways that are pretty common among learning businesses and asked if they’re currently using these approaches already, planning to in the year ahead, not planning to in the year ahead,” and then we gave a “not sure,” just in case a respondent wasn’t clear there. But I’ll do the first few. We asked about self-reported learner satisfaction. We also asked about self-reported learner application of knowledge or skills. In both those cases, these can be those post-course evaluations, but you’re asking the learner, “How much did you like the course?” in terms of that learner satisfaction.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:41] For the one around application of knowledge or skills, it might be, “Have you applied something that you learned in the course?” And that might be something you ask a week later or a month later. Or you ask what they’ve done that applied what they’ve learned. The third option that we asked about was enrollment numbers: “How many people are enrolling in whatever that option is in your portfolio?” Then completion rates. Out of those people enrolled, how many of them are actually finishing that course? And then revenue generation and/or profit margins—so not just how many people enrolled, but then what does that mean in terms of revenue? Or, even better yet, what does that mean in terms of profit once you deduct any of the expenses related to providing that opportunity to learn?

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:26] Right, that business side of learning business. And then some additional measures/metrics. We asked about post-learning assessment of knowledge or skills. Once the course, the event, whatever is done, are you following up with that post-learning assessment? Post-learning assessment of application of knowledge or skills. Engagement metrics—things like time spent in the activity or interactions in the activity. And then finally post-learning career impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:00] Now, you might have a variety of different ways that you’re measuring some of those last ones that you just ran through, Jeff, but the idea is that we know that being able to show career impact is very valuable. If you can do that and collect that data and then be able to use that in marketing efforts, that’s probably going to be very valuable for your learning business. And you could do that in different ways. It could be through some sort of survey. It could be through some sort of interaction with a manager once the learner’s back at work, depending on what your level of connection is in those environments.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:37] That was some measurement related to learning, related to business, how you’re evaluating the success of your education offerings. We also wanted to ask a little bit about business model issues, indicating your status with respect to certain product and pricing approaches. Many things we could have asked about here. We homed in on some that we feel are common, or we see some trending in their direction. This included things like discounts for bulk enrollments or registration. For example, if you’re selling to corporate buyers, doing that business-to-business-type approach, are you providing those discounts? Another was subscription access to full or part of your education catalog. Are you providing a subscription model for doing that? Again, something we’ve been hearing a lot about, and we wanted to see how well that’s playing out out there. The third one was bundling products together for a discounted total cost. Do you have a bundling approach to give people more value if they buy more from you?

Celisa Steele: [00:30:45] We also asked about purchasing a set number of enrollments or registrations and then maybe getting the next free. So, you enroll in nine online courses; you’re going to get that 10th one free. And then we also asked about tiered pricing levels. Maybe you have essentially the same product, but there’s a premium, standard, and basic level. At the premium level, you get some additional perks that you don’t get if you’re just buying at the basic level as a learner. All of these are about, as you said, Jeff, the business models behind this, and it’s often around trying to grow the amount of dollars that any particular learner or any other stakeholder, on behalf of learners, is spending with your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:31] You may have noticed that AI didn’t come up in that question, around putting AI into your products, or it hadn’t popped up a lot in these questions, and that’s because we asked specifically about AI in some of the questioning that we do here. Specifically, we wanted to know where organizations are, where learning businesses are in implementing artificial intelligence, and then we have a follow-on question from that. But, in terms of implementing, we basically gave a range from “not currently discussing AI” up to “actively using AI across most or all offerings,” just to give us a sense because obviously AI has been such a huge thing over the course of the past couple of years, and it does have amazing potential in the learning business. In fact, we have a keynote speaker at our Learning Business Summit for 2025 who’s going to talk about artificial intelligence as part of what he covers in his comments. So we wanted to see where are we with it?

Celisa Steele: [00:32:30] That’s a walkthrough of the survey, and we’re going to be sharing some results from the survey in another podcast episode here in a few weeks. Even before we got to sharing any results—and we do think that’s valuable; we think that can provide some benchmarking data and insight for you and your learning business. But we also believe that the kinds of questions and topics that we probe on in the survey can serve as an aid in your own thinking about strategy, in your own thinking about areas of focus, in your own thinking about areas where you’re going to invest in in the year ahead.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:09] Hopefully, everything we’ve raised here are good points for reflection, good areas to prompt some questioning, whether that’s sitting down with a piece of paper or your favorite digital note-taking tool yourself or whether it is a conversation with your team. Leverage these questions. Of course, we also hope that you’ve participated in the survey or will do that when the opportunity comes around again. But having this as thought material we felt would be extremely valuable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:47] Whether you’re setting strategy, revisiting an existing strategy, or planning how to deliver on a strategy, the end of the year is a natural time to do the work.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post No Time Like Now for Strategy appeared first on Leading Learning.

COVID changed how we live and work in many ways. One example is the increased need for remote communication and for managing and leading hybrid teams.

Wayne Turmel is part of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, and he and Kevin co-wrote The Long-Distance Leader, originally published in 2018, with a revised edition out in 2024. Wayne’s work focuses on remote and virtual communication in the evolving workplace.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 439, Wayne and Leading Learning Podcast co-host Jeff Cobb talk about what leadership is; how leadership does and doesn’t change in the context of remote, virtual, and hybrid work; the importance of trust and of choosing the appropriate communication tools for the situation; and what mules and hybrid work have in common.

Whether you lead a team, are part of a team, or both, you’ll benefit from the advice and insight Wayne offers around effective communication.

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.

Wayne Turmel: [00:00:00] Leaders need to seek feedback.

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

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

Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] COVID has required many changes in the ways we live and work. One example is the increased need for remote communication and for managing and leading hybrid teams. Wayne Turmel is part of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, and he and Kevin have co-authored three books, including The Long-Distance Leader, originally published in 2018, with a revised edition out in 2024. Wayne’s work focuses on remote and virtual communication in the evolving workplace. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 439, Wayne and Jeff talk about what leadership is; how leadership does and doesn’t change in the context of remote, virtual, and hybrid work; the importance of trust and of choosing the appropriate communication tools for the situation; what mules and hybrid work have in common; and the fact that Wayne’s been a contestant on Jeopardy! Whether you lead a team or are part of a team or both, you’ll benefit from the advice and insight Wayne offers around effective communication. Jeff and Wayne spoke in September 2024.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:33] When you work with people, what are you doing with them?

Wayne Turmel: [00:01:36] What we’re doing is helping them take a look at their leadership as well as their leadership development. How are they adjusting to the new hybrid and remote workplace? Where are the skill gaps that need to be addressed? And we then do training, consulting, all that good stuff. But it really starts with helping people understand what do they need their leaders to do? Before the COVID diaspora and everybody got sent home, there was a lot of concern about remote work, and now there’s a lot of concern about hybrid work or trying to figure out the right balance of remote and hybrid. We can help demystify some of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:30] A key reason that we’re here talking today—we have many, many good bases for conversation—but you are releasing a new edition, the second edition of The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, and so we want to dig into some of what that book can provide to leaders and aspiring leaders. I always like to start out—we’re sticklers for language here at Leading Learning—so we want to make sure we get our terms defined well. You’ve already brought up three that I think we need to be clear about. The most foundational one is simply “leadership” because everybody talks about leadership and being a leader and what it means to be a leader. When you’re talking about leadership, how do you define that? How do you define leadership?

Wayne Turmel: [00:03:14] Leadership, by definition, is getting things done through and with other people. We need to, whatever it is, whether it’s lead a committee, lead a Boy Scout troop, get your company’s project completed, leaders are those who inspire, coach, and—“exploit” is the wrong word; it’s so loaded—but get the best from people to help achieve those results. And that hasn’t radically changed. Genghis Khan ruled half the world and never held a Webex meeting.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:55] Good point.

Wayne Turmel: [00:03:56] Julius Caesar did great out in the field. It’s when he went back to the office that things kind of went pear-shaped. Both the highest praise and the biggest criticism that we got when Long-Distance Leader came out was “Most of this is just a really good leadership book.” Well, yes, thank you. And they were going, “But it’s not all about remote.” No, it’s not. But, if you’re not doing the basic leadership things, being a whiz on Zoom or Microsoft Teams is not going to be the flex you think it is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:31] Right, and it’s a good point because Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar were remote leaders in many ways. They were obviously leading a lot of people who never saw them, probably. Now, the other terms that relate to that, that I want to make sure we’re clear about from the beginning, you’ve used the term “remote” a number of times already, “hybrid” and maybe “virtual” too. I haven’t heard “virtual” come up as much. But when you think about those three things—hybrid, remote, virtual—how are those the same or different in your context?

Wayne Turmel: [00:04:58] Remote is one person is someplace, and somebody else is someplace else. There’s distance between you. That’s remote. Virtual is a little more ambiguous. It tends to mean your teams; maybe don’t have direct reporting mechanisms. A project team, for example, is a virtual team. There might be people from all over the place from different departments. Maybe they have a real boss somewhere who is not the project leader. But you still need to form those relationships, and you need to get the work done, and you need to get stuff done, mostly through influence as opposed to coercion and direct reportorial power. And hybrid—you may be careful about asking me this question because I’m a little bit like a dog with a sock. I think that hybrid, right now, means some of us are in the office; some of us aren’t. Maybe we need to be in the office three days a week. Most of what people are calling hybrid work isn’t really hybrid. It’s a hostage negotiation. They said, “Well, COVID’s over, and we want to get people back to the office.” And there was this negotiation process. “How much can we make them come back to the office before they quit?” “How much can I whine about going into the office before I get fired?” And they agreed, compromised. Nobody’s 100-percent happy with the arrangement, but it works. And now let’s get back to work.

Wayne Turmel: [00:06:46] A real hybrid is not just a mushing of things together or a negotiated settlement—not that there’s anything wrong with negotiated settlements. But, if you really want to be strategic about hybrid work, hybrid is when you take two distinct things and create a third distinct entity. The classic example is a mule. Yes, it’s a horse, and it’s a donkey. But, if you’ve ever met mules, you realize that they are their own unique thing. Mules are mules. They are not horses, and they are not donkeys. When you’re trying to put together a strategic plan for a team, you want to be intentional about “What is it that we’re trying to achieve?” You can be office-first. You can be remote-first. But a real hybrid team is not just what work gets done where, which is how we think about it—well, they’re at home or in the office. A true hybrid team also takes into account when the work happens, so the balance of synchronous and asynchronous work not only can be very different, but it is very defined and carefully thought out as opposed to smushed. I warned you.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:18] The image of you being a dog with a sock, I like that in my mind. And hybrid as a mule, I like that as well. Obviously, remote, hybrid, virtual have all existed for a while, certainly since well before this thing called the global pandemic hit us, but that escalated a lot of these issues or the issues that come with these different forms of working. What, in your mind, has changed fundamentally in the wake of the pandemic, if anything? Maybe nothing has changed. I don’t know. And what’s fundamentally the same?

Wayne Turmel: [00:08:52] What has not changed is human beings. They are still wonderful and full of potential and dumb and petty and all the stuff that human beings are. I started looking at remote and virtual work almost 20 years ago, and The Long-Distance Leader—the first version came out in 2018, so it was almost exactly two years before the pandemic. So we’ve been standing on this corner for a while. One of the reasons for the new edition is “What’s changed?” There are two buckets of things that have changed. The first is clearly the technology is different. Before the pandemic, Zoom was a free product that had zero corporate penetration, and then suddenly it went from “What’s Zoom?” to a verb to a syndrome in 18 months. A lot of people had been thinking, “Maybe we should look into remote. We’ve got to think about that one of these days.” Whatever. And then we all got pushed across the Rubicon.

Wayne Turmel: [00:10:07] A third of the workforce found themselves not going into the office and still needing to get work done. The technology, Microsoft Teams, for example, was a gleam in somebody’s eye, but that’s about it. It was still Skype for business. Slack was on the ascendance, but it hadn’t achieved what it became. So the tools changed, and the book tries not to dwell on specific tools. We don’t care if you use Outlook or Gmail, but you’ve got to think about your e-mail in a certain way, if that makes sense. But the second part is more important, which is, in the year of our Lord 2024, what does remote work look like? What we found is there is a much larger percentage of people than before the pandemic who work primarily remote.

Wayne Turmel: [00:11:07] They need to be addressed, supported, developed, managed. There’s more of this hybrid work that started as “O, dear Lord, let us return to normal. Let us pretend the last two years didn’t happen and get back to our lives.” You can’t really do that because the genie’s out of the bottle. You walk into any office, even one that has supposedly returned to normal, and anywhere from a third to half of the desks are empty. Not that there aren’t people who belong to those desks, but So-and-So is traveling; So-and-So has a sick kid; today’s their day to work from home. Whatever it is. At its core, if you have one team member who isn’t there when the work’s getting done, you have a remote team. The same dynamics that you need to take into account—I’m happy to go down that rabbit hole—need to be in account even when you’re in the office; otherwise, you can unintentionally create havoc.

Wayne Turmel: [00:12:18] Proximity bias is a very natural way that our brain copes with problems. But, on a hybrid team, for example, it can result in the people who aren’t in the office feeling excluded. It can result in perception—and it may just be perception, but that doesn’t mean it’s not corrosive—the perception that the manager favors the people in the office. Part of developing leaders in this new environment is to say, “Yes, you’ve got to do all the leadership stuff.” The Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar stuff, he’s still got to do that. And you need to be aware of how the dynamics of your workplace are going to impact that and adjust accordingly.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:07] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:43] One of the key principles in the book—you have a number of principles that you cover—but it’s this whole idea of leadership first, location second. I assume that’s a principle because a lot of organizations don’t do that. They screw up that order. You’ve mentioned some of what can happen when you do that. What trips organizations up there?

Wayne Turmel: [00:14:01] Part of it is they become focused on the fact that people aren’t there. Some of them go to extremes. We get keyboard monitoring. We get, “You must be logged on at a certain time, and you must be logged off at a certain time.” The attempt to micromanage sometimes goes up. Here’s the thing: Bad leaders are going to be bad leaders, and good leaders are probably going to find a way to make it work, regardless of the circumstances. But technology does play a part in this, and it does change how we think. We might be the most diligent coaches in the world, but giving feedback is different when you have to go to your keyboard and type something out to somebody or make sure they’re there so that you can talk to them before you walk up to their desk and start talking to them. A really terrible example of this…well, it’s a great example; it’s a terrible story. My wife was once fired by instant messenger. See that face that you made and that little noise? I would expect that 99 percent of people listening to this would go, “Yeah, that’s probably not right.”

Wayne Turmel: [00:15:20] Now think about it from this point of view of a terrible manager: “I don’t want to deal with this person. I’m already done with them. I want them fired. I don’t have to listen to them cry and the drama and everything.” Because, at the end of that interaction, the goal was achieved. She was fired. She was no longer working for them. We can reasonably assume that this guy is a terrible human being. But now let’s take that to a slightly more understandable version of the same thing. “I need to give Jeff some feedback, but it’s already 4 o’clock on Thursday, and I’m just going to send him an e-mail, and I’ll deal with it tomorrow.” In the great, perfect leadership world, that’s not the right thing to do. But, man, is it easy, and it’s convenient, and it saves time, and it gives me time to get my head together about how I’m going to deal with Jeff. Those are the little things. A huge piece of remote and hybrid leadership is making sure that we’re choosing the right tools for the right communication and that we are helping the team establish the norms that are going to get the work done in the best possible way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:46] I suspect a lot of people…because I know I do wrestle with that and wrestle with getting to a point of confidence around, “Am I using the right tools in the right ways to do this?” I suspect another source of hesitancy and fear, and I can say I’ve felt the tug of these at times with being a remote leader, it’s that concern that, if you are that remote or hybrid organization, you aren’t going to be as productive. You’re not going to be able to achieve the same level and consistency of outcomes that that more traditional organization can achieve. How do effective remote leaders move past that fear and ensure that goals are achieved, that employees are on track, that it is a productive organization?

Wayne Turmel: [00:17:28] The first thing is you need to figure out is what is it that you are measuring. Most organizations for the last 100-odd years have measured activity versus productivity. For example, people say, “Well, you should be logged on at a certain time and logged off at a certain time. We want you at your desk for the eight hours a day that we are paying you,” which sounds reasonable because, in the office, we look, and is somebody at their desk when the day starts? Are they still there when the day ends? But you and I know that somebody sitting at their desk is no guarantee that they’re being productive or that they’re doing good work. What matters is is the report written on time? Is it up to a certain quality? Is it achieving the goals? Are the customers being served? That’s the stuff that you want to be measuring. If we’re talking about a financial analysis needs to be done by our meeting Tuesday, does it really matter if that report is written between 9 and 5, when everybody is all online at the same time? Or, if I decide, “I’m a morning person; I’m just going to bang this out first thing in the morning while my head’s clear,” why does it matter that it was done at a certain time?

Wayne Turmel: [00:18:49] One of the things with hybrid work is people are saying, “I can’t get any work done. If I have to go into the office, people are talking to me, and there are conversations, and there’s cake in the break room because it’s Alice’s birthday, and I can’t get any work done. And then, when I work from home, I’m on Zoom calls all day, and I can’t get any work done.” This gets back to what I was saying before about what work gets done where and when. Maybe the days that you go into the office are not going to be days where you get a lot of stuff checked off your list, but those are the days that you have your coaching conversations with people, that you have to sit around, brainstorm sessions, that you take the time to bring in pizza so people can converse and get to know each other and form relationships. On the days when people are working from home, you leave them alone to get the work done, and, as long as the work is getting done, I don’t really care that you’re online at the same time as everybody else.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:56] Yes, I agree completely. I know a lot of people who struggle to let that go, though, but I think it’s something to constantly be working towards and maintaining as a leader.

Wayne Turmel: [00:20:08] That’s the key. Coming out of COVID, we’ve never done this before. It’s no wonder it’s confusing and frustrating. But, coming out of COVID, senior leadership sat around and said, “Okay, this is what it’s going to look like going forward,” and there were a lot of assumptions that were wrong. There were a lot of assumptions that couldn’t be supported. The one thing Kevin and I are really, really clear about with our clients is that this is an evolving situation. We’re all learning to do this better at the same time. And, for the love of everything that’s holy, think pilot before policy. Before you create a policy that says, “This is how it is,” try it and then see how it went and what needs to be changed. Some people are going to find they want to be in the office more than they expected, and other people are fine not coming in that often, and the work is getting done.

Wayne Turmel: [00:21:12] You said something earlier that I almost responded to, but I have trained myself not, which is this notion that somehow, by virtue of the fact that they’re remote, teams are less productive. There is very little evidence to back that up. As a matter of fact, during COVID, two things went up in the first year of COVID: employee engagement and productivity. Some of that is the circumstances. Why did engagement go up? There’s a crisis. People want to keep their job. They want to make sure their friends and teammates are supported. They want to make sure the company doesn’t go out of business so that they’re employed. When people care, they are more engaged, and they do good work. Some of it was not constructive. One of the reasons productivity didn’t drop is we worked more hours. We started the minute we got out of bed, and the boss was sending e-mails at 10 o’clock at night, and we were answering them. For a lot of people, it took time to develop the discipline and the guardrails around their time so that they weren’t burning themselves out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:39] You brought up engagement, which, of course, is the other area that people worry about. Are people going to be engaged when they’re working remotely? At Leading Learning, all of our work is in the world of learning. When we’re talking about remote learning, online learning, engagement is a huge thing. It’s a thing in face-to-face now too—are people really engaged or not?—for probably some of the same reasons it’s seen as an issue or feared as an issue in remote work.

Wayne Turmel: [00:23:08] There are a couple of things. First of all, I think that the focus on engagement in general is a little disingenuous. They used to say only a third of the workforce is actively engaged, and then there’s the rest, and then there’s the group that is actively disengaged. I’ve been hearing that for 20 years, and part of my brain goes, “That sounds about right.” In any group of humans, you’re going to have the people who really care and work really hard. You’re going to have the people who do exactly what’s expected of them and not a lot more. And you’ve got the sluggards. If you really work hard, you can move that bell curve a little bit to the left. But there’s always going to be that group. Now the problem with remote and hybrid work is that what we are learning is the people who are engaged are really engaged. They’re not going anywhere. They like the work. They’re happy. They maybe have more work-life balance. They’re not spending all that money on a commute. They ain’t going anywhere. Those are your star performers. The problem is that the people who are least engaged are really disengaged. And, not only is it harder to coach them and get them to acceptable minimum standards, they are at far greater risk for turnover.

Wayne Turmel: [00:24:34] If they’re your least engaged people, “Do you really care?” is a fair question. But the problem for people who work remotely is that there are no barriers to changing jobs. If I go into the office every day, and now I want to change jobs, I might have a longer commute; my childcare situation changes. There’s a lot involved in changing jobs. If I work remotely, literally the only thing that changes is my log-in information. We do need to be conscious of engaging everybody and doing the best we can. The problem with the whole conversation about engagement is there’s only so much that the employer can do. Let me give you an example. I meet somebody; I’m wildly in love; I decide I want to spend the rest of my life with this person; I buy a ring; I get down on one knee; I ask them to marry. They are not engaged until they say yes. As employers, we can do everything in our power. God knows we do enough to make it easy to disengage, but all we can do is make it as easy as possible and desirable as possible for them to choose to engage. Because engagement comes from within the individual.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:59] What are the factors on the employer side? You talk about trust in the book. Probably that’s one. But, if we’re trying to position ourselves as the type of leaders and organizations that people are going to want to engage with, what are some tips for that?

Wayne Turmel: [00:26:17] A big piece on that is clarity. Starting big-picture, are people clear on what the work is? Why do we do what we do? You have worked with enough corporations, and I have worked with enough companies in my life to know that some of them are just soulless drone factories. It doesn’t matter that there are foosball tables in the break room. If my job is just to fill out C-17 forms all day long, and that’s all I do—that can be hard for me to engage with. If I’m filling out C-17 forms so that people’s bills get paid on time, I’m probably a little more engaged with that activity because I’m doing it for a reason. Do people understand what the job is, who the company is, what is it we’re trying to achieve on a macro level? Then it’s really important to have expectations around goals, tasks, and “What do we expect of you?”

Wayne Turmel: [00:27:21] Do I expect you to be logged on at 9 o’clock every morning and don’t log off until 5? I can make that expectation. Not sure it makes a lot of sense, especially if I’m in a different time zone than you, but your house, your rules. But, if I say, “I need this report analyzed and reported out, and I need it by Tuesday, and I need it to this level of quality, and I need you to involve the following people in that process,” and I do that, you probably don’t need to micromanage me very much because clearly I am capable of doing the work, and the work is getting done. If I decide to go to the gym or go to Target over my lunch hour, what does it matter? Now that doesn’t mean you don’t, again, have to be intentional and mindful. Are there times of the day when you want people to have synchronous access to each other? That’s not unreasonable. I live in a three-hour time zone different from Kevin. I’m on the West Coast. He’s on the East Coast. It’s not entirely reasonable to think that I should be online the exact same number of hours that he is, starting with the hours that he is.

Wayne Turmel: [00:28:48] Now what happens organically is that I’m an early bird. My day, [6:30], 7 o’clock, I’m functional and banging away, which means on the one hand, “Oh, Wayne’s off work at 2.” Yes, mostly. But I started at [6:30]. But that’s a choice. That’s how my body clock works. One of the reasons I don’t work 9 to 5 is I’m useless at 3 in the afternoon. There is a three-hour slice of every day when anybody on the team can access anybody else synchronously. How much do you need? Realistically, how often do you need to be synchronously attached? And, if once a month we have a team meeting, an all-team meeting, that’s at 7 o’clock my time, okay, I’ve got to be up and take a shower and dress like a big boy in time for that meeting. But that doesn’t happen every day.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:55] There’s a significant chunk of the book that’s about leaders knowing themselves and knowing how to position themselves and engaging in reflection, seeking feedback, setting boundaries that are going to be workable. Can you talk a little bit more about that, the importance of understanding ourselves as leaders?

Wayne Turmel: [00:30:14] I love when people have read the book. That’s so cool. That doesn’t universally happen. There are four models in the book, but the one that ties mostly to what you’re talking about is the Three-O Model, which says, “For work to get done”—and this is true remotely or otherwise, but it’s particularly important in a remote and hybrid environment—“the three Os are outcomes, others, and ourselves.” You always start with the outcomes. What do we want to have happen? How do we best serve our customers? Do we know who does what, with which, and to whom? Do we know where the handoffs are? Do we know that the workflow is happening the way it needs to happen? We started this whole conversation with the idea that, as leaders, we are not supposed to be doing all the work ourselves.

Wayne Turmel: [00:31:11] Our job as leaders is to get those outcomes achieved through other people, and that’s the part of leadership everybody’s cool with. I have to manage. I have to get these people to do that. But where you separate the good leaders from the less good leaders is a level of self-awareness that says, “What about me?” During COVID, we found out that there is a dark side to the whole servant-leadership piece of this. Very often, leaders consider themselves last. If somebody’s got to be on that morning call with Hong Kong and that evening call with Australia, I’ll take the bullet, and I’ll do it. What we found is managers were burning out at a much faster rate than anybody else in the organization simply because—I remember having this conversation as a manager. I was asking somebody to do something, and it was a lot. It was a lot that I was asking them to do, and they were putting up some resistance. I said, “Well, I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do.” And they looked at me and said, “And exactly what is it that you wouldn’t do?” Ouch! But am I taking care of myself? Am I working in a vacuum? Am I getting…?

Wayne Turmel: [00:32:44] I literally just wrote a blog post before I logged on to talk to you about how leaders need to seek feedback. We know how important it is to give our people feedback. But, especially if we’re working remotely, we aren’t getting a lot of feedback. We’re basically left to our own good intentions and the voices in our heads. I don’t know about the voices in your head, Jeff; mine are not kind. I would instantly fire any manager who spoke to an employee the way I speak to me. My self-talk is very often not as constructive as it should be. But this stuff matters. If we’re not putting guardrails on our time, if we’re not intentionally setting models for the behavior that we want them to achieve, if we say, “We want you to respect your time, and your family time is your own, and I don’t expect you to be answering e-mails at 10 o’clock at night,” why am I sending e-mails at 10 o’clock at night? Because no matter what you say, no matter how benign you try to appear, you are still the boss. There is a huge power discrepancy between you and the people on your team, and most human beings are going to default to appeasing the person who has control of their paycheck.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:11] Yes, true enough. In so many ways, what we’re talking about at this point has to do with learning. All of this has to do with learning. We covered this earlier on. This is a process. Nobody comes out of the gate saying, “I know how to lead over Zoom and e-mail,” or “I know how to lead” period. But, to take us to the end of our conversation today, this is a podcast about learning, and we’re called Leading Learning, so it’s both about leading and learning. We always like to ask guests about their approaches to learning. Maybe for you this is how you constructively engage with those voices in your head. What are your lifelong learning habits and practices?

Wayne Turmel: [00:34:50] First of all, to me, the most useful characteristic in another human being is curiosity. It bothers me that I am going to die without learning everything. I’ve come to terms with the fact that is going to happen, but I’m still going to give it my best shot. I am omnivorous around stuff. It got me on Jeopardy! in 1994. It didn’t teach me enough to win, so it only gets you so far. But that’s the big thing—curiosity—for me. Interestingly, I have the attention span of an Irish Setter, and so, when things get too normal and mundane, I get restless, and better that things constantly keep me interested and engaged. That’s the big thing. I think also—and this is where organizations have lost their focus—the ability to take what’s in your head and communicate it to somebody else is so critical. It is maybe the number one thing about being a great leader. You must be able to communicate your vision and take in input that they give you and process that. We’ve kind of lost that.

Wayne Turmel: [00:36:13] A lot of organizations aren’t teaching presentation skills. Why? Because we are doing this, as you and I talked about so many years ago. That’s exactly the problem. For those of you listening on audio, I am pointing to the camera. But, if webcam is our method of communication, we had better optimize that. I’ll give you an example. Kevin rolls his eyes when I start to say this because he’s been listening to me say this for a number of years. My career extends exactly as long as we’ve had e-mail. The first major project I worked with in a big-boy job was rolling out e-mail to my company. So 30-ish years. In that time, for the first time in human history, 70 percent of our work is done in writing—e-mail, text messages, online chat, reports. Seventy percent of our communication is in writing. When was the last time you or anybody on your team got any coaching or education around writing?

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:31] You’ve picked a topic area that is dear to the hearts of myself and my co-founder and probably a pain point for some of our employees because, for us, we come out of a writing background, so it’s something we talk about a lot. But I completely get your point because it is so important to be able to communicate well through writing.

Wayne Turmel: [00:37:51] It’s funny. One of the massive changes is, when I started with e-mail, e-mails were very long, dense things. “Dear Sir, Pursuant to your letter of the 17th….” Because we wrote e-mails the way we wrote memos; we were just sending them electronically. And, over time, things changed to, now, I open an e-mail, and it will just say, “Yes.” Maybe that’s an answer to a question. Maybe I have to dig through the previous five e-mails to figure out what they’re responding to. So that’s part of it—are we really communicating effectively? But also doing all that communication in writing makes communication—or can make communication—very transactional. “Send me this file.” “Here it is.” If that is the only interaction we have, sending each other messages on Teams, and they’re short, very transactional type messages, are we building a relationship? Are we building trust? Are we having fun and enjoying our work, heaven forbid? I’m a little obsessed with this notion of communicating through the technology in the right ways.

Wayne Turmel: [00:39:13] Personally one of the most important models in the book is the idea of “richness versus scope,” which is simply a way…and it’s not even our model. Bettina Buechel wrote it in 2000, 2001, whatever it was. It basically says, “All communication is a balance of richness and scope.” We need richness. We also need the convenience, speed, and scope. If we think about firing people by instant messenger, it’s efficient, but there’s not a lot of scope. You’re not going to build a relationship in a positive way. You’re not going to appear empathetic and the kind of leader that people want to work for. So maybe not the right tool. But has your team had these discussions? Has your organization had the discussions around when do you send a chat message? When do you send an e-mail? When do you get on webcam? When do you talk on the phone? When do we need to come together in person as a team? And make those choices intentionally, and make them consistent so that the old white guy isn’t managing by e-mail while everybody else is texting to each other. Some of that is generational. Some of it is work style. Some of it is leadership style. But we need to be on the same page for the team to move forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:40:53] Wayne Turmel’s work focuses on remote and virtual communication in the evolving workplace, and he co-authored The Long-Distance Leader with Kevin Eikenberry. Learn more about the work The Kevin Eikenberry Group does and learn more about the book.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post Long-Distance Leadership with Wayne Turmel appeared first on Leading Learning.

Effort contributes to lasting, durable learning, which means learning businesses have a responsibility to expect learners to put in effort and an incentive to support them in doing so.

Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss the role of effort in learning and how learning businesses can scaffold effort in this episode, number 438.

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.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:00] Because effort contributes to lasting, durable learning, learning businesses have a responsibility to expect learners to put in effort and to support them in doing so.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:15] I’m Celisa Steele.

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

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:24] Have you ever met someone who seems to master everything with zero effort? Like they were born with skills the rest of us have to work for?

Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] And we intend that as a true reflection question for you, dear listener. Can you think of someone who seems to have mastered something effortlessly? Pause this episode, and take a moment to try to think of an example. It might be someone you know personally. It might be someone you’ve read or heard about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:55] The media is full of stories of apparently overnight successes—the song by the unknown band that rockets to number one, the bestselling novel by a newcomer, the newly discovered artist whose work is going for millions.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:09] Yes, and what the media coverage is often missing is the effort that went into crafting those “overnight” successes—the countless hours of practice and the songs the band wrote that didn’t make it onto any charts, the umpteen drafts of the novel and the dozens of rejections from publishers before the acceptance, the long days of art school where the artist studied and honed her craft.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:34] The person that popped to mind for me when thinking of effortless expertise is Sherlock Holmes.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:41] I know you like mysteries.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:43] I love Sherlock Holmes. So often Holmes appears effortlessly brilliant, solving these complex cases that no one else can crack and seemingly with complete ease. But, if you read the stories carefully, Holmes is actually extremely meticulous, constantly studying, paying attention, and being observant, and it’s that effort that allows him to crack the cases.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:07] Mozart came to mind for me. He supposedly composed his first pieces of music at the age of five.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:14] That’s about when I was doing it, I think.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:16] By eight, he had composed his first symphony. How old were you when you composed your first symphony?

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:20] I haven’t gotten to that one yet.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:22] He seems like the epitome of a born talent. But Mozart’s father was a musician and a composer himself, and he had his son studying and practicing for hours every day from a very early age. So the effort was there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:38] And odds are, dear listener, that whoever came to mind for you when thinking of that apparently effortless expert actually put in a lot of effort, and you’d probably find evidence of that if you dig into their history a bit. The effortless expert is a myth. Because learning isn’t about innate ability. It’s about the effort we choose to invest. And so we want to look in this episode at the role of effort in learning and ways learning businesses can help support learners in putting in effort.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:11] This episode is the final installment in what has turned out to be a mini-series. We started in episode 425 with “What’s Necessary to Learn,” and we talked about motivation, time, and effort. In episode 431, we unpacked motivation in an episode called “Why Motivation and Mindset Matter.” And then, in episode 434, called “The Small Matter of Time,” we looked at the role of time and learning. And now, in this episode, number 438, which is called “This Is Hard, and That’s Not Bad,” we’re focusing on the role of effort in learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:50] Effort is a critical part of learning that often gets overlooked. Learning isn’t just about showing up or passively absorbing information; it’s about the active engagement that we bring to it.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:03] We’re going to start with the concepts of effort and attention because attention is foundational. Before we can learn, we need to direct our attention. Effort starts with giving our full focus to whatever the subject or the learning experience at hand is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:21] As we’ve explained in other episodes, this is a matter of working memory. Working memory is where we temporarily hold and manipulate information, and that part of our memory is limited. There’s only so much we can put in there. When we divide attention, we reduce the effectiveness of our working memory.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:43] All of this ties into the concept of cognitive load. Cognitive load is the mental energy that we need to process information. The more complex the material—meaning, the harder the subject or the skill is for those of us learning it—the higher the cognitive load and the higher the demand on our working memory.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:05] To help make sure that we’re getting as much from a learning experience as possible, we need to do what we can to focus that limited working memory on the topics or skills that we’re working on and not on other things.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:20] Which means limiting distractions that might pull our attention away from the learning experience. For example, trying to read and respond to e-mails while participating in a Webinar or a conference session. I will say I’m guilty of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:35] I’ve never done that.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:36] You’ve never done that. Well, good for you, Jeff. But, for me and perhaps other folks like me who have tried to read and respond to e-mails while also in a learning experience, that means we’re spending part of our already limited working memory on something not related to learning—we’re dividing our attention, which means we aren’t putting our full effort towards learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:57] This all comes down to debunking that multitasking myth. I think most people, probably most listeners here, are aware that multitasking isn’t really a thing. Despite what we might think, the brain doesn’t truly multitask. Instead, what it does is task-switches, meaning it shifts rapidly between tasks. Some people can be very fast at doing that to the point that they feel like they are multitasking. But, no matter what, that switching is draining energy, and it’s going to reduce learning efficiency.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:29] One small example of this is that I’ve realized that I shouldn’t listen to music with lyrics when I’m reading. I might be reading an article online, or maybe I’m reading part of a self-paced e-learning course, or I’m reading a book, whatever it is. But, for me, hearing the song lyrics interferes with the words that I’m reading with my eyes, and it slows me down because of that increased cognitive load. That’s not necessarily the case for everyone. I know that some people seem to be able to treat songs as background sound, and they don’t have that sort of level of interference. But, for me, I do, and so this is a realization I’ve had, and it’s something now that, if I’m really focused on learning through reading, I try not to have any music with lyrics or anything that’s competing with those words I’m reading. I don’t want to be hearing anything else as I’m trying to concentrate on what I’m reading and learning that way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:21] Yes, and I’ve realized I need to have my phone turned on “Do Not Disturb” and face down if I’m trying to do any intensive work in the morning because it is amazing how many texts come in between, say, [8:00] and [10:00] in the morning.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:33] I never send you texts between [8:00] and [10:00].

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:35] Never, never. But you have to ignore those if you want to really focus in and get some actual learning done.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:43] If we think about our role as learning businesses and what we can do to help our learners focus their attention, keep the cognitive load, that limited working memory focused on the content at hand, one of the big things we can do is prune our content.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:02] Right. Get it down to what really is essential for the learner to be focused on. This is something we talk a lot about in the “Presenting for Impact” course that we’ve created. If you are a presenter, you know so much; you can often be burdening the cognitive load of your learners because you’re trying to tell them everything that you know and taking them down multiple rabbit holes when you need to focus on what is that one thing they need to learn in this particular segment of the course and keep attention focused well on that.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:29] Another important concept related to effort in learning is desirable difficulty.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:36] A term dear to the heart of every learning theorist, I think. A learning challenge that requires effort but strengthens learning, that’s a good thing. That’s the desirable part. It’s difficult, but, because it is achieving an aim in being difficult, we characterize that as desirable difficulty.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:55] When we engage in activities that make us work a little harder to recall or understand, our brains are creating stronger connections. That gets at the desirable part that you were talking about, Jeff. That effort strengthens the connections in our brains, makes that information or those skills become more ingrained and more easily called upon. We can talk about a few examples of what desirable difficulty might look like, and we’ll end up throwing around some other terms that listeners here are probably familiar with, and, if not, it’d be very good for you to become familiar with them. Effortful retrieval is one of those terms.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:32] This is a big one. Simple example: When we test ourselves, we’re pushing our brains to actively retrieve information. This recall effort strengthens memory and helps us retain what we learn longer. In fact, this kind of self-testing is one of the most effective learning practices that any lifelong learner can have.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:54] Right. And coupled with effortful retrieval, the concept of spaced practice or spaced repetition fits very well. The general idea with spacing is that it’s more effective to spread out any review and practice of ideas and skills over time in smaller chunks rather than doing it all at once in a longer session—sometimes called massed practice. Spaced practice helps us move information from working memory to long-term memory. We’ve already talked about how working memory is extremely limited. Long-term memory is thought to potentially be limitless, and so, as we’re practicing concepts and revisiting them, if we can move them out of that working memory into long-term memory, from long-term memory we can draw on them when needed. A big part of effortful retrieval is getting that spacing right. You need to let enough time elapse before you test yourself so that you’ve done a little bit of forgetting, actually, so that that recall is a little bit harder than if you did it two minutes after you had just practiced the same concept or reviewed the same term, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:03] Another key example of that desirable difficulty is problem-solving—or we might think of this as problem-pre-solving. When we try to solve problems before learning the answers, we’re engaging in desirable difficulties, and figuring it out ourselves makes the learning stick better than passively watching someone else solve that problem.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:26] Yes, and we made a small nod towards effort when we asked you, dear listener, at the outset of this episode to think of someone who is apparently successful without effort. We didn’t necessarily want to give our examples first. We wanted you to have the opportunity to do a little bit of problem-solving or at least answering that question on your own without the examples at first. That’s just a small example of a little bit of effort.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:52] We’ll make clear here that not all difficulty is good. We’ve qualified this as desirable difficulty. You don’t want to put in difficulty that is going to hinder learning. A simple example: If a slide is blurry, if it’s hard to read, that’s difficult, but that’s not going to help with learning at all. So it’s important to focus on difficulties that challenge us to recall, understand, or connect concepts actively.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:20] A personal anecdote I can offer again is learning to snowboard. A few years ago, I put on boots and strapped into a board, and I was slipping around all over the bunny slope and beginning to figure out balance and some other things on my own before the instructor said one word. Did I fall? Absolutely. Many times. Did I learn? Yes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:42] You were much more successful at learning that than I was. I fell a lot and finally decided that snowboarding wasn’t for me. But I do experience this all the time, for example, in practicing the guitar. I’ve been working for a while in trying to know the whole fretboard, where all the notes are, how all the scales work, how it all fits together, and, boy, I get frustrated all the time in doing that. But making that effort, doing it spaced out over time, I can definitely tell I’m making progress, much more so than if I just sat down on a Saturday and said, “I’m going to learn this.” I would learn nothing doing that.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:15] Dear listener, we’re going to encourage you again to put in a little effort of your own, to pause this episode for just a moment and think of a time from your past where doing something difficult helped you learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:31] Now, in terms of tips for learning businesses around desirable difficulty, if you make use of professional instructional designers, folks trained in instructional design, they’re probably going to be well aware of the value of effort. They’re going to be thinking through how to incorporate it. If you rely on subject matter experts, though, you may need to do a little bit of educating them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:55] Yes. In the first place, the subject matter experts are going to have to know about the value of effort and why it’s valuable. And then, second, they need to build in those effortful opportunities and make time for them. This can be a bit of an uphill battle. I think it’s at times hindered by our evaluation system, and we’ve hinted at this in other episodes. We want our learners to like the experience. We want them to enjoy the experience because that’s going to help them come back. But sometimes putting in that effort is not enjoyable, and an instructor can end up getting dinged because they did things that were hard for the learners, when in fact it’s going to be the most effective over time. In the world of the learning business, there’s a challenge around really thinking through this desirable difficulty, and how do you frame it in the best possible way, as an instructor, so that learners are receptive to it?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:48] 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: [00:15:26] We have a couple more terms and ideas that tie into effort that we want to talk about. The next two are reflection and elaboration. Reflection is about looking back at what we’ve learned. It’s about asking ourselves how well we understand it. It’s about considering how the ideas or the content apply to our work or our life.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:49] One of the keys here is for reflection to be active and to contain a little bit of that effort that we’re talking about, not just simply sitting back in a chair and musing but trying to do something with those reflections that you’re having. A practical tip: Your reflection might involve something like journaling, in which case you’re writing things down, which is helpful, or mentally reviewing key points after a class, after a conference session, after an online module, making the time to do that. This will lead into our next point—trying to make some connections as you’re doing that.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:24] That’s right. Those connections tie to elaboration, which is where we begin to link new information to what we already know. When we explain something in our own words or when we find examples from our own experience, those are examples of elaboration, and that’s helping us to embed that learning more deeply because it becomes connected to things that are already in our long-term memory. We can then pull out the new information more readily because it has that foothold in our long-term memory.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:54] We can offer up an anecdote here. Something that we’re doing at Tagoras, as so many organizations are doing now, is trying to get our arms around AI (artificial intelligence) and, as part of our approach to learning about AI and implementing it, having some meaningful conversations among staff. We recently had a company meeting here, and we were talking about AI and about when using AI and not disclosing it might be unethical. We made the comparison to a situation in which someone buys cookies, puts them on a platter, buries the box at the bottom of the trash, and presents the cookies at the end of a dinner party as something made from scratch. Which I would never in a million years think of doing. This is purely a hypothetical situation.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:40] What you just shared there, Jeff, uses an analogy, and analogies are a kind of elaboration. When we use analogies, we’re connecting new information to concepts that we already understand, and that deepens our comprehension and helps with retention. This is because an analogy helps bridge the gap between the unfamiliar and the familiar, creating this mental hook that makes the new idea easier to remember and easier to apply. In that example, Jeff, it was the store-bought cookies versus homemade when we’re talking about AI and uses of AI and when it’s unethical. But we can also use it in a lot of other ways.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:20] You could use the analogy of saying that working memory juggles a limited number of items. Then you get that idea of juggling, helping us visualize and relate to this concept of working memory because we have some notion about juggling. It’s hard to have a lot of items up in the air, so you get this idea that it’s limited. You get this idea that it’s a little bit of a difficult situation, that working memory is a little tenuous. And so analogies are a very powerful tool for elaboration, and they actively engage us, as learners, in meaning-making because we’re drawing parallels, usually from our own experience. Sometimes an instructor might be giving us an analogy to help us, but, either way, it’s helping us to connect new information to something that we’re already familiar with. This is the kind of thing that you might be using in some of your learning experiences.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:10] Maybe we can offer up some tips for learning businesses once again around these concepts of elaboration and reflection. First of all, don’t assume that learners know these concepts or at least that they’re fully engaged with these concepts and have them front of mind when they’re coming into a learning experience. It’s worth taking some time to forefront them and explain them and give them some tips on how to use them. For example, something simple like note-taking, which we tend to take for granted, assume people will do this. But we know that, when you take notes, that trying to use your own words instead of copying verbatim is good to do in notetaking. So is adding questions to notes. Questions remind learners of what they know and what they’re still figuring out, and this, of course, can prompt further reflection when you frame those questions to yourself as you’re creating those notes.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:07] A simple act that you can do to encourage reflection and elaboration is just to make sure that the learning experiences that you’re offering in your portfolio do encourage reflection and elaboration. You can be more or less formal about it. In any particular learning experience, you could simply pose a question, which gets people reflecting. Or you might be slightly more elaborate in the sense of providing a worksheet that helps scaffold the reflection that someone might do as part of a learning experience.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:39] The bottom line there is you build in the opportunities and build in the time for those opportunities for elaboration and reflection, and don’t put that burden wholly on the learner. Help the learner with doing that—helping to find the time and highlighting the importance of those activities.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:56] And then effort, well, it takes effort, right?

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:01] Indeed.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:01] Which means that there are a variety of—what we’ll put under the umbrella—lifestyle factors that can be important in supporting effort. We’re thinking about things like sleep, what you eat, your physical activity, your stress level, and those types of things. We can touch on each of those briefly.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:21] Yes, I think these don’t get enough attention. Again, it’s just one of those things we can help forefront for learners and help them manage this as an aspect of their learning because we don’t really think of these as aspects of our learning. But sleep, for example, is essential for consolidating memory. During deep and REM sleep, our brains process and store new information. And, if we’re not getting enough sleep, it’s a lot harder to both focus on and then retain what we learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:47] And then with diet and what we eat, that’s tied to brain health. We want to be thinking about eating healthy foods. There’s some research around omega-3s and antioxidants supporting cognitive function, but, in general, what we know for sure is that poor nutrition can make us not feel very good. It can make it harder to stay focused, and essentially it can hinder learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:09] We want to keep that in mind when we’re planning those conference meals and snacks and those sorts of things. Then physical activity and mood, which are closely related. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain and releases neurochemicals that can enhance mood. They can enhance memory and focus. Physical activity in general can make us more receptive to learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:33] And then stress. Chronic stress can disrupt memory and learning, and so we want to try to minimize that chronic stress for the sake of learning—and for the sake of all sorts of reasons. Chronic stress is not a good thing. We will say that sometimes short-term stress can actually help you focus on learning. Again, if we get back to that example of perhaps asking a learner to solve a problem before you’ve shown them the steps for the solution, that might create a little bit of stress for some learners. But, again, that’s a healthy level of stress. It’s the kind of stress that can help them potentially focus on the task. And so there’s a little bit of finding the balance. We don’t want to overly stress our learners, but there might be times when it’s appropriate, where small amounts of stress do make sense.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:21] The takeaway from all of this is that there are a range of factors that support the effort that learners can put in, and very often we, as learning businesses, don’t have a lot of control over these factors. But, when we do, we should make smart, evidence-based choices. Jeff, you mentioned menus at a conference, for example—yes, making sure that it’s not sugary snacks or sugary snacks only. During a longer session, you might do a seventh-inning stretch to get people up and moving for a moment, for example. Again, you don’t always have that control, but, when you do, thinking through some of how these lifestyle factors support learning can be important and helpful.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:05] Yes, that would be one area of tips for learning businesses to put this into action. Another area of tips would be, when it’s appropriate and when you have the chance, to help learners be aware of and think about these factors and what they can control. We should all keep this in mind as learning businesses and as subject matter experts. We’ve presumably got the attention of people when they’re gathered in the room in front of us, and we don’t want to get on a soapbox, but some useful reminders that these are important factors and how to think about managing them is something we should be pursuing. For example, on testing days, our schools emphasize the importance of kids eating well before showing up, and our elementary school would provide a snack for all kids before testing took place. Again, connecting this to nutrition and supporting learning through proper nutrition.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:03] And, again, we can offer learners advice that they pay attention to when they tend to have their own lags in attention or surges in attention throughout the day. If learners are engaging with an online course that we provide, we can help them think through, “When would it be most effective for me to engage in this course? If I happen to be on top of my game in the morning, maybe I need to make sure to try to carve out time to do that course in the morning rather than trying to leave it ‘til at night, at home, right before bed,” for example.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:36] So what do we know about effort in learning? The short answer is we know that putting in effort contributes to lasting, durable learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:46] Yes, an abundance of good, evidence-based research points to this. When learners do things like ask questions and take notes, they’re putting in that useful effort, engaging in that desirable difficulty. When they actively recall information from memory without referring to notes or the text, they’re again putting in useful effort. When they try to solve a problem without first being taught how, once again they’re putting in useful effort.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:17] Those are forms of effort that involve desirable difficulty, and they therefore contribute to learning. These kinds of efforts are things that we, as learning businesses, can and should support. There aren’t overnight successes in learning. Learning isn’t about innate ability. It’s about the effort that learners choose to invest, and we, as learning businesses, should support learners in investing effort.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:51] Because effort contributes to lasting, durable learning, learning businesses have a responsibility to expect learners to put in effort and to support them in doing so.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post This Is Hard, and That’s Not Bad appeared first on Leading Learning.

Content marketing at its core is educational. It’s about raising awareness not only of a brand but of that brand’s ability to help and to act as a partner. For many learning businesses, content marketing is the start of the learner journey and the way they establish both expertise and trust with prospective learners.

Deirdre Reid is a writer, a content marketer, and the publisher of Association Brain Food, a weekly list of free Webinars and other events and recommended reading. In this episode, number 437, Deirdre talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about content marketing, AI’s influence on marketing, data analytics, the role of taxonomy in personalization, search engine optimization, customer acquisition and retention, partnering with employers, cohort-based learning, unconferences, and self-assessments as marketing tools.

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.

Deirdre Reid: [00:00:00] We all need to learn more. It never ends. And sometimes you have to make people aware of that.

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

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

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] Content marketing at its core is educational. It’s about raising awareness not only of a brand but of that brand’s ability to help and to act as a partner. For many learning businesses, content marketing is the start of the learner journey and the way they establish both expertise and trust with prospective learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:39] Our guest for this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 437, understands the important role that content marketing plays. Having worked in associations for a decade, Deirdre Reid started a writing business about 15 years ago. She now works primarily with association industry partners, and her goal is to help people through her writing. Deirdre also publishes Association Brain Food, a very popular weekly list of free Webinars and other events and recommended reading for association professionals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:12] Deirdre and Celisa talk about content marketing, AI’s influence on marketing, data analytics, the role of taxonomy in personalization, search engine optimization, learner journeys, customer acquisition and retention, workforce development and partnering with employers, cohort-based learning, unconferences, self-assessments as marketing tools, and more. Celisa and Deirdre spoke in October 2024.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:44] I’m curious to get your thoughts about what trends you’re seeing in content marketing, particularly as it relates to learning businesses, and I want to hear about those trends. And then I also have a follow-up question about those trends, which is about how those trends might shape the future of continuing education and professional development and learning in general.

Deirdre Reid: [00:02:07] Content marketing, you and I throw around that term a lot because we do it. You do it. Here’s an example. Let’s talk about the way Tagoras does it. This podcast is content marketing. Your blog is content marketing. The executive summaries and guides and benchmark reports and trends reports that you do is content marketing. Basically, it’s all educational content, but the mission behind it—knowing you and Jeff and knowing a lot of my clients—when you know something, you like to share it. You like to help other people. But it’s marketing. It’s positioning a company so that they can, first of all, spread awareness about their brand, spread awareness about their expertise but also position themselves as a partner—a true partner that is there to help their clients or help their audience. In my case, they’re readers. We try to demonstrate that we understand what our readers are going through on their job. I used to be in those shoes. What is an association professional? What challenges are they dealing with? What ideas are they noodling around?

Deirdre Reid: [00:03:21] Our content is to help them do their jobs better and expose them to new ideas, to explain to the new folks some real basics about what you need to do to recruit members or communicate with your chapters, simple things like that. We do it through blog posts. We do it through case studies, which are a little bit more focused on, in my case, one particular association and how they use the technology. But, through those success stories, you cannot just learn about the product but learn a little bit about how other people are tackling the same issues. Content marketing works. It drives e-mail opens and clicks, and it ideally turns Web site visitors into regular readers, into warm leads, and one day into customers or clients. That’s just so everyone understands what content marketing is and the advantages it has for everybody involved. It’s not just a promotional tool. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it because I like to have a mission in my life, and part of that is to help other people do their jobs better.

Deirdre Reid: [00:04:29] Trends. It’s hard to talk about trends without bringing up AI, which, as a writer, I have very mixed feelings about. When it came out, it was November 2022—I’m taking a guess there—that was ChatGPT, the first generative AI tool that people were writing jokes with, and it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I wrote blog posts about it for my clients when it was first released. I had to explore it and figure out what it meant to me and my business. Frankly, right now, after a year and a half, I’m like, “It has its uses, but the human brain is certainly a lot more advanced these days.” I do worry about a reliance on it by marketers. I work with marketing teams—and they never have enough time, so I understand how AI does help them jumpstart a lot of processes, thinking about ideas and outlines, titles, these different things you need to do for Google, like meta tags and such—but I do worry about them relying on it too much and weakening their own creative and cognitive abilities by farming it out to AI. I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen the movie WALL-E; it’s an animated film, and there’s one scene of them all going around on a conveyor belt being stuffed full of junk food.

Deirdre Reid: [00:05:51] Somehow my mind goes from where we are with AI to that very quickly, which is a little too pessimistic. But AI has its uses, and I definitely understand that. I’m not an anti-AI person. I think marketers can use it to help them with jumpstarting, copying, and with videos—creating things that they don’t have the technical chops for. AI is definitely helpful there. You just need to know its limits and not trust it because it does hallucinate, as everyone says. I had it once write a bio for me, and I had written books, which I didn’t realize, so you really have to check. Right now, I say it’s nowhere near a quality of writer who has the subject matter expertise and knows her audience. You have to know when to outsource to a real person and when to rely on AI. It’s exciting, but be careful. Several years ago, it wasn’t so long ago where data and data analytics seemed like something that belonged to other people, techie people, and people with those crazy, analytical minds. Marketers tend to be better with words and people. I don’t know how. Right brain, left brain—I always forget which is which.

Deirdre Reid: [00:07:10] But now, because of the tools that we have, especially these middleware tools, integration, platforms as a service, marketers can really finagle data that’s coming their way. And that could be a member profile/customer profile data; it could be learner data; it could be behavioral data (such as clicks, opens, and page visits), even transactional data (what people have bought). Using all of that, you can start getting more relevant and more targeted in your e-mails and other communication vehicles. And, if you’re not doing that, the technology is there, and it’s just a matter of making the choices of where to allocate resources and investing in some of this stuff, which is getting cheaper all the time. Personalization, smart marketing, only sending people relevant content used to be a trend, but now I think it’s foundational. So the investment does need to be there, and that’s a matter of educating boards perhaps or even your bosses and executive suites.

Deirdre Reid: [00:08:23] Another big piece that’s foundational but will help with the personalization piece is taxonomy, which you see a lot of content strategists talk about. It’s not simple. It’s a big job. But, if you start doing it as you’re going along, tagging your content is what it’s about because then, when you have that, they become pieces of data basically, and you can start delivering a more personalized experience to not only your e-mail readers but your Web site visitors. In your newsletters, you could tag it by topic or career stage, and that way you can take all the content you have, those session recordings, get AI to rip apart recordings by different topics, and start having little microlearning, little bites of content that you can send out as content marketing—something free to get them interested and perk their interest to maybe pay for something later. That’s maybe not so much a trend, but you don’t really see it very much.

Deirdre Reid: [00:09:26] One other thing that comes to mind is understanding the place of SEO in your content marketing strategy, and I see this a lot with clients who work with agencies. Associations often do the same thing, where they’re instructed to write blog posts using this particular SEO phrase and this keyword and following this outline, and it looks all AI-driven to me. The thing is, Google algorithms have changed a lot over the years, and, if you’re writing for your audience, if you understand what they really need, write to that. Don’t be a slave to SEO. The keyword strategy doesn’t nearly have the same power it used to. Google’s gotten smarter, and, if you write useful content, Google will like what you’re doing. So be a little discriminating in how you write. Write like a human. Don’t write for the Web-crawling little robots from Google. Those are just some of the things that I come across.

Deirdre Reid: [00:10:32] In my world or the association world often we sadly are playing some years behind the for-profit world. A lot of times what’s a trend in the association world may have been common sense in the for-profit world. Not always. It’s a matter of resources, and it’s also a matter of our governance structure when we’re run by boards of volunteer members/volunteer leaders who often take a chance and take risks in their business but don’t always want to take those same chances when they sit on the board because they have a legacy to preserve, and they don’t want to be that board that lost the money going down that path. We have a lot of really innovative, intelligent, generous people in our community who know what’s going on and are on the cutting edge of everything, but yet they can’t always act on it in their organizations. It’s a funny place. It must be a very frustrating place to be sometimes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:32] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:07] A couple of things occurred to me, hearing you talk. One is around the purpose of content marketing. You talked about it providing value in and of itself, but it does also have this purpose of hopefully taking that, say, blog reader and turning that into someone who might purchase a course or engage in some sort of learning experience. But then it also occurred to me that content marketing has a role in customer retention too; it’s not just the acquisition. If you’re providing this value so that learner who came and participated in one of your Webinars or went to your conference, and then, if they’re going to the blog, and they’re seeing relevant content, that might remind them, “Oh yes, this organization has great content. I should look to them for my next learning experience, the next course I want to take.” Any comments about customer acquisition versus customer retention when you’re thinking about content marketing, maybe for some of the clients that you’re working with?

Deirdre Reid: [00:13:03] I’m glad you brought that up because, yes, the customer journey, the member journey, they’re very similar as far as when I was speaking about boards always love the growth numbers. They love seeing the reports from the membership director showing the number of members growing and showing the recruitment growing. But what about retention? It’s huge, whether you’re talking about a learner, a customer, or a member. That’s the beauty of content marketing. If you can establish that relationship, you are hitting them with ideally new content every week, every other week, whether it’s a podcast episode, a blog post, or a Webinar. I always think you have to keep delighting your customers. There’s so much competition, and it’s not just competition—“Oh, they might go take a class at another organization.” In a lot of fields, especially medical fields and legal fields, there is so much competition with other for-profit and nonprofit organizations, but it’s not just that. It’s competition for their time and their bandwidth. Those challenges that all marketers face, and associations face with their members, even to get them to read their e-mail, newsletter, and not just let it sit in their inbox.

Deirdre Reid: [00:14:21] I think members are ever-changing. Learners are ever-changing. I think reaching out to them and learning more about them, letting them know that you’re not just pushing promos—”We’ve got this Webinar coming up; we’ve got this,” all these paid things. You already paid dues. “We want you to keep giving us more money.” But it’s also finding out more about how their interests and needs are changing because we know that they are. Let’s look at AI and how many of us have had to figure out how to do that quickly. There are so many ways that, in different professions, because of technology, changing workforce, or changing marketplace, new needs are coming up all the time. So sending them a poll, sending them a little interest inventory when they renew their membership, on a year anniversary. Or six months later, after their learning experience, following up with them with an automated e-mail asking them about the impact of that. I don’t know how many associations do that. “What we taught you, did it work? Are you actually applying those new skills?”

Deirdre Reid: [00:15:32] Anytime you engage and ask questions to find out what somebody thinks is a sign of interest, which a lot of organizations (for-profit or nonprofit) don’t ever do. Once they get your money, it’s like, “Okay, thank you. Goodbye.” There’s a new conversational engagement tool in our market, which is a fairly new concept, but it is little e-mail questions, and you respond. It’s automated, AI-driven smart technology, and, depending on what your answer is, it will send you another e-mail letting you know about something. That’s something that never was possible. AI and automation are making what was once impossible for a small team possible so that there are ways to actually touch your members and your learners but not have to do it manually. And people are used to that. They don’t care as long as the intent is good, and you’re giving value to them in response. Yes, I think a content marketing program where you’re always telling people the what and the why about something for free—whether it’s a free Webinar for members, a blog post, or free little videos that you send out—give them a taste, and, if they want to dig deeper, then they pay for something. That’s the way an association and a learning program can certainly keep people going.

Deirdre Reid: [00:17:00] Or self-assessments. Remember way back when, on Facebook, everybody was taking quizzes about God knows what? It was a great way for scammers to learn all your personal things that you might have in your security questions. But self-assessments are fun. We all like to know how much we know. We like to see how we compare to others. Self-assessments, put them on your LMS, and send them out to people to see. “How much do you really know about this issue? How much do you really know about this? Or where are your gaps in your skills?” Get people aware. The first step of marketing is awareness. Get people aware of where they could stand to learn a little bit more. A lot of us think we know a lot, especially when you reach a certain level. That’s kind of a cliché, the CEOs who don’t need to take classes anymore. But we all need to learn more. It never ends. And sometimes you have to make people aware of that. Self-assessments can do that.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:59] Deirdre, we’ve been hearing a lot about technology in some of what you’ve already shared today, and we know that technology is playing an increasingly important role in how organizations engage with their audiences. I’d be curious to get some additional thoughts from you on how you’re seeing associations and other learning businesses leveraging technology to improve communications and engagement with their members, their learners, their customers.

Deirdre Reid: [00:18:28] When you said other businesses, something just occurred to me that’s been one of my soapbox topics. When I write blog posts, especially for my LMS client, I tend to find myself pushing the same ideas years after years. One of the great things about COVID was that it did make people look beyond what they’ve always done, including virtual learning, which I love. As someone who does not live in the Washington, DC or Chicago area, where most association activities take place, I personally enjoy the fact that I got access to education, whether it be roundtables and discussions or virtual conferences. And I’ve seen for-profits take that and run the idea of membership communities for people who are in the same stage of their career or business development. I particularly saw a lot for folks who were doing startup businesses or marketers, and cohort programs are huge in the for-profit world and hugely successful and big revenue generators for the kind of programs you apply for. You pay a little bit more money, but what happens is you learn with a facilitator, instructor, or coach, and it varies.

Deirdre Reid: [00:19:45] Seth Godin is involved in one called the altMBA that has gone on for years and is still a really popular and expensive program. The idea is that you do have the content, which is important, but we also have the community, and we know the reason people join associations, even the introverts, it’s not only to get information and news, but it’s primarily…. MGI is a membership consulting company in our space, and they’ve done a membership benchmarking report every year for like a dozen years. The two top reasons, year after year after year, are education and networking. And networking is really finding your community and finding people who do what you do, who get what you do, who you can talk shop with. Cohort programs are the upper level of that as far as time commitment. They last several months, if not a year, but you can do it at the lower level. What about a two-month, three-month program for a group of people? They don’t pay as much as perhaps these big, expensive programs. But you have coach facilitators. Maybe they’re paid coaches with expertise. Maybe they’re volunteers. Maybe this is a new volunteer category you have in your association.

Deirdre Reid: [00:21:03] But, where you have helped people at the same career stage, interest in the same things, learning together, learning from each other, holding each other accountable, lifelong relationships develop. I truly believe that that is a life-transforming experience. Something similar happens at ASAE with their DELP program, which stands for Diversity Executive Leadership Program—a yearlong program, application-based, big, huge sponsorship by Visit Detroit that subsidizes a lot of the travel and such for the people who are involved. I know so many people who have graduated from that program, and it changes their life. The people who were in that several years ago are in CEO positions now all over our industry.

Deirdre Reid: [00:21:55] So you take something like DELP, and you figure out, “What are the secret, magic ingredients, and how can we bring that to our association?” I don’t think enough associations do something like this. Or, if they do, it’s the traditional leadership academy, which is fine, but maybe it’s time to rethink what you’re doing. Put more virtual so it’s a blended learning experience. People don’t have the money or the time to travel as much as they used to—maybe they do have the same amount, but the perception is they don’t. And do something that’s more accessible to more people—people who physically can’t travel, for financial reasons can’t, personal/family reasons, employer reasons—and get them together online, and find a sponsor to help you bring them together once or twice a year so they get that irreplaceable in-person experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:56] What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve seen learning businesses face when they’re thinking about how to effectively market those education programs and services? And then hopefully also you have some thoughts on not just the challenges but ways to overcome those challenges.

Deirdre Reid: [00:23:12] The time challenge is, number one, your members’ time, your customers’ time, and proving that it’s worth the time to open your e-mail. And you’ve got to prove it by demonstrating that it is. That’s what we’ve discussed before about personalization, understanding and using data as your friend, smart content marketing, and becoming that trusted source. So when your e-mail or your newsletter pops up in their inbox, they know that it’s going to be valuable. It’s not going to take them forever to read, or it’s going to be a quick skim. Skimming is fine. Skim, and then find what’s important to you. That’s a challenge that content marketing can help solve by helping you become a trusted source. Another thing is, if you ask somebody, “What’s the role of professional development? Do you think professional development is important?,” any professional is going to say, “Of course. Of course it is.” But then ask them when was the last time they paid for any professional development? And you might find there’s a gap between what we think we want and what we actually pay for. And yes, I’m guilty as charged. I love my free education, but…

Celisa Steele: [00:24:25] Association Brain Food—that’s the premise there.

Deirdre Reid: [00:24:27] Yes, right. But every now and then, I do pay for things, like the Learning Business Summit, which I attended earlier this year, which was really good. I have to say it was worth it all. I think there’s also a big marketing job in creating an audience of warm leads. Yes, your membership is, in theory, your audience, but what you need to do is take them from being people who say they want to learn to people who actually do it. Of course fear would be a great way to do that, but it’s not the best motivator. They need to know that that’s the only way they’re going to get ahead. Inspiring them by better pictures on themselves, using marketing and figuring out their aspirations, and trying to connect them, but making it easy for them to take the baby steps. An eight-week online course that meets once a week and has homework may not be the best way for someone to start learning. Maybe you have to put them on a learner’s journey and start them with small little videos and microlearning and then build them up to even an hour.

Deirdre Reid: [00:25:33] A lot of people say they can’t take an hour out of the day for a Webinar. All right. Try some 20-minute Webinars, and see. Test, experiment, try with different segments, and see what works for them. But have something for everybody, for not just every budget but for every time commitment tolerance so that way you can get their feet wet. They understand that “Boy, this is actually something I enjoy. Maybe I will start going to a Webinar every other week or so. Or maybe I will do this.” It’s like volunteering. You can’t ask someone to be on your board. You have to start small with micro-volunteering and pull them along the volunteer journey. It would be the same thing with a learner journey as well. So that is one challenge I see out there.

Deirdre Reid: [00:26:21] Understanding the competition is always a challenge, and it’s getting worse because for-profits have discovered that there’s a really good business in lifelong learning. And it’s evergreen. There are new customers coming along and graduating every day. Associations, we always thought of ourselves as like, “We’re the authority. We’re the industry leader.” But that’s not enough anymore. And loyalty—maybe your boomers and your Gen X are loyal, but I’m not sure about the rest. Understanding what your differentiators are compared to your competitors, once you start exploring that, you may discover you don’t have any. That’s where you’ve got to figure out, okay, well, what can you do? What is your secret sauce? Is it your community that you can offer? What about you is going to set you apart from your for-profit competitors because they probably have deeper marketing pockets than you do? If you can figure that out, you’ll be able to take on the nonprofit.

Deirdre Reid: [00:27:30] I wrote about this a while back, on workforce development. I saw an awesome example of a workforce development site. I forget the name of the association, but they are a semiconductor chips organization. The challenge that associations always have is the younger generations and workforce development—working with employers to figure out what together you can do to attract young people to your industry. That’s something I’m not sure I see enough associations doing. The nursing industry does it. The chips people are doing it. And they have Web sites that are dedicated to this, that have interviews with members about why they got into it, what are different career paths, how many different directions can you go, information about education, information about typical young professional career issues—things like resumes, dressing for work, and all the things adults take for granted. You could call these adulting issues they address. But I think that workforce development is becoming more and more an issue for many industries, and young people are floundering. I have a nephew who’s in his 20s, a smart kid, not really sure which way he wants to go. I’ve tried to point him in the direction of associations, but, where he lives, there aren’t too many.

Deirdre Reid: [00:28:53] Associations can help a lot of folks figure out, “Here, come check us out. Here’s a direction you can go in all these different ways.” Be a little more proactive about reaching out to young people where they are—probably on social media channels—and reaching out to them with people who are a few years ahead of them, five years ahead, and peers helping younger peers figure out their direction. That, I think, is a challenge that everyone’s wrestling with, and education and community would also work just as well for young people as it does for their older generations. One thing I brought up working with employers—employer advisory councils are a great idea, not just for helping to develop workforce development programs but to develop any kind of learning program. We need to educate folks.

Deirdre Reid: [00:29:46] The employers are the ones who know what skills are in demand. The employers and their HR departments or industry recruiters—all these folks know what skills are needed, where the skills gaps are in the industry or in companies, and partnering and working hand in hand with these employers through an advisory council that can help you design curriculum and help you figure out what it is exactly you need to do in the next few years, which programs you need to develop. You also get a lot of buy-in too, and then we all know people need to have the employer support to pay for any programs. It’s like a technology project. If you get people involved from the start, when it’s time to adopt the technology, they’re going to be more willing. The same thing will happen with these employers. If you get them involved in your curriculum design, they’re going to be more willing to pay for the results than if they’re locked outside of it when these programs are presented to them. So that might help with that young professional challenge and curriculum challenge in general.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:00] You’ve worked with a lot of different organizations on a lot of different projects over your career. Do you have a favorite project or initiative that you could share that involves learning, and what made it particularly impactful or meaningful to you when you reflect back on it?

Deirdre Reid: [00:31:17] One that comes to mind is when I worked for the California Building Industry Association; it’s the state affiliate of the National Association of Home Builders, where I had worked for five years, then was hired away by CBIA in Sacramento. Every year we put on an annual membership summit for our local membership staff. We had 20+ local home builders associations, and so the local membership staff and their membership committee chairs, vice chairs, would come to this. The first year, we hired somebody who was a big membership expert guru guy. He came and facilitated, and it was your typical membership conference. The second year, the same guy called me the morning of the conference, in my hotel room, to tell me that he woke up with a stomach flu. I thought, “Okay, well….”

Deirdre Reid: [00:32:11] One of my colleagues from NAHB worked at our Southern California local, so I called her up. We got together. We figured out what we were going to do. We had the program, so we knew what we wanted to cover as far as basic topics, and we decided to let all of our local membership staff—they’re a very opinionated, smart bunch—we decided we would tap into them, and we did it unconference style and asked them to help us design the program together. They loved that idea. And Alison and I facilitated it and shared a lot of our expertise because we had a lot of expertise to share. We had lots of stories from other associations in the NAHB network from across the country, but we also made sure that we got everyone into small groups to do a lot of interaction. It was a lot of group conversations and small-group conversations.

Deirdre Reid: [00:33:07] By the middle of the day, that room was buzzing. By the end of the day, people were telling us it was the best thing they had experienced as far as education in their career. We felt pretty good about it, and it was basically because they helped design it. We didn’t assume what they needed to know. They just talked, and the relationships were developing like they hadn’t in years. Future years, we did that format over and over. It saved us a lot of money on speakers and travel expenses, but it was a really rewarding thing to put together, which we did with no instructional design expertise whatsoever. We followed our gut, and it worked well. So I still look back on that very fondly.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:55] I like how that example exhibits perfectly what you talked about, the main two reasons that people tend to say they join an association: for education and for peer networking.

Deirdre Reid: [00:34:06] Right. That’s one thing over my career—this started when I worked at NAHB—is to see relationships start. I remember back, some of my members on my committees at NAHB, these women, still to this day, I see them on Facebook, going on trips together, enjoying each other’s company when they get together. I think that is one of the magics of association, that it is truly, can truly be life-transforming, which sounds very grand and such, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in my own life, and I certainly saw it in my members’ lives before it even happened to me. It’s something I think we forget. And figuring out how to capture that and put that in marketing messaging to even your members who already belong because they still need to be sold on the power of membership. Maybe they haven’t experienced it themselves, so the secret is trying to figure out how to connect them with that transformational experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:01] This is a question that we always like to ask our guests on the Leading Learning Podcast, and it’s about your own practices, habits, and approaches, maybe sources that you use for your own personal lifelong learning.

Deirdre Reid: [00:35:14] I’m lucky because I work for myself, and the whole day is at my disposal, however I want to use it. I read all the time. I read about associations. I read about the world at large. I read about technology. I read about organizational development. I just read. I get hundreds of newsletters; it’s pretty ridiculous. But I read all the time. A part of it is for my own professional development, but also I do share things I like in Association Brain Food. I practice what I preach. And I mentioned how associations are transformational. For me, it started with blogs. Back in 2008, 2009, I started reading association blogs by people who I’m still friends with to this day. That was when bloggers actually commented on each other’s blogs. I became friends with all these people who belonged to ASAE as well. We were all on Twitter back then too, which of course has changed. But blogging changed my life, which sounds strange, but it is true because it introduced me to new ideas and new people and inspired me in my work, and I still feel that was my foray into professional development.

Deirdre Reid: [00:36:25] I feel like professional development like that, on your own, can still change your life. Newsletters, blogs, books—I always have a lot of books going, never work-related. I’m not one for business books. I like to read fiction, history, philosophy, and all kinds of strange things. I have a long queue of my podcast episodes. I listen to them at 1.5 speed so that I can get through more of them. I do listen to association podcasts. There are a lot of good podcasts in our space, like this one, but there are many others. I especially like hearing ones that have association guests on because that’s my intel, besides hearing them on Webinars and talking to them in person. And I go to conferences. I mentioned the Learning Business Summit I went to earlier. I like to go to ASAE Annual. I used to go to digitalNow a lot. I’ll probably return to that in the future. But I try to get my professional development in lots of different ways. I never stopped reading. I think that’s the most important thing. And, if you read a lot, you certainly become a better writer too. If anyone’s wondering how to improve their writing chops, read good stuff, not AI-written.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:45] Deirdre Reid is a freelance writer and content marketer and publisher of Association Brain Food, a weekly list of free Webinars and other events and recommended reading for association professionals.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post Awareness Through Content Marketing with Deirdre Reid appeared first on Leading Learning.

Impact is a theme we circle back to again and again on the Leading Learning Podcast because we believe that any learning business needs to create impact for the learners and other stakeholders it serves. And measurement and evaluation are critical for knowing if we’re creating impact and for showing that impact.

Dr. Alaina Szlachta is author of the book Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring. In this episode, number 436, Alaina talks with co-host Jeff Cobb about what measurement and evaluation are (listen for her short but elegant definition). They also talk about data, ways to go beyond smile sheets and completion stats to get at long-term impact, the importance of an impact hypothesis, and automation and AI.

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.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:00:00] What’s one thing different that you’re going to do because of this one-hour conversation today?

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

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

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] Impact is a theme we circle back to again and again because we believe that any learning business needs to create impact for the learners and other stakeholders it serves. And measurement and evaluation are critical for knowing if we’re creating impact and for showing that impact. That’s why we wanted to talk with Dr. Alaina Szlachta. Alaina is a self-proclaimed data nerd and author of the book Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 436, Alaina talks with Jeff about what measurement and evaluation are—listen for her short but elegant definition. They also talk about data, ways to go beyond smile sheets and completion stats to get at long-term impact, the importance of an impact hypothesis, and automation and AI. As you listen, I encourage you to think about one thing you might do differently as a result of hearing Jeff and Alaina’s conversation today.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:27] As somebody who’s focused on data, focused on learning, focused on measuring and evaluating learning, that gets narrower and narrower. You’re in a relatively niche area. How did you get there? What was your path to what you’re doing now?

Alaina Szlachta: [00:01:42] Like many of us, I think we arrive where we are accidentally and never could have imagined I would be here today. But I think the journey begins with my time in Mexico. After undergraduate, I was like, “I need to leave my country to feel like I have a different perspective on the world, to figure out my place in it.” And so I went to Mexico and joined a nonprofit to teach English as a foreign language. I fell in love with teaching, so the throughline of my career are these two parallel throughlines. One is the education focus, and the other is the data focus. Really, the passion for education, teaching, learning and development comes from that experience in Mexico. I went on to get my master’s degree in education, a doctorate degree in education and human behavior, and then my career…. While we’re in grad school—many of you listening have done grad school—you know that it’s not just school; you’re also working. While I had a scholarship, I was working full time too, so it was a crazy time of my life.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:02:44] But I was working and doing some really cool projects that sometimes you only have access to when you’re a graduate student. All of those projects were grant-funded, donor-funded, special interest projects that needed to prove that they were going to be effective. I was working very tightly with how do we collect the right data? What’s our hypothesis? What evidence do we need to prove it so that our program can keep going? We needed data and a research lens to give ourselves permission to keep going with our programming. All of that was the introduction of that second throughline of how do we collect the right data to essentially get permission to keep going? Ultimately, I worked in the nonprofit higher ed sector for a big chunk of my career and then decided, before I get too old, I need to go get some experience in corporate. I took a step down from a director level to an individual contributor level to work for one of the Brandon Hall Award-winning learning teams.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:03:49] I thought, “They’re going to be able to teach me something great about corporate learning. I want that experience.” And, while the team was amazing, they didn’t have the same rigor around measurement that I had grown up with in my other experiences. It led me to question, “What’s going on here? Why is it so different in this one sector?” We’re doing the same thing. We are all working on educating and developing humans to get results. Of course, those results are all different, but why is measurement not baked into corporate learning in the same way that it is in other places? During COVID—everyone has their COVID story; what did you do during COVID when things changed?—I did a study. Being the educational researcher that I am, I’m like, “Okay, there’s this clear challenge around measuring corporate learning. Let me go investigate this.”

Alaina Szlachta: [00:04:42] I interviewed 40 people all around the world. Every person I interviewed, I said, “Who else should I be talking to? I’m trying to get some diverse perspectives on this.” That’s how I got to my 40. And that study led me to a conference presentation at ATD Core4. In the audience was an editor for the ATD publishing arm, and they reached out to me and said, “We’re looking for an author for a book series, a Shoestring book series, focused on measurement and evaluation. Would you consider submitting a proposal?” And I said, “Well, I want a place to publish my research and findings.” Of course, I had done this massive literature review around models, theories, perspectives on measurement in education and corporate sectors. And I’m like, “Yes, I could do all of that and put it into a book.” And that’s where we are today.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:29] When you say measurement and evaluation with respect to learning, what do you have in mind, one, and then, two, what’s the big deal? What compelled you to think this is something that there needs to be a book about? Obviously, the Association for Talent Development thought there needed to be a book about it.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:05:47] Yes, I can sum it up in two phrases. One, making measurement easier is something that our industry, and I think many industries, can desperately benefit from. And then, two, what I mean by measurement and evaluation is also very simple: Did we do what we said we would do? We need measurement and evaluation to prove, to collect the right data, to do the analysis and investigation, to see did we do what we said we were going to do? Why or why not? And what are we going to do about it once we get those results? I like that perspective because it’s very inclusive and broad because, let’s be honest, when we’re in the world of education and learning and people development, we’re very nuanced, and so I’m a big believer there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to measurement and evaluation.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:06:40] At the very basic, we need to get clear. What are we doing and why? That insight is the strategy that leads us into what are the appropriate tactics to then literally be able to say, “Yes, I did what I said I was going to do.” We want 100 percent of our target audience to complete this program. Well, did you do what you said you were going to do? We need to analyze and investigate that. We need some data to help us see it, all the way up to the business has a big, expensive problem, and we’re going to use learning as a tool to solve it. Did we help the business cut the costs of that expensive business problem? We have to go investigate that, and we need some data to help us do that investigation. Did you do what you said you were going to do? That’s the overarching theory, thinking I have around measurement and evaluation.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:31] 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.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:07] Measuring that bigger stuff, that more important stuff, that feels really daunting. I’d love to hear a little bit more about how you approach making that kind of measurement feel easier, feel more manageable. You’ve already been pointing to it, but you haven’t used the term so far—you have this idea of an impact hypothesis. I know it drives everything, so I’ll throw that out to you, and let’s discuss.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:08:34] Yes. A few colleagues of mine in the world of measurement and evaluation all agree that impact is whatever it is that you want to influence. I think sometimes we have these big, lofty goals that aren’t what the business needs—or even what our stakeholders need. And so did we do what we said we would do? What impact did we have? We all want to be able to tell those stories. You’ve all probably been to a nonprofit fundraising event, and you have a speaker come that says their whole life changed because of the work of this nonprofit. Every one of us wants that kind of validation and confirmation that we’ve made a difference. The thing is, how do we unpack the difference that we’re meant to make? Sometimes it doesn’t need to be that long-term, big, lofty thing. Sometimes the business, our communities, or our peers or stakeholders need something really small and simple. Let’s unpack what do our stakeholders, our training requesters, our clients need at a basic level? I don’t think that we do a good enough upfront analysis to be able to clarify what’s the difference that we really need to make here?

Alaina Szlachta: [00:09:54] Sometimes it’s a lot less complex than we might think it is, so we sometimes overcomplicate things, and we don’t need to. I would say impact might feel like this long-term aspirational thing, but sometimes impact is just we want people to feel more confident in their role. Well, we can measure that. But, before we measure the difference in that, we also need to know what’s the thing that’s going to make them more confident, and what’s the problem that’s making them not feel confident? If we don’t have that information, we’re not going to be able to make a difference. We might offer something else, and maybe they like it, but it’s not necessarily going to make them feel more confident or address the root cause of that. I’m a big fan of data literacy, and I’d like to think that what I offer, my passion and mission in the world, is helping people feel more confident working with data and telling stories. But we have to do a better job investigating what’s the real problem so that we can prove if we made a difference solving that problem.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:53] I’m taking that as being serious about your initial analysis. Whether you’re somebody who buys into the traditional ADDIE design process or not, that analysis part is still very important, regardless of what you’re doing. I know that you’re a believer in building the opportunity for measurement and evaluation into the instructional design in the first place. You can’t measure what you haven’t built for, basically.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:11:22] That’s right. It’s really difficult to do it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:24] Yes, very difficult to do it. That’s something that a lot of organizations struggle with, though, particularly in our world, because they’re running a conference with all these different sessions, they’ve got this online stuff going, and having the discipline, the consistency to back up and say, “We’re going to do that analysis. We’re going to build in that opportunity for measurement and evaluation in the things that we’re developing.” Any tips/insights into how organizations can get their arms around that a little bit better?

Alaina Szlachta: [00:11:52] First, to the analysis part, I don’t use the ADDIE model. In fact, I didn’t even learn about the ADDIE or the SAM model until I went to the corporate world. I want to say to listeners there are a lot of other approaches to learning design and investigating solutions and how learning plays a role in community and business challenges. I think the ADDIE model focuses too much on the learning side of things, and that forces us into learning objectives that are about what knowledge people need to demonstrate they have. The analysis is about “What’s the problem that we’re trying to solve?” Not “What’s the best modality for the learner?” A lot of times we think we’re doing an analysis, but we’re actually doing a training needs analysis, which is, “What’s the best training design to make the learner feel like it’s a relevant experience?” That’s well and good. But that’s not an analysis of “What problem is training and learning supposed to solve for the individual participant and for the organization that you’ve come in, as a consultant, to be able to support?”

Alaina Szlachta: [00:13:02] And so, to your question about what are some tips here, I just had a conversation with a colleague who does cost-reduction analysis for organizations, and I asked him about his business model. They’re not in learning, but they are an organizational development tool, just like learning is an organizational development tool. This perspective is meant to help the business make sure that they’re not overspending. The value in that is we want to make sure that we have a great profit-to-loss ratio. And so he goes in, and he does this in-depth investigation. For learning business leaders, how we do our proposals, and how we decide we want to be compensated, I think there’s an opportunity for us to think differently about that. Instead of doing a proposal for “Here’s the training program,” maybe part of the proposal is, “We’re going to do an in-depth investigation of what’s the problem, and how can learning potentially be a tool for solving that problem?”

Alaina Szlachta: [00:14:06] But part of the proposal is getting access to the data. You can’t do a true analysis unless you’ve got hard data and evidence that helps you, as the consultant, to understand what’s really going on here. A lot of times, people want third-party perspectives because they’re not biased by the internal institutional history or anything internal that might bias your perspective. External expertise is valuable to help shed light on something that internal employees and leaders just can’t see the way that you can. So why not build that analysis into your proposal? Get access to the data, those key performance indicators or other data points that help you reflect as a mirror back to your client: “Here’s the problem that I see. Does this resonate with you?” And then you build into your proposal, “This is going to be a one- to three-year contract, and we’re going to be monitoring right along there with you how those KPIs are changing over time and how people’s performance and behaviors are changing over time and how training has played a role in that change.”

Alaina Szlachta: [00:15:15] We need to advocate for a different way of how we work with our clients, which is to be like, “Hey, training is not the silver bullet here. It is a sliver of a larger pie in how we help organizations. And, in order for us to help you see how we’re moving the needle, we all need to be looking at the same data together to make smart choices about what the business needs to invest in to continue optimizing and solving those problems.” The tip here is to think differently about how you do business with your clients, and don’t let lack of access to data…because you’re not an internal employee. Do your proposals, do your scope of work differently. And maybe you get people to push back. But here’s the thing—the ones that don’t push back, you’re going to have such wild, effective results that the business case that you then present to future clients is going to sell itself. So all you need to do is find one company who is willing to bring you in as a true partner, not just a vendor—a longer-term partner in solving business problems. You have access to the data. You’re looking at it with your client together. Over time you get one of those winners, and you talk about that case study to prospective clients. I don’t imagine anybody is going to say no because of the power of the results that you deliver.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:40] I like that a lot. It’s very true in our world that, for example, if you’re in the education department in an association, you’re thinking about education. You’re not thinking about the broader picture necessarily of, say, membership and research and publications and other things that are going on in the organization. Or you’re in an academic continuing education unit, and you’re not thinking about how your work might align with the larger degree focus of the institution, the alumni program, all of those different things—really thinking through that. Now, you’ve mentioned data a number of times; I want to focus in on that. Before I do that, though, I’m going to do an acronym check because I broke my own rule and threw out an acronym without defining it: ADDIE. Most listeners probably know what ADDIE is, but I don’t want to assume that everybody does. Analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation—the classic steps to an instructional design model, which, as you indicated, some people use. It’s fallen out of favor, I think, with a lot of instructional designers, but you need to know what it is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:48] How do you think about data literacy? What are the types of data that are important? How do we get better about gathering the right data? What do we then do with that data? A lot of times I encounter organizations where they’re like, “We got a lot of data. We’re not sure what to do with it. Our LMS has this stuff. What do we do with this now?”

Alaina Szlachta: [00:18:07] Yes, and that exact phrase, “We’ve got a lot of data. We don’t know what to do with it,” that came out when I did my study of professionals in and around learning. What was their biggest challenge when it comes to telling the story of what came about because you invested in learning? Lots of people said, “We actually have a lot of data. We have access to data, but we just don’t know what to do with it.” That’s where I think let’s break down data for a moment. You asked me to define measurement and evaluation at the start of this conversation, but we didn’t unpack data. There’s a false narrative around data that forces us to think about data as the quantitative, numerical side of things, and that’s a piece of the data equation. But, actually, data artifacts live in and around us all the time.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:18:59] Jeff, this conversation is a data artifact. When we have informal meetings with clients, internal employees, or peers, that’s data. Getting our heads wrapped around what are we doing and why? Going back to that impact hypothesis, we don’t have a clear hypothesis that helps to shed light on what data do we need to prove and test this hypothesis. Because there’s a lot of data that’s not going to be useful. I’m going to say something that I think people need to hear more and more and more, and that is your learning management system or your learning experience platform, the data that comes out of those platforms, is usually not the data that you need to tell that story of what came about because we invested in a learning program. Oftentimes the data does exist, but it exists in ways that we need to think creatively about harnessing that.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:20:00] For example, somebody worked in a construction company, and they didn’t have any formal measurement in place, and they needed to know what are the problems that are experienced in the field, and how can learning be a part of developing people so that those problems don’t persist? One of the data artifacts that could be the most useful—and not only the analysis side of the equation but also when we do our upfront analysis, the data artifacts that we use to understand the problem. Those are usually the same data artifacts that can help us see if we solved the problem. A lot of times, your upfront analysis is giving you where do I look to see if we made a difference? Back to the construction story. Informal conversations were happening regularly on the field between the management and the field staff. They were meeting regularly, but there was no way to harness those conversations. Because in those conversations were some of the problems that were coming up, some of the solutions that were being talked about, the results of the solutions, and how we keep tweaking them. Those conversations were the best data artifact to help the learning team figure out what are the problems, how can we help with that.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:21:19] So the question becomes, “How do we collect that conversational data?” And so then the conversation becomes, “Could we have one of the foremen or one of the managers actually have a recording device?” And it’s their job every time they have an informal conversation, “Hey, let’s record this” because the organic conversation is such great insight to help the organization support the field workers. And that little tweak…. Now, then you can imagine, okay, yes, we have all this narrative, qualitative data, which is more relevant to the use case, but what do we do with it? Well, that’s where AI comes into play. AI is so good. Today we have the tools, and we’ve had them in the past, but today we have the tools that make working with that narrative data so much easier.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:22:12] A lot of times those tools are free, or they have great free trials, so there’s no longer an excuse to say, “Hey, the data is too difficult or cumbersome.” It’s probably that you’re not figuring out how to narrow what are the most appropriate data artifacts, and then how do we harness it if it’s not already being collected? How do we creatively figure out…? And sometimes that’s like having a conversation with the manager of the team and saying, “Do you mind using this recording device and pressing record when those conversations happen? Because the business needs that insight.” And, if the manager is appreciative of the extra support, they’ll do it and without much extra effort on their part. So it’s a lot of creative thinking that I think is needed to help us use data more effectively.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:00] That is a great segue into artificial intelligence, and I would love to hear more of your thinking around that. With respect to those sorts of data points, that more qualitative data, informal, conversational-type data, recently, I’ve been finding it very powerful to…. We have transcripts of so many things. A transcript will exist because of this conversation. We’ve had 500+ conversations on the Leading Learning Podcast, and we do all sorts of other meetings and that sort of thing. Within our own organization, we’ve got a lot of data from conversations that can be used. And something I’ve been doing—I’m hardly the only person doing this—is having conversations. And I use ChatGPT.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:40] You can use one of the other large language models, but I’ll have a conversation with ChatGPT that’s starting more with what does ChatGPT know about whatever I’m trying to get to? How can I make it understand the outcomes that I’m looking for from whatever data that I’m going to give to the large language model? And then finally get to the point of uploading transcripts or whatever and saying, “Okay, based on what you know, what we’ve discussed about what we’re trying to achieve here, look at this data and analyze it, and come back with X, Y, and Z. And give it a plan.” If you’re thoughtful about how you’re engaging with the AI, with the data you have available, I’m amazed at what you can actually get out of it. That’s one example of being able to use AI, building on what you were saying, Alaina. How else do you see artificial intelligence being used, both to analyze data and then for that measurement and evaluation, that larger goal of evaluating whether learning is achieving the impact or not? How do you see AI being leveraged?

Alaina Szlachta: [00:24:39] The world of AI, I think it is overpowering another AI-ish tool. It’s not AI, actually; it’s just a technology tool, and that’s automation. I think AI and automation are working hand in hand these days. Sometimes your automation is part of what makes AI possible in terms of doing more powerful analysis and support for the organization. Segueing away from AI for just one moment. If we take the 100-foot view of learning…. One of the podcasts I listened to before you and I had this conversation, one of your podcasts was like, “What is learning, and how do we be more effective at facilitating it?” For me, learning is happening all the time, and you all mentioned that in your podcast. I think we do a disservice by trying to measure the learning intervention or event, and we try to measure before and after this one program. Actually, what’s happening during that program is just a small piece of the entire experience that an employee or a person is having in their life or in the workplace. Learning is happening all the time.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:25:55] We could use automation to take that 100-foot perspective and say, “If we want people’s performance to change, what are all the ways that we need to support someone?” A formal learning event is a piece of that. But manager conversations, peer groups, unpacking and problem-solving together, job aids, intranets, chat bots—a lot of organizations now have AI agents that are built to sit on top of the organization’s policies, procedures, all kinds of data and content that’s basically from the intranet. You could ask questions of that AI tool. For example, “How do I fill out a form to request two weeks off?” All of that up to “What’s the way that I deal with a challenging client who wants a full refund, but they’re beyond their refund period?” There are a lot of experiences and touch points in that very large experience of learning and performance.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:27:03] If we use automation, think of an e-mail marketing campaign. Many of us have worked with marketing tools, and we can create a marketing campaign. The moment somebody goes to our Web site, and they click on this, then based upon what they clicked on, they get this other series of things, and we can build out this automated journey. If we do that same thing, thinking about the life, not the lifetime because that’s overwhelming, but a period of time in which learning is unfolding relative to a certain performance expectation, let’s look at that and figure out what are all the ways that we could automate some of those touchpoints or automate did something happen or not? A manager meeting with their employee to maybe process what they experienced in learning and what they feel like they’re going to do differently because they invested in a 60-hour training program. And then maybe there’s an accountability worksheet that gets filled out. How do we capture all these different points in time that help us to see what’s helping people develop their performance or what’s getting in the way?

Alaina Szlachta: [00:28:14] Maybe the manager doesn’t have time to meet with the employee within the first one, two, or three weeks after the program. And then, as we know, we forget—the learning curve—we forget some of those new things. And so how do we capture those moments where we could have done a better job of facilitating and keeping the performance and development top of mind? We can use automation to capture data points on “Did that meeting with the manager happen or not?” And then that could trigger an e-mail that says, “Hey, learning team or operations team, so-and-so manager didn’t meet with this staff member within that three-week period post-training to talk about the experience. Let’s follow up with them so that the momentum is not lost.” We can use technology to help us capture and support that longer-term process of learning that’s not in the classroom, and that’s not the formal piece of the puzzle.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:29:10] Now, Jeff, I know you’re probably thinking, “Well, what about people who are vendors, and they don’t have those same touchpoints?” Part of the proposal is helping the organization to think through and capture the most meaningful touchpoints, and, if you build the automation for them, or you help them to build it, you can get access to that data yourself and help them to make sure that those pieces are happening. Maybe you get copied on those e-mails when manager meetings don’t happen so that you get the same insight that they do, and that helps improve your own process, your service, and product. There’s a lot we can do with automation that creates good, insightful data to help us be more effective. That is not at all the AI equation, but I think we get too excited about AI, and we forget that there are other things that we can do that give us great data to help us be more effective.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:14] Often that long-term impact is very difficult, particularly outside of the context of a single organization or a corporation. For example, if you’re serving learners who are dispersed all over the place—it’s a membership base, or it’s the students in a state or region—you don’t have the same kind of access to them. But we do talk a lot about building learner journeys, building learner pathways, which any type of learning provider can do and can use the technology and the automation that goes with the technology to say, “Okay, we’re going to take you through the steps of this career path over time,” for example. And we’ve got that programmed into the LMS and some combination of the LMS and the marketing tools so we’re sending out reminders about X, Y, and Z and different opportunities and points where you might want to take an assessment or have a conversation with your manager that you record or whatever it is. You can lay out, over a very long period of time, with automation and technology supporting you in doing it what you want that learner to ideally be engaged with, that you’re able to track over time, and that produces a lot of data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:14] That can be daunting. Setting it up in the first place feels daunting, but you’ve got the tech and the automation to help you with that. As long as you know who the person is and can contact them, you’ve got that opportunity available. But then, if you’re able to take that data that you’ve accumulated over time and feed it back into an AI to help you analyze it so that you can do something with all that data you’ve got, that’s a pretty powerful equation. There are a lot of dots that have to be connected along the way there to make that work, but it’s not very far out of the reach of even smaller organizations to do that kind of thing at this point.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:31:47] Yes, and what’s great is that most of your listeners probably offer only…. Some folks might do bespoke programming and development, but I think most of us have what I call flagship programs that we do on repeat. You’re only investing maybe one time, and then you’re refining a bit over time, but you will get to a point where that upfront investment then pays off in spades. Don’t think of it like you have to be building this journey over and over again. If you build something one time, you can then duplicate that and adapt it for a different program. So you have a little bit of an upfront investment, but then it begins to pay off, and that takes the overwhelm a little bit out of it. One thing, Jeff, I wanted to say about how to take the overwhelm out of all the data that you get from those automations—I think this is something we overlook as an industry—and it’s milestones. If we take that 1,000-foot or 100-foot perspective on the learning that’s happening all the time in an organization and how a formal training program is just one part of that, and there are other informal things happening that’s facilitating the learning, what are the milestones that are essential for us to get the success that we want?

Alaina Szlachta: [00:33:09] And so I go back to that manager meeting example because I know that, when managers are supportive—and it doesn’t have to be a manager; it could be a senior peer; it could be a graduate of the program that’s checking in with the new graduates; it’s just someone that helps to process the experience and reinforces the large formal programming—we know that’s a critical milestone to somebody continuing in their development process. Let’s say we trigger did that check-in happen? That’s an important thing for us to capture. There may be other data points that are going, but what we want to know is, are those critical milestones unfolding in the way that we imagine or need them to get the results? So you’re looking at four or five critical data points. The first one is did people complete the program as it was designed? If someone only showed up to half of the programming, well, your first milestone wasn’t accomplished. What are you going to do about it? And that’s the other piece of this whole data equation. If you don’t have a plan for what you’re going to do with the data that you get, don’t collect it.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:34:21] Don’t put yourself through the hassle of building all of that if you don’t have the time, the resources, or the interest and motivation to do something with the data. If you’re not going to follow up with your clients and tell them, “Hey, folks aren’t completing the training,” or “They’re not checking in with their support person after training,” if you’re not going to be reporting that back, having the tough conversations about, “Okay, what do we do about it?” If you don’t have the bandwidth, the interest to do it, don’t collect the data. Be very honest about your capacity and capabilities around what you’re going to do with the data, and that makes everything else, again, less overwhelming and easier. Otherwise, you’re back to what you said earlier: “We have all this data. We don’t know what to do with it.” You should know what you’re going to do with that data before you even collect it because that makes it easy to streamline. What do we really need to emphasize and focus on as we build out all of these supports and structures?

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:15] Yes, and it goes back to your original basis in what is the impact we’re trying to achieve here, and what is the story to achieve that impact look like, and what are the data points that will tell us that that story is actually happening or how that story is happening? One thing I like about this too is organizations can get so caught up in content when it comes to learning. “We’ve got to build content. We’ve got to design content. We’ve got to publish content.” When you’re talking about things like, say, a manager conversation down the road, you’re not building content there; you’re providing for substance because you’re (A) saying it needs to happen, and (B) you’re providing some questions that might be relevant to that conversation. But the content is the learner and the manager talking, and then you’re just capturing that and being able to do something with that data. If you’re thinking in terms of the longer range and the story and how data is going to support the story, you can start thinking in terms of those substantial touchpoints that don’t necessarily involve you having to invest in building a whole bunch of content and making it all feel heavy and complicated.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:36:21] It’s a little bit challenging for us as providers and learning businesses because what we can control is the content. We want to invest so much in having great, quality content. But I push back on that, and I would say your content is useful in making sure that it’s relevant and it solves the problem that you’ve discovered, but what’s more important is your investigation of “Is the context and the environment currently supportive of the investment in your program?” Because, if the environment isn’t supportive of that, it’s going to be a waste. Some of the things to consider would be asking your client how involved, historically, have managers been in supporting employees, in reinforcing and having conversations about training programs in the past? If your client says, “Oh, our managers are way too overloaded; they’ll never do that.” Red flag. The second thing, “What else do you guys have going on right now that are big initiatives? Because we want to make sure the timing is right.” If the client says, “Well, we’re rolling out this; we’re changing our technology provider, and so all the staff have to go through this other training, and it’s mandatory,” blah, blah, blah, that tells me that now is not the right time for the employees to be taking yet another program. Because cognitive overload will prevent that program from being effective.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:37:49] You’ll have people dragging their feet like, “Oh my gosh, yet another program.” Even if your content and the learning experience are designed fabulously, people will be inherently resistant to it because of cognitive overload or competing priorities in the organization. There’s some stuff we can investigate upfront to help us and our clients pick the right time and have the right supports in place upfront to make that program effective. So my big takeaway for you all here is 80 percent of the outcomes and the effectiveness have to do with the environment and the context and its support of your program and the change that you’re trying to create through your program. I’d be investing a whole heck of a lot more time in that investigation and helping the client to support that complimentary environment over developing this robust, amazing learning program.

Jeff Cobb: [00:38:48] This being a show about learning, usually the people who come on are avid lifelong learners themselves. I want to ask you about some of your own approaches, habits, and practices related to your own lifelong learning. And, since you are a measurement and evaluation person, how do you think about the effectiveness of your own learning and whether it’s having the impact that you want?

Alaina Szlachta: [00:39:12] Yes, it’s a great question. One of the things that I do for myself—and because I’m a business owner as well—is research and development. I have a newsletter, I have a meetup group, and I get access to the perspectives, the challenges that my target audience is currently experiencing. When I see a trend on the rise, I’m like, “That’s an indicator. That’s a place I should go do some research and development, see what other people have done, what other models, theories, and perspectives might be out there.” And, if I don’t find something valuable, then I’m going to go write or build myself. One of the things I’m working on right now for my own continuing education is a pain point that a lot of us experience, and that is exactly what we talked about. It’s so funny. Full circle. I have a lot of data, but it’s not that I don’t know what to do with it; it’s that it’s really painful to do something with it because everything is manual.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:40:10] I am a solopreneur. When I get big projects, I do collaborate with other peers and contractors, but I’m the one managing my business and doing the majority of the client work. That’s why I love automation. I’m thinking a lot about automation right now to then basically have my automation be my second employee. I mentioned my meetup group. I want to be practicing what I preach, which is measuring some of the change that’s coming about for participants that come to that meetup regularly because the whole point of it is to get ideas and solutions to get you out of the weeds when it comes to measurement. If we’re being effective, folks should be being more effective themselves. One of the ways that I want to experiment—and I’ve got a partner that’s helping me in the implementation side of things—is building automations and some code to extract….

Alaina Szlachta: [00:41:07] At the end of my meetup, we talk about “What’s one thing different?” This is a great way to measure the intention and capture the ideas of what people will do because of the conversation, the class, or whatever you’re up to. I ask folks, “What’s one thing different that you’re going to do because of this one-hour conversation today?” That helps them to go, “What realistically could be that one thing that I do?” I purposefully do not use a survey tool. Now, it would be easy for me to ask folks to write in their one thing different because that would go to a Google sheet, and I could then analyze it with AI, with the themes, or dashboard it, whatever. But I believe that people share more honestly and authentically when they’re using their voice. Sometimes we process and share via conversation. I want to capture the auditory answers versus having people type. Plus, it’s at the end of the hour, and people probably don’t want to be typing, and they’re rushed, whereas, if they’re sharing via conversation.

Alaina Szlachta: [00:42:13] So I just record the last bit of our meetup, which is that one thing different, and I’m going to push it into a quarterly report that asks people to say, “Hey, you attended these sessions in the last quarter. You said this was your one thing different. Check how many of these did you do? And, for the ones that you did do, what became possible because of those actions? What unfolded?” Getting toward that longer term, I did this one thing, and what happened? And then the second question, “For the ones that you didn’t do, what got in the way?” That gives me really good data to continue to support the participants in my meetup, to support my own writing and exploration, but also it reflects back to my participants and gives them a chance to continue processing because we know that facilitating that processing and that critical thinking helps to facilitate learning. Again, back to your point of how I’m trying to integrate measurement in learning, this is one example of doing that, and I’m trying to get automation and AI to help build that quarterly report on autopilot so I don’t have to do it manually.

Celisa Steele: [00:43:28] Dr. Alaina Szlachta is the author of Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post Measurement and Evaluation with Alaina Szlachta appeared first on Leading Learning.

If the goal of so much professional learning is improving the skills and abilities of learners on the job, then why put theory and methods before practice opportunities? That question gets at the core of reflective practice-based learning, which is an approach that emphasizes practice before theory.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller, a learning and development expert, is passionate about helping educators and leaders create more practice-based, learner-centered experiences. In episode 435, Annasofie talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about how reflective practice-based learning works and how it’s being applied in various contexts, including her experience with the Danish defense. Celisa and Annasofie also discuss the importance of psychological safety in learning environments, emotional intelligence in leadership, and how self-determination theory aligns with reflective learning.

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.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:00:00] We want people to learn from their mistakes so they do better next time. We want them to reflect over practice so they can reflect in practice, but they will only do so if we have a high enough degree of psychological safety.

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

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

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:26] If the goal of so much professional learning is improving the skills and abilities of learners on the job, then why put theory and methods before practice opportunities? That question gets at the core of reflective practice-based learning, which is an approach that emphasizes practice before theory.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:45] Annasofie Wædeled-Møller, a learning and development expert, is passionate about helping educators and leaders create more practice-based, learner-centered experiences. In this episode, number 435, Annasofie talks with Celisa about how reflective practice-based learning works and how it’s being applied in various contexts, including her experience with the Danish defense. Celisa and Annasofie also discuss the importance of psychological safety in learning environments, emotional intelligence in leadership, and how self-determination theory aligns with reflective learning. Celisa and Annasofie spoke in August 2024.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] Reflective practice-based learning is an area of focus for you. What led you to choose that as a focus area?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:01:42] Reflective practice-based learning is something that I really started being interested in when working for the Danish defense. Because, at the end of the day, soldiers are practitioners, and when you work in Denmark, at least with reflective practice-based learning, it is the University College of Aalborg who invented that and who has been working with that and refining that approach for years. What this approach to learning and development does is that it takes practice before theory—what happens when you are solving your task, when you’re taking your classes, or when you are doing the job. That is the center and the starting point for the learning and development that takes place. Educators will look for those learning occasions, and that could be cases from practice, scenarios from practice. Whatever you may be—a registered nurse, a soldier, or you work with learning and development—you will look for occasions that call for learning and development. As an educator, the first thing I would do when starting a class, a lecture, or doing my curriculum is share a story or something that took place in practice.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:03:06] Not all educators like it, but I like to use the narrative. I like to use the story because we have a tendency to lean in to when someone’s telling us the story about something that took place in practice. If you think about it, it’s really just a way of also working with embodied learning. You are looking for the embodied emotion. It could also be any sort of obstacle course that you have your students or your participants do first. I’m going a long way around to say have them have an experience first before you do anything else, and, of course, you want them to experience something related to what you would like for them to acquire of knowledge, skills, and competencies, but you will do so in order to create what we call the “teachable moment.” An example that I like, even though it’s a bit dramatic of a teachable moment, is that young people joining gangs is a problem. We had really good, well-trained social workers trying to go out on the streets and connect to the young people and say, “This is bad for you. We have this program you should join,” but the success rate wasn’t very high in doing that.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:04:28] But, if you look for a teachable moment, and you put all your resources and all your well-trained people into the situation where you have a young person waking up in a hospital room, gathered around is the family, grandma’s worried, and you say, “We have this problem to get you off the street and not be in a gang.” I know this is a bit dramatic, but, for the sake of the argument, that’s a teachable moment. As educators, if we start with, “So this is my course, and this is what I would like for them to know,” I will instantly just start telling them things. I will start pouring knowledge in their direction. But several things are wrong with that. Number one, knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to action. If it did, look at where we would be because we have all the knowledge accessible to us, don’t we? It’s on your phone. We’d all be rich and healthy with six packs if knowledge led to actual practice or actual behavior. But it doesn’t. And also, if you don’t create a teachable moment, you don’t have the need to learn and to develop, so you take the autonomy away from the learner.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:45] In some of those examples, it’s a bit about learning in the flow of work and life. You were talking about the teachable moment, but then it also seems like you were suggesting that it can also be created, that it could be more of…even if you’re going to have a seminar that’s going to happen on a particular day and time, which isn’t necessarily tied to each specific learner having a moment of need right then because this is going to happen on Wednesday at noon, but that you could still tap into the idea of not leading with theory. Because, by telling that narrative, by telling that story, getting someone to emotionally engage, you’re beginning to create that curiosity or their own internal desire or acknowledgment of “Yes, I do need to know more. This is interesting.” Is that true—you can either wait for the learner to have that realization and then have a resource available in that moment, or you can try to create that receptivity to learning, try to create that teachable moment? Is that correct? Is that fair?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:06:47] Yes, that’s absolutely what you would do because, in the best of all worlds, it would happen naturally. You will constantly, as an educator, think of yourself as a designer of learning opportunities. Don’t be so caught up in “What do I want them to know?” because that leads to “What can I tell them?” But think about “What do I want them to experience? What do I want them to feel? What do I want them to acknowledge?” Of course, that is quite humbling as well. But being able to think like a designer, that’s what I do, and that’s what I encourage everyone to do. Constantly look for those occasions. Gather. If you hear a story, write it down. If you hear a podcast or a conversation, note that down. If you see a clip of a film or a movie, save that as well. I have a huge repertoire of learning occasions, and also, when I teach myself, it’s very rare that I ask people to read things beforehand, but what I will ask them to do is to share learning occasions, experiences, or stories from their own practice. I will gather these as well. As an educator, as you think of whatever course that you are responsible for, whatever curriculum you might have, look at where would be a good point to collect stories from the learners’ practice and have them hand it in beforehand, and you can use it when you want. I did that. I taught a bunch of cadets how to lead learning.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:08:24] Before the course started, what I did was quite briefly explain how do you write a case? You need a setting; you need some interaction; you need some people present; you need something to happen, conflict, and a few examples. And then they just wrote situations that they have seen in their training of learning occasions that either were really, really good—learning really took place here; this was a great situation—or a situation where learning was dropped on the floor. And they came up with so many brilliant cases, and I could use that. I could look at what would I like for them to discover? What would I like for them to feel, to acknowledge, to experience? I just use their own cases. If you use the participants own cases, you make sure that this is true to practice. And, if it didn’t happen to you yet, it will probably happen to you soon. With that acknowledgment, it’s more their levels of proficiency and what they need in terms of learning and development—what knowledge, skills, and competencies do they need to acquire next?—and they’re behind the steering wheel.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:40] 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: [00:10:16] Is this an approach to learning that really does require that human facilitator, that human educator, to be responsive and in the moment? Or have you seen this potentially work in an asynchronous, more e-learning-type approach? Could one apply that there as well?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:10:32] When you look at reflective practice learning, when learning is taking place—meaning we will become better in the future—the difference also lies in the research of Donald Schön: reflection in practice and reflection on practice. Reflection in practice is when we’re seamlessly, fluently able to navigate in solving the task. For instance, if you and I were having a conversation, and I’m trying to come across with this point of whatever, and I have a faint idea we’re going to end over there, that’s the goal of the conversation, but I can see it’s not going well. Maybe I can see by your eyebrows, the way you clench your eyes a little bit, and I can hear it in your voice this is not going in the direction that I want. I’m going to change my example. I’m going to check my body language. I’m going to ask you more questions to get a feel of what you’re at—that’s navigating in practice. The bigger the repertoire, the more efficient you are, the more expertise you will have. That’s reflection in practice.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:11:44] Reflection on practice is what happens afterwards—after the conversation has ended, or the one you were trying to talk to has stormed out the door. Then you will reflect over practice, and the better you are at reflecting over practice—what didn’t go as planned, what didn’t go according to plan, and why—the better you are at that discipline, the more you build up your repertoire of being able to navigate in different situations that you find yourself in solving your tasks. Basically, that’s what needs to be present in reflective practice learning—that practice is the starting point; it’s the center point, but it’s reflection over that enables us to reflect in. We don’t need to necessarily be a teacher to do that; just two coworkers who are doing a project together can do that as easily. One of the researchers, Mads Hermansen, behind this theory, he puts it like this: A lot of reflection simply doesn’t take place because we can’t stand ourselves. We can’t stand the fact that the good that we wanted to do turned out not to be great at all.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:12:59] Instead of being in that situation, you and I, maybe we had a project; the idea was great. Let’s say it was the best idea ever. “This project is going to be great.” And it wasn’t. We failed along the way. Of course, that’s really painful and very fragile and vulnerable to go into that room. A lot of reflection doesn’t take place because we can’t stand ourselves. The thing is, if you set out to do that, and if you—wherever you work or study—know that this is what we need to do in order to learn from what takes place in practice, the next time we will be so much better. We will not repeat the same errors that we already made, which people do. We know this from Kahneman as well: optimism bias. It’s a strong one. Next time we’ll get a project that’s similar, and we’ll go, “The last time wasn’t that bad.”

Celisa Steele: [00:13:55] Define for us psychological safety and its role in learning. Why is it important in terms of learning?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:14:01] I stumbled upon psychological safety when I was trying to look for that missing link for reflective practice-based learning because, in the defense, we have structures to support reflective practice-based learning. We have after-actions review. We have lessons identified, lessons learned. But the thing is, if we want these structures to work, it will need a high enough level of psychological safety to be able to learn from what took place in practice, especially the things that we hoped were different. Psychological safety is based on the work of Dr. Amy Edmondson, and it has gone like a whirlwind over Denmark. When I talk about psychological safety, I normally start with saying—and this is directly a quote from Dr. Edmondson—“It’s about the ability to be comfortable in the uncomfortable.” In the Danish translation, we won’t go there now, but it sounds a lot like, “Let’s all be friends. Let’s have a good time,” which is great by all means—be friends and have a good time—but that’s not the essence of psychological safety.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:15:16] Basically, it is the belief, in a team, that you can speak your mind. You can be honest about your doubts, your suggestions, your mistakes, and your new ideas without the fear of being excluded, ridiculed, being frowned upon because you know from experience that it’s worth that risk. It’s very important to always remember, when you work with psychological safety, to understand the social aspect of why is it difficult? Psychological safety is when you are able to be uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable is that you are willing to take interpersonal risks. This is what we constantly do when we have to be honest with one another. To understand that, as social beings, as human beings, we are hardwired to do everything we can to stay in the group. We do not want to be excluded. We do not want to be the ones eaten by the saber-tooth. We need to stay in that group, like our lives are dependent on it.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:16:20] Of course, you have strategies for staying in that group, for not being excluded, and, if you look at it like that, who do you want to exclude? Well, we don’t like people too pushy. If you don’t want to come across as pushy, you don’t suggest things. You don’t come up with new angles or new ideas. “Let’s do that. I know, we said in this meeting two weeks ago, that we were going this direction, but now, come to think of it, I think that would be a bad idea. Maybe we should go in that direction.” If I don’t want to come across as uncertain, insecure, and not worthy of my job or my position, don’t express doubts. Don’t say, “I’m not sure. What do you think we should do? Because I’m not really sure. I’m in over my head here a little bit.” Of course, if you don’t want to seem like you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t admit to errors. You don’t admit to failures.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:17:17] These are pretty good strategies for not being excluded from the group, but, the thing is, it hinders learning. If you don’t have a high enough degree of psychological safety, you talk about what you dare talk about, not what’s important, not what you actually need to talk about. Everybody is so interested in psychological safety because it is the clearest link to high-performance teams. But what they are able to do is to develop antifragility, if we use Taleb’s term here, which means that bad things can happen, but we’ll still learn from it. I like antifragility because, normally, we talk about being robust—“I want people to be robust.” Robust is the ability to take a hit from the side and just get up and soldier on. What we want is antifragility. We want people to learn from their mistakes so they do better next time. We want them to reflect over practice so they can reflect in practice, but they will only do so if we have a high enough degree of psychological safety.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:30] How can we promote psychological safety? I’m thinking, for our listeners, that can mean within their teams internally but also with those learners that they’re bringing together to help them learn something new. How can they help those learners or their teams or both feel that psychological safety so that they do feel like they can engage, that they can share their mistakes, and we can all then therefore learn from them?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:18:55] I look for learning occasions, steal cases and stories, but I also like quotes. I collect them as well. I think one that really nails it is Scott Stratten. He says something like, “You’re not a team unless you have each other’s back; then you’re just a bunch of random people working for the same person.” Have each other’s back—what does that look like? That’s a conversation you need to have in a learning community or a community of practice. There are five steps you can use. I mentioned Christian Ørsted before. Amy Edmondson works with three steps; he works with five. What I really like about this is he starts with the task in hand. So we are a group of learners or a group of workers—what are we trying to achieve here? What is the task in hand? What does it look like when we’re doing a good job? That’s step number one. Make sure you have that in order because that’s very different from situation to situation, from team to team. It’s not something that’s the same all over. What are we trying to do here? As a soldier, is this a day at the office, or are you in a combat zone? The way you lead will be very different. The way you communicate will be very different.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:20:14] I find that a lot of times when working communities don’t work really well, it’s helpful to go back and say, “What are we trying to solve? What does it look like when we’re doing a good job?” As an educator, facilitate, but have your students have that conversation. What is the task at hand? “Well, we’re trying to learn here,” for instance. Number two, who are the participants? Who are we? For instance, if we are in a learning situation, what we are learning is quite new, quite complex, and it’s also something where we are pushed to our limits, what personalities, what expertise, and what experience are we putting in the mix? Have a talk about who are you as a person. What do you bring to the table? A lot of people like to talk about learning preferences. By all means throw that in the mix as well. Who are we dealing with here? Number three would be framing the house rules? What we’re trying to do and who we are, what would be some good house rules?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:21:27] House rules will be the rules for how we communicate, how we cooperate. And also, if we spend more time together, what are the rules here? Have them give concrete behavioral examples. What does that look like? If we disagree on something, how do we solve it? If something goes awry, how do we talk about it when we disagree? If somebody loses their cool, how do we address that? Do we have a 24-hour rule for getting back to a conflict that happened? So we have: What’s the task? Who’s participating? What house rules do we need? And then you have your students train inclusive behavior. Basically, how do we invite people in? And that could be as simple as asking questions, having a plan for inviting other people, listening to their suggestions.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:22:29] For instance, if you have a study group, there are always a few people who’ll always be the first to talk. Then maybe you need a plan for how you begin your conversations. You need a plan where you say, “For our work group, if we have a new task in hand, we will all spend five minutes on brainstorming, and then we’ll share our ideas because it’s always these two who take the reins and then go. The rest of us are like, ‘We didn’t even see what was happening.’” So having a conversation about that as well. And then you have number five, which is committing to how will we respond to what we hope were different? That’s really important as well because you can have all the good intentions, but you need a plan for how to cope, how to talk about, how to address when it goes wrong. Because it will. People working together, right? There’s nothing wrong with that. We just need a plan before it actually happens.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:27] These five steps then can help a group of individuals coming together to work or to learn create that sense of psychological safety because then everyone’s clear about the task, everyone’s clear about who’s participating, and then they’re clear about all these behaviors, these rules that are going to govern behavior, making sure to be inclusive, and then being clear about how to respond. It sounds like potentially a lot of work to lay that out and get that right as a group. Or do you see this happening pretty quickly, potentially?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:23:59] It can. I have done this in 15 minutes. I think it’s so important because learning is a delicate matter. Maybe hardcore training, that’s not as delicate, but learning is. And making sure that you have a good learning environment is crucial. What you give them when you support or facilitate that conversation pretty much is common sense. What people come up with is common sense. It’s like, “Let’s listen. Let’s ask questions. Let’s not interrupt. If something is starting to go off a little bit, let’s take a step back.” Common sense. But what you give them in supporting that conversation is that they can do what you call reframe the rules. It’s very difficult to say, “Annasofie, you’re interrupting again,” and “Don’t be too pushy.” That’s difficult. But, if we already have that conversation, it’s very, very easy. Not true, but it’s easy to say, “Annasofie, I can see you getting excited now, which is good, but we all agreed that we wanted to take turns, and I think we should let Thomas finish what he was trying to say.” Making a good learning environment is not about you being wrong, but it’s about we already agreed on how we want things, and we will respectfully, lovingly, in a friendly manner help each other to be true to these rules because we know that’s what’s best for our working community, a learning community.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:37] I would love to get your take on how self-determination theory aligns with reflective practice and what role autonomy plays in motivating adults who are going to be engaging with the learning.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:25:53] Self-determination theory is not by any means new. It’s invented by Deci and Ryan back in the ‘80s, and, because of Professor Ib Ravn here in Denmark, it is taking a renaissance, and I think it deserves that revival, that renaissance because we see a lot of learning not taking place. A lot of motivation that seems to be lacking both in educational contexts and in working contexts all over the world—a lack of motivation and a lack of thriving. If you look at self-determination theory, which is a motivational theory, it can provide some of the answers to why. Where did that motivation go? Where did that thriving go to? It’s important to distinguish between inner motivation and outer motivation. Outer motivation is the stick-or-carrot situation, and we also talk about…in a weird way, we talk about motivation as a quality, like, “You don’t have so much. That’s not good. Maybe we should provide you with more,” thinking that it’s solely external factors, and the external factors that we look for are either praise or punishment. “You don’t seem motivated. What if I give you some more money? What if I give you a prize? Employee of the week. Gold star. Good grade.” All outer phenomena.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:27:20] Or maybe I should try to punish you a little bit. Maybe you don’t solve the test, then maybe you can’t work with that person. Maybe you don’t get as much money. Maybe you get a bad grade. To some, it will ring a bell: “That sounds like behaviorism.” Which is true. What has been proven is that good, strong inner motivation that we all have—we’re human beings; we’re naturally curious. We are driven. We want to learn. We want to do better. We get excited about things. But a lot of research has been carried out, and it all showed that the more you focus on outer motivation, the more you ruin the good inner motivation. So every time you steer our attention to outer factors, outer motivation, we go, “Oh, why does she get a raise? I want a raise. I want a promotion. I deserve a good grade,” and then we tend to not focus on we’re doing this because it’s meaningful; we’re doing it because it caught our interest. We do it because we’re curious. When you talk about self-determination theory (SDT), it’s very much to do with inner motivation. This is what we focus on. Quick note: If we look at outer motivation—that I had so many bad things to say about—if you look at how the education system is built up, it all has to do with the grades.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:28:45] We don’t learn biology because it’s important. We don’t learn history because we need to understand our past to understand our future. This is important. This is exciting. No. You need a good grade. And the same if you look at workplaces. Most workplaces, it’s all about outer motivation as well. Self-determination theory is a way that enables educators and leaders but also teams as well to work with inner motivation as a means to be motivated and to thrive, in your education or your work. It’s a trinity. If you think of it as a bar stool on three legs, you have the three areas that you will focus on. The first leg is what we normally spend the most time on. It’s not the most important, not according to Deci and Ryan. They’re all equally important. But we like to talk about the first one pretty much because it’s what we’re not succeeding in. The first one is autonomy. In order to be motivated and driven in finding your work or your studies meaningful, you need to be behind the steering wheel. In a learning and development context, that means that you need to have a leadership or an educator that enables you to use your expertise, to use your knowledge, skills, and competencies, to use whatever you might have in your backpack.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:30:15] In SDT, you will look for as much autonomy as possible. Not saying do whatever you want, but steer them in a direction and give them as much influence as you possibly can. Say, for instance, I think psychological safety is great, and I have some students. I have a course. Let’s teach psychological safety. Instead of starting with, “Okay, so this is what I want them to know. This is what I’m going to tell them.” Instead I’m trying to connect some of the dots to where we started. I would look for the teachable moment. I would look for an experience. I’ll use a story. I’ll use a film clip. I’ll use a case. I’ll have them play out a scenario where they get a sense of psychological safety, and what does it mean if it’s a very low level in a team of psychological safety, for instance? And then I will be interested in what do they want to learn next? What is for them most important, and how would they like to go about it? Because I could be like, “Okay, read chapters 1 to 5 in The Fearless Organization, listen to this podcast, listen to my lecture, and then we’ll go on.” But I’ll listen to them. How do they want to work with it? Maybe they find it meaningful to call an expert. Maybe they want to read some of the original work of Amy Edmondson.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:31:39] There could be so many suggestions, but that doesn’t have to be left up to me. Of course, it could be that they go, “Well, we would actually like a lecture on this and that according to psychological safety.” But, again, where can I protect, so to speak, their autonomy? As a leader, if you’re working on a project, I’ll say, “I think you’d be great for this project. This is what it looks like now, but, with your expertise, what do you think that we should do? Is there something that you’re seeing? How do you want to execute it?” You start off by thinking, “How much influence can I give my learners, my coworkers, or my employees?” So autonomy. We’re behind the steering wheel. Number two is the need to feel competent, the need for competency. It’s not good if we are behind the steering wheel if we don’t know how to drive. As a leader and an educator, you will then provide whatever they need to be able to acquire knowledge, skills, and competencies. And, if we circle back to reflective practice-based learning, this is where theory comes in. This is where they’re ready to fulfill that need, but I will try to angle it in a way, as an educator, that we touch or angle at least what they ask for.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:32:58] And the third is—here we are circling back to psychological safety—we need to be a part of a meaningful community. This is where we’re the most motivated. This is where we have a tendency to thrive. We need a workplace, or we need a study group where we can show up every day and feel like we’re being treated well. We are being respected. We are being appreciated. We are being listened to. We need to feel listened to in order to feel like we belong. These are the three core needs, and, if they’re being fulfilled, you would see a lot of inner motivation in your learners, in your employees as well. How do you work with that? You use practice. You use examples from practice. You use casework. You use your narratives, your movie clips. You make sure, as an educator, you have your repertoire ready. You don’t necessarily have the whole plan for how this is going to play out, but most educators, if they have a course they’re teaching or a subject that they’re teaching, they will have it all in their repertoire. Maybe you, as an educator, decide, “Well, A is here, and then we’re going to end over there.” But that’s not necessarily the way the learners are more motivated, and that’s not necessarily the teachable moment. Have your students decide that.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:30] Talk a little bit about what might be the barriers to trying to tap into that internal motivation of the learners, allowing self-determination theory to be at work in what learning businesses are offering. What are those obstacles that you tend to see—and if you have solutions for how to work around some of those barriers and obstacles?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:34:51] Brilliant questions, also the hardest. I think there are definitely some barriers that derive from how we traditionally view the role of the educator, the oracle, the expert, the one with the plan. Not saying that educators shouldn’t have a plan; a plan is always good. But, as educators, teachers, learning and teaching using the approaches that we just talked about is not a traditional role of the educator. We like holding the reins. We like a more linear form of teaching. As I said, we start here, and then I have the whole plan, and you’re going to end over here. But, the thing is, it often leaves the learner passive, and that’s not what we want. Hence, acquiring knowledge, skills, and competencies, not being poured into. The traditional role as the teacher is what hinders us the most. I think it’s the uncertainty that teachers don’t appreciate. Where is that going to go? But, the thing, is they know because they know their subject so well. It’s not very often that something will fall outside your repertoire. Maybe you have something that you want to tell them that you find is really important, but, if there’s no teachable moment for it, chances are the knowledge that you pour in that direction without them having a need for it is just going to vaporize.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:36:21] Look for their motivation. What do they want to learn? What do they find interesting? And you will see a different form of energy. This is also what you need. Of course, as an educator, you know best. All educators know best—that’s just a rule of law. But sometimes we don’t. What we’re really good at is looking at our students, listening to our students, and seeing what are their learning and development needs? Where are they? I think most educators know their participants and know their zone of proximal development. They know that. They have a knack for that. They develop that throughout the years. And basically this is what you use in designing learning opportunities, in choosing what cases to use, what stories to tell them. The role of the educator but also the role as the learner. Over the years, we have been very keen to bombard our students with information. If you look at your students, and you see this grayish color in their skin, that’s because they’re fatigued from information overload, not just in class but everywhere. The way we design traditional teaching has taught learners to be passive and to be more or less numb recipients of knowledge being poured in that direction.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:37:43] They also need to have skin in the game to think that’s a good idea as well. You need to have that conversation with your students and say, “This is the way I would like to do things, but, in order to do that, you need to come out of your shells a little bit. I’m putting myself in a vulnerable situation because I don’t necessarily have all the answers. There will be some things where you suggest, ‘This is what we want to learn next.’ I’ll go, “Well, I think it’s important, and, if I look at the objectives from this course, it’s definitely relevant as well. Not this lesson. Maybe in a week we’ll get back to that.’” So what? Nobody ever said you’re a bad teacher because you said, “Let’s get back to that.” But training your students in wanting to reflect together, reflect on practice, to be willing to have the humbling experience that it is when you set out to do something and you’re not perfect at it.

Celisa Steele: [00:38:44] I do know that emotional intelligence is an area where you’ve given thought, and so I would love to get your perspective and thinking about our listeners, who are trying to lead the learning function at their organization and about what they’re offering out to prospective learners in the portfolio and then with their own team. Talk a little bit about how you see emotional intelligence, the role of it in leaders and potentially, if there’s any particular lens for learning leaders, what that role of emotional intelligence might be.

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:39:19] I think emotional intelligence is really important when you talk about learning and development. Being a leader or an educator, their learning and development is your responsibility. What is quite important is to be able to be a leader and educator who is very humble about what you do. Emotional intelligence has everything to do with what feelings do you drive for yourself, and what feelings do you drive for others? I don’t want to reel too far off the railway tracks. If you look at psychological safety in a work group or a group of students, what we find is the ones that have a high degree or higher level of psychological safety will have a high degree of what is called social sensitivity, which is basically the ability to listen and listen to understand, not just listen to respond or to attack or to ignore. So emotional intelligence. You will be very good at asking questions, understanding others, meaning, if a situation is starting to go awry—again, circling back to reflect in practice—I can see that this is not going where I want it to, so I will change it up a bit. As I said, psychological safety is the answer that I found. That was the missing link to reflective practice-based learning. Emotional intelligence is the missing link to leading psychological safety.

Celisa Steele: [00:40:59] We always like to ask guests who come on about their own approach to lifelong learning, how they approach it. I’m especially interested in your answer, given everything that we’ve already talked about and how much awareness you have of what goes into effective learning. But are there habits, practices, or sources that you use to continue to learn?

Annasofie Wædeled-Møller: [00:41:19] Yes. Different strokes for different folks, but I like podcasts a lot, and I think that’s definitely where I go to find new information. I listen to recommendations. “Check out this podcast,” and I always will. I like the conversation. I think listening to two people reflect together is so interesting. That’s where I get a lot of my knowledge from. I think I am blessed with having some brilliant people that I’ve worked with throughout the years. Just make sure, if you meet someone who’s really interesting and preferably doesn’t look like you or look at the world the same way you do, hang on to those with everything you’ve got. Make sure that you talk when you’re doing something new, when you look at a new project, give them a call, say, “This is what I’m looking at. Can we talk about this?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:42:22] Annasofie Wædeled-Møller is a learning and development expert on a crusade to help steer education and leadership in a more practice-based, learner-oriented direction.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post Reflecting on Practice with Annasofie Wædeled-Møller appeared first on Leading Learning.

As parents, as partners, as colleagues, as professionals, people are constantly being asked for some of their time, and learning businesses are part of the clamor for people’s time. Learning requires time, yet many people feel they don’t have enough of it.

How do learning businesses secure a share of people’s limited time, and how can they help learners make the most of the time they do invest? In this episode, number 434, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele focus on the small matter of time for learning and for learning businesses.

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.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Part of the value of any learning experience is determined by the return on investment of the time spent learning.

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

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:13] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] Hey, Celisa, do you have a minute?

Celisa Steele: [00:00:22] I’d say that depends on what it’s for.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:25] Yes, and there’s the rub. It seems like, as consumers, as parents or partners, as colleagues, as professionals, really just as individuals alive in today’s world, we’re constantly being asked for some of our time.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:40] And, as a learning business, we’re often part of the crowd clamoring for people’s time—we’re competing for the very limited resources of people’s time and attention.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] In today’s episode, number 434, we want to focus on the small matter of time when it comes to learning and when it comes to being in a learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:04] Time is one of the most valuable resources we have as humans. Learning requires time, yet many people feel they don’t have enough time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:16] Indeed. In conversations that we’ve had with learning business leaders over a very long period of time, it’s common to hear that their learners—whether they’re professionals in industries like healthcare, finance, or education or in any sort of field or profession—frequently struggle to find time for ongoing learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] I think that complaint about there not being enough time has been a big driver for different formats and learning businesses trying to try things out like microlearning, like podcasts. I was on a panel recently at CMEpalooza about CME podcasts, and a big part of the attraction of the podcast format for healthcare practitioners is that they don’t have to be at their desk, so that allows them to maximize their time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:04] Yes, and you mentioned microlearning. This is a huge driver of all the buzz around microlearning because people feel like, if you can get the learning into those short chunks that, maybe, just maybe, you can convince people to give up a little bit of their time for learning. But that brings us to a brutal truth when it comes to time and learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:23] Yes, it’s limited, and learning does require time. So we’ve got a double whammy there. We have to have it. If we’re going to help our learners learn, they have to spend some time, and they feel like they don’t have enough time. All of this leads to a double-barreled question, which is, how do learning businesses secure a share of people’s limited time, and then how can they help learners make the most of the time that they do invest with them?

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:52] Let’s start with that reigning truth that time is necessary for learning. We have to face that. That is a fact.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:02] Learning is not a quick-fix activity. Or, for some very micro skills, it could be a quick activity. But, in general, anything that you’re trying to do that’s going to result in deep learning requires sustained time and effort.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:16] Yes, we’re not quite at the Matrix yet. Whenever I see that movie, and Neo has to learn to fly a helicopter at some point, and they just plug him in, and he gets everything he needs—skills, knowledge, experience—to be able to fly. I look at that, and I’m like, “Wow, if somebody could plug that guitar knowledge in for me, I’d take it in a minute.”

Celisa Steele: [00:03:38] But we’re not quite there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:39] We’re not quite there yet.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:41] We know that there are things like spaced repetition and deliberate practice—those are evidence-based strategies—that we know are very effective for learning, and they’re also strategies that acknowledge the important role of time in learning. With spaced repetition, it’s this idea of revisiting key concepts, information, or skills periodically with deliberate practice. It’s also about making sure that, when you do carve out time for practice, that you’re practicing in an intentional and focused way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:10] The great thing about spaced repetition and deliberate practice is they start to tell us some things about how we can use time effectively, how we can make more effective use of our times. Time is essential, but many learners, as we know, are conditioned to seek out quick wins or cramming sessions. This starts in elementary school and high school, certainly goes into college, where you cram everything you can into a study period. And that can work in the short term if you just need to pass an exam. But, if you need to retain something, memorize it, be able to use it over time, that doesn’t work. Knowing that spacing things out, knowing that being deliberate starts to point towards how we might manage our time more effectively when it comes to learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:58] All of this speaks to our view that learning businesses have a role to play in helping learners shift away from a mindset of quick results to a more sustainable, time-conscious approach to learning and that learning businesses can help emphasize the value of creating a culture where the time spent on learning is seen as important and seen as an investment, not just as an expense.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:25] Right, and as a high-return investment because you’re going to tell them, you’re going to help them understand how to get the most out of that time investment so they really are learning. There’s that reality that we’re not going to help people learn if some time isn’t going to be used for learning. But then that does raise questions. People need their time for a lot of things. We are competing for learners’ time as learning businesses. How do we think about that?

Celisa Steele: [00:05:51] I think one important thing to realize is that, yes, we’re competing for people’s time, and we’re not just competing for their learning time. Very few people compartmentalize their time that carefully. Typically, what we’re competing with is also the time they have for work, the time they have for family, the time they have for exercise, the time they have for relaxation or entertainment. And so we’re not just competing against other learning providers; we’re competing against life.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:21] Yes. I wish I had the discipline to compartmentalize my time like that, where I could say, “Here’s the amount of time I have allotted this day at this period of time, and this is when I will plug in this learning business’s learning to help me.” But, as you said, that’s not what’s happening out there. Before we can hope to get a share of people’s time in most instances, because they haven’t necessarily said “This is the time when this is going to happen,” we have to get their attention.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:48] Yes. It’s challenging to get people’s attention because attention requires some time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:54] Right. There are a lot of things that want your attention. At the time of this podcast, we happen to be in an election season, and I don’t know how many messages I’m getting in my e-mail box, on my smartphone right now from candidates who want my attention. They want money. But that stuff is flowing all over the place—messages from friends and family, advertisements, and the stuff of life.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:16] Learning businesses can and should keep this time-strapped mentality that a lot of learners bring to your marketing, to your learning experiences in mind. When you’re developing, you’ve got to keep that reality, as unpleasant as it is, in mind because we have to recognize that our learners, for the most part, usually do feel very time-strapped.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:40] There’s an opportunity to build goodwill there if you are creating those bite-sized learning experiences, microlearning, which, generally speaking, is a good thing to be looking at. We’re in favor of well-done microlearning. If you’re creating asynchronous learning experiences so they’re not time-bound, if you’re creating mobile-friendly platforms, like podcasts, so they can be done at any time, first of all, you’re creating situations where learners do have some autonomy around when they’re going to engage with you and how they’re going to engage with you—a great practice from a learning business standpoint. But, by doing those things, you’re also automatically creating a certain amount of implicit goodwill that you understand these challenges that your learners have.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:23] This reality of how time-strapped our learners are has direct implications for formats that might show up in our portfolio. We also need to keep the time-strapped point of view or mentality in mind when we’re promoting our learning products as well because, again, that gets back to, even before someone’s going to engage with that microlearning segment that you have or listen to that podcast episode, you first have to get their attention. That means we also have to keep that in mind when we’re talking about the learning we’re hoping they will engage in, when we’re marketing and promoting it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:59] I see at least two sides to that, and there are probably more. But one is we’ve for a long time advocated good copywriting, knowing how to write in a way that is going to get people’s attention. We’ve talked about the AIDA model before and applying it to learning—attention, interest, desire, and action. Maybe you’ve got a marketing team you can count on to help you do that. If you do, then certainly work with them to do that. If not, then, within your learning business staff, as you’re writing those course descriptions, as you’re writing the e-mail messages you’re sending out, you’ve got to be able to write in a way that gets people’s attention or create videos in a way or however you’re messaging. And then, in the messaging itself, making it clear that you get it, that you understand that the time is valuable, and clearly conveying how, in whatever amount of time you’re asking for, you are going to deliver tremendous value. You’re going to help get that big return on investment as effectively and as efficiently as possible out of the amount of time that you’re able to get from that prospective learner.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:09] 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: [00:10:43] Implicit in what you’re saying there, Jeff, is that there’s both a quality aspect of time and a quantity aspect.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:50] We’ve been talking about how people feel time-strapped. That’s the quantity side. We can’t wave a magic wand and suddenly give people extra hours in the day. Making a sheer quantity argument of “Hey, you should spend more…”

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:06] “Buckle up.”

Celisa Steele: [00:11:07] “Buckle up. Yes, just spend more of your time learning out of your limited 24 hours a day,” that’s not going to get us very far. We need to shift the focus away from a discussion or edicts to just “Find time” to more about that quality of the time spent. It’s not just logging hours but engaging meaningfully with the material.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:29] The fact is high-quality learning experiences can actually reduce the time required for learning efficiently, learning effectively, by promoting deeper understanding and retention in less time—and that’s part of our role as learning businesses. We can enhance the quality of learning through interactive content, real-world application, or community engagement and using those tools that ensure, when the learner does have an interaction, that interaction has been very well designed to get learning results.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:04] That’s right. This is where we can rely on learning science. We can look at evidence-backed strategies and make use of those when we’re designing and delivering our learning programs. For example, building in practice and also allowing some autonomy in, say, a project that might be part of a learning experience—doing those things can help make that time spent contribute, yes, to deeper learning but also potentially to helping that learner get something done that they have to do for work anyway. You can then have that one hour of time, if that might be the example, doing double duty. Yes, they’re learning, and they’re also making progress on some tasks that they need to do for work. This is something we tried to do in “Presenting for Impact.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:48] Yes, definitely. Build that into your learning experiences. And remember too that, if you’re designing learning experiences well in the first place, and you’re taking advantage of the evidence-based, science-based approaches to it, you’re helping to provide the framework that’s going to give learners confidence, that is going to help them feel and see the progress they’re making. I know, in my own experience, for example, in trying to get better at the guitar—if you’re somebody who’s played a musical instrument, and this applies to all sorts of hobbies and avocations, you probably do a lot of floundering and noodling around over time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:25] We do this in our professional lives too, where we don’t really have the structure; we don’t really have the pathway; we don’t know what to focus on and how to focus on it in a way that’s going to really give results. At points in time I’ve been able to figure out, “Oh, if I engage in these types of activities in this way, spaced out over time, I’m going to see tremendous results.” And, once you do that as a learner, and you understand that that works, that that’s possible, and you find a source who can provide that for you on a consistent basis—which is what a successful learning business should do—you’re going to go back to that source because of the effectiveness, the efficiency, the return that you’re able to get off of the time that you’re spending in working with the learning opportunities that they’re providing.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:11] I think what you’re talking about there is that, if you can find a learning experience that helps you be intentional and that delivers that impact, you’re seeing those results pretty quickly, that’s, yes, a resource you’re going to want to go back to again. To explain a little bit more when I said that we do this in “Presenting for Impact,” we have a training, a course that we offer for instructors, and you can use the course independently to try to up your game as a presenter, but we also encourage folks going through it to actually work on a presentation as they go through it. Again, you have that one hour of investment in the course, but, if you’re coming out with a solid draft of a presentation you had to come up with anyway, then that hour spent does double duty.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:57] Part of that is educating the learner on why that little bit—because, in that case, we’re saying you could sit there for an hour and just watch, or you can invest a little bit more time actually doing this stuff as you go through it, and guess what, (a) you’re going to finish something that you need to finish, and (b) you’re going to retain it and be able to use it for so much longer—and making sure the learners understand that, when you’re making those asks, that there is a very concrete and high-value reason for it. We often don’t do enough to help our learners understand learning and be good learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:29] There’s probably a parallel in all of this with fitness. For the most part, people understand that, to get in better shape, they’re going to have to spend some time working out or exercising. Now, there may still be some snake-oil salespeople out there who say, “Here, just do this in your sleep or whatever,” but, for the most part, people who want to improve their physical fitness get that they have to spend some time doing that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:53] Yes, but then often in those cases it’s useful to have a coach. It’s useful to have somebody structure that for you, to help you spend that time in the right way. I go to a gym occasionally. I don’t know how many people I see, and they’re bouncing from machine to machine, and maybe they’re getting some results; maybe they’re not. They’re probably not going to be in the gym six months later because they haven’t really gotten where they want to go. But, as learning businesses, we can help provide the structure and the understanding for our learners to get the most out of the experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:22] We can be like the coaches or the personal trainers. We can be like the workout regimen that helps the learners get to that next stage.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:31] Part of what learning businesses can do in thinking through time is helping to think through what does time well spent look like in the context of learning? How can we, as learning businesses, frame our offerings so that learners do feel the time they spend is valuable and productive? We’ve been talking about some of the practical ways, but we can talk a little bit more about some ways that we’ve seen learning businesses do this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:59] Yes, we’ve been hinting at some of these things. For example, learning paths and curated content, these are ways to help get learners to the right content and then to the right next content efficiently and clearly. This goes back to the guitar example I was talking about. I’ve always struggled to find the right learning pathway in learning guitar. When I do happen to latch on to one, those are when I make the big leaps forward. We want to make sure that learners can clearly see that the time that’s spent on learning isn’t going to be spent on just trying to identify the appropriate opportunities. We’ve already got the appropriate opportunities there for them, and then we’re helping them to really take advantage of those opportunities.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:41] That’s right. If you have a good, well curated portfolio and if that portfolio makes clear different learning pathways—if you’re new to the profession, here’s what you should be taking; or, if you’re trying to make the leap to management, here’s what you should be taking—anything we can do to make the right content very clear for that learner helps because that means they’re not spending the time trying to identify the content; instead, they get to spend time learning that content, engaging with that material, and trying to apply it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:13] Subscriptions or any sort of bundling can be another example of this. It’s helping to reduce that time and energy that can be spent on deciding what to learn or what to enroll in and instead channeling that time into actively engaging with the right content that’s been presented there for you to engage with.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:33] We touched on it earlier, but I think building in opportunities for application, building in practice opportunities—we have an executive briefing about the role of practice in learning—anything that you can do to help the learner begin to apply and begin to see the real connection between the material and their day-to-day work is going to be huge because the time away from work to participate in a course then becomes time on work. It’s something very clearly that they’re going to be able to move more quickly through what they need to do and more effectively through what they need to do on the job.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:09] Many learning businesses, an increasing number, do put the time in to create personas of the people who they are trying to serve. Something that I don’t often see focused on with personas is how is that person perceiving and managing time? What are their time challenges? And then, from the standpoint of the learning business, how do we create in a way that connects and helps alleviate this person’s time challenges in the items that we’re creating for our portfolio, in the learning experiences we’re creating, whether it’s microlearning, pathways, or some of these things we’re talking about? Also, how do we message that person in a way that tells them, “We get this. We’ve got your back. We are, in fact, going to help you take that very limited amount of time that we know is so challenging for you to manage and really get a huge amount out of it when you use some of that time to engage with the learning experiences we provide.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:12] Part of the value of any learning experience is determined by the return on investment of the time spent learning. As good stewards of your learners’ time, think about how you can create more impactful learning experiences that maximize the value delivered.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post The Small Matter of Time appeared first on Leading Learning.

Amrit Ahluwalia is executive director of Continuing Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, where he’s focused on growing Western’s professional and continuing education reputation and approach to match the reputation and approach the institution already brings to its research and undergraduate programing. Before joining Western, Amrit founded The EvoLLLution, and he ran the publication for a little over ten years. He also hosts the EdUp PCO podcast.

In episode 433 of the Leading Learning Podcast, Amrit talks with co-host Jeff Cobb about the revenue imperative facing most professional, continuing, and online (PCO) education units; the need for the 60-year curriculum; collaboration between higher ed and associations; COVID’s impact on learner expectations; the value for many learning businesses of moving beyond a content producer mentality to being a curator and a guide; and Pink Floyd.

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.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:00:00] If the university is a beam of light that serves a very particular set of learners in a very particular way, the continuing education division refracts that expertise and refracts that knowledge and makes it accessible to the full spectrum of individuals who might need access to the institution at some point in time.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:21] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:22] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:30] There aren’t many times that Pink Floyd comes up on a podcast focused on learning businesses. Fewer still are the times that such a mention makes a profound point about how higher education is seeking to respond to the needs of post-traditional students.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:45] But that’s exactly what happens in this episode, which features a conversation with the astute Amrit Ahluwalia. Amrit is executive director of Continuing Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, and he’d been in that role about six months at the time he spoke with Jeff in early September 2024. Western University is one of Canada’s U15 (essentially the equivalent of an R1 institution in the U.S.). Amrit is focused on growing Western’s professional and continuing education reputation and approach to match the reputation and approach the institution already brings to its research in undergraduate programming.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:25] Before joining Western, Amrit founded The EvoLLLution, and he ran the publication for a little over 10 years. He also now hosts the EdUp PCO podcast, where he highlights innovation happening in professional, continuing, and online education. The podcast focuses on giving visibility to leaders in the space and covering topics such as AI, strategic planning, and more—all with a student-first philosophy.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:51] In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 433, Amrit and Jeff talk about the revenue imperative facing most professional, continuing, and online (PCO) education units; the need for the 60-year curriculum; collaboration between higher ed and associations; COVID’s impact on learner expectations; the value for many businesses of moving beyond a content producer mentality to being a curator and a guide; and more.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:28] Can you talk a little bit about the path that got you to Western?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:02:32] Well, it’s funny. In continuing education, we say that no one was eight years old dreaming about being a continuing education leader. Certainly, we’ve all had circuitous and unique routes to getting to where we are in this profession. Mine has probably been both more streamlined and more random than many of my peers. As you mentioned, I founded and ran a publication called The EvoLLLution for a little over 10 years. It was a publication focused on transformation and change in the higher education space, with a particular focus on continuing education. In fact, for those of you who don’t know—who know the publication but never understood whether we just typoed it or whether that was intentional—the reason EvoLLLution has three Ls in it is for “lifelong learning.”

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:03:17] The publication has a square focus on creating pathways to education for learners that aren’t traditionally served by the institution. That was our bread and butter for over a decade. In that time, I had the opportunity to work with thousands of leaders from colleges and universities across Canada, the United States, and around the world—all talking about their unique approaches to driving innovation in the postsecondary space, to some of the key considerations and key challenges they were navigating, some of the unique and mission-critical work that can happen in a division like Western Continuing Studies.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:03:52] My wife and I actually moved to London, Ontario, in the middle of the pandemic. We were part of the exodus from Toronto that happened at that time. Western University is located in London, Ontario, and they were looking for an executive director of continuing studies. It felt like kismet, an opportunity to bring some of that knowledge, some of that expertise, some of that vision that I’ve been fortunate enough to have—probably the best crash course in the world on how to run a continuing education division—and bring that into practice here at Western. And so a lot of what our team is doing is applying the lessons that I’ve spent the last decade learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:28] I’ll note that The EvoLLLution carries on without you. It’s still out there.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:04:34] Yes, it does. In the very capable hands of Shauna Cox. She is just a tremendous leader, and I think the publication is richer for having her at its helm.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:43] She’s doing a great job. For listeners who were not familiar with The EvoLLLution before this, I very highly recommend checking that out, seeing what’s going on now. There’s a huge backlog, going back and seeing what your work was there, Amrit, and everybody who’s participated and brought their voice to that publication. It’s a very rich experience. But you’re in a different setting now; you’re where the proverbial rubber meets the road, so to speak. How has your perspective on continuing education and professional development evolved? It’s been six months, so not a long time, but I imagine you’ve got a little bit of a different perspective now.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:05:16] Yes, it’s been a fascinating transition. Peers and colleagues will laugh about this, but, when I started, I thought, “Starting on March 25, 2024, I’ll come in; we’ll continue to do things as a status quo; I’ll learn the ropes and then start to insert myself.” Around that time, the Government of Canada released new regulations on international student enrollments—basically executed a federally mandated cap that, at the provincial level, meant that the province was setting the number of international students every postsecondary institution can enroll. As many of my colleagues will know, international students have become something of a revenue lifeline for postsecondary institutions in Canada and certainly in Ontario.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:05:58] In Ontario, we faced a tuition freeze that was executed in 2019. Certainly taking inflation into account, the public funding for postsecondary institutions in Ontario has gone down quite significantly. International students have been looked at as a pathway to maintain a steady and healthy margin. So, when that international student cap came into place, effectively the role of the continuing education division completely changed, which meant, upon my start, we had to take a very close look at the way we were running things—taking a look at reformatting and recalibrating the learners that we were bringing in and serving and taking a very close look at the role we played in supporting our community and in supporting industry in and around our region. Instead of having a few months to settle in and find the ropes and things like that, really day one was completely reinventing continuing education at Western University and finding ways to leverage what we had and finding ways to implement new models so that we could get faster and get larger as quickly as we could, while still respecting the roots of what we do and who we are here to serve. It’s really been an interesting transition.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:07:04] I’d say the biggest shift in perspective for me has come from going from a place where I could operate very comfortably at 35,000 feet to now being at the ground level and not only having the vision of where we want to go but working with the team to figure out how do we execute it? I’m very fortunate. I’ve got a phenomenal team of folks here at Western, both in institutional leadership and within the leadership team in continuing education, who can help to navigate some of the challenges that many of my colleagues have faced. Historically, there’s a great deal of support and interest in finding ways for continuing education to be a more active player at Western University, and that goes all the way up to the provost and the president. For us, it’s a matter of bringing that trust to life, and it’s been a fascinating transition. I think the biggest shift from a corporate mindset to a public institutional mindset is the pace of change. It can be a little slower to enact a shift than what I’m used to.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:02] Yes, I bet. I’d be interested to hear—because it’s an area that we’re focused on quite a bit now at Leading Learning and Tagoras, and I feel like it’s a hot topic in general—how much has a focus on workforce development and collaborating with and supporting industry employers in general factored into where you’re going to be taking Western?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:08:25] It’s so critical. Ultimately, any professional, continuing, online education unit has to be responsive to industry needs. We need to be proactive in supporting talent pipeline management. We need to make talent pipeline management a clear part of corporate growth strategies. One thing that’s unique about London, Ontario, is it’s one of the fastest-growing economic regions in Canada. We have a booming manufacturing sector specifically but also quite a large computing sector, significant agrifood sectors. There is rapid growth happening in a range of fields. For us, it’s a matter of finding the connective tissue that will allow us to serve the largest number of employers and industries as we can while bringing our expertise to life.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:09:13] We’re also very fortunate here in London. We’ve got a phenomenal college in Fanshawe College that also serves this region. Between Western University—which, as I mentioned, is a U15 (basically the equivalent of an R1 institution in the U.S.)—and Fanshawe, which is a premier college, we have the ability to serve every level of the labor market or every level of the labor force with specialized and distinct focus. It basically means we have the opportunity, if we’re mindful about it, to create a talent pipeline strategy that should be effective in not only serving the industries and serving the businesses that are already here in London but also in attracting new businesses to set up shop here. We have the capacity to pivot the booming population that we have in the region and to transition it into a really effective talent pipeline. It’s unique. It’s about being responsive and proactive at the same time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:05] Practically speaking, what does that look like? Do you have business development people who are going out to meet with corporations? Are there task forces across the region? How are you aligning yourself with workforce and employer needs?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:10:20] It’s a great question. I would say, right now, we’re bootstrapping a little bit. There’s some of the startup mentality that we had in launching the publication, some of the startup mentality that came from the tech sector of my background that we’re now applying to the way that we operate in continuing education. At the same time, we’re fortunate to be supported by some incredible organizations. In particular, the London Economic Development Corporation (or the LEDC) is the business hub for our community, and they’re incredibly active in promoting London as a place to do business. They’re really active in working with us to give us a clear sense of what the talent pipeline gaps are and helping us identify what are some of the areas where our programming needs to evolve to be responsive to the largest number of industry members as possible.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:11:06] They also have been instrumental in facilitating introductions to industry-specific organizations to help us dive deeper into the work that we can do to be of greater support to the businesses in our community. It’s relational at its core. One thing that’s really important about the higher education space—that has been a lovely consistency from the technology world and from the publication world—is that everything is relational. At the end of the day, it’s people working with people to help people. If you approach it like a robot, you’re not going to get very far. But, if you approach it like a person and are honest about what you’re trying to achieve and some of the obstacles in your way and want to have an honest conversation about what industry needs and what some of their challenges are, it’s not a question of an institution-to-industry partnership; it’s a question of two people having an honest conversation about where their strengths are and where their weaknesses are and how those things can come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:12:01] We’re really fortunate that we’ve been able to go on a bit of a listening tour, that we have organizations like the LEDC supporting us and supporting our capacity to be responsive and proactive to the needs of industry. The reality of it is it’s also a mentality shift as to what continuing education is. At many institutions—and we’re no exception—continuing education has historically operated in a bit of a silo. It’s been a space for experimentation. It’s been a space for skunkworks. But, given that mentality and given that focus, it’s historically operated of its own accord, off to the side. And the way I see continuing education is more of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album cover. Bear with me.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:46] Yes, all right. I will.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:12:48] Yes, you weren’t expecting that. It’s funny because any colleagues of mine, certainly at Western, who are hearing this interview will have heard me give this example about 700 times. If the university is a beam of light that serves a very particular set of learners in a very particular way, the continuing education division refracts that expertise and refracts that knowledge and makes it accessible to the full spectrum of individuals who might need access to the institution at some point in time. That’s my mental image of what continuing education is here to do, where we almost serve as a relational hub, extending the reach of institutional research and extending the reach of institutional faculty to make that learning applicable and to make that knowledge practical to folks in our service region, to make sure that we’re making Western as accessible as we can. That mentality shift around what we’re here to do makes itself seen in our business model, makes itself seen in our program catalog, and hopefully makes itself seen in the quality of offerings that we’re bringing to market.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:58] 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.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:35] I feel like, as I’ve watched it, that the role of continuing education or professional, continuing, online education within universities has grown, has been elevated quite a bit over, say, the last decade or so, to the extent that maybe more funding is going towards it, more attention is being paid to it, maybe a little more respect is being paid towards that function within universities. Does that jibe with your experience?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:15:05] Yes and no. I’m not sure on the funding side necessarily, but I think there’s more respect for the business model of continuing education than there has historically. Continuing education divisions are at minimum cost-recovery units and are increasingly revenue-generating units. Once upon a time, I think this created a bit of a cultural gap between the continuing education unit and its staff and the rest of the institution. But, as revenue issues and revenue challenges have brought themselves more to the forefront of university operations in Canada and the U.S., probably over the past three to four years, I think the understanding of the work that continuing education divisions do to balance and access mission with the revenue generation expectation is greatly respected. I don’t know necessarily that more funding is coming our way, but I think there’s more space that allows us to operate the way we need to operate to be as effective within the bounds of what’s been set up for us.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:02] I think that that’s a good distinction because, obviously yes, continuing education units typically are going to have to be revenue-generating, so they’re not necessarily looking for funding per se. They are self-funding. But I think that ability to self-fund has probably grown as the focus on lifelong learning has grown.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:16:16] Absolutely. The reality of the labor market that we have today necessitates continuing education as a foundational principle of any postsecondary institution. The work we do is critical to maintaining a healthy and knowledgeable workforce, and I think part of the challenge we’ve had historically as a sector is that people have bought into the idea that, once you earn a degree, you’re done and that the relationship between the institution and the learner, after that degree is conferred, is either a purely academic track, where you want to get a graduate degree for the purpose of, effectively, workforce training for the academy, or you want to come back every five years and blackout while watching a football game.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:16:57] There’s a common understanding now that the relationship between the learner and the institution needs to be value-based, and our value primarily is as a provider of learning experiences and a provider of intellectual growth. Our role in providing the conduit to that intellectual growth has become increasingly important. This is the foundation of the principle of the 60-year curriculum, which is the idea that, if an individual is going to come back to an institution for a lifelong experience, we can’t just be reactive and responsive. We need to be proactive in ensuring that individuals are seeing the right learning opportunities at the right time that are designed to help them achieve the goals that they’re starting to unearth for themselves.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:38] That’s a great segue back a little bit towards that industry/workforce question that I had because you just referenced the 60-year curriculum and staying with learners throughout their lives and careers. We do a lot of work in the trade and professional association world. Traditionally, that has been their domain. Somebody joins a trade or professional association because they’re in a career, and they’re going to use that organization as a vehicle throughout their career. I think there’s possibly a little bit of a tension there between universities now potentially playing that role—what the associations have traditionally played—but I think there’s also fertile ground for collaboration, particularly when you’re talking about serving an industry or a profession, where you’ve got the association for that profession and collaborating with a university that has the intellectual firepower behind it. Are you seeing collaboration happen between associations and academia?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:18:32] Absolutely, 100 percent. Because the reality of it is no one can be everything to everyone. I mentioned earlier how happy I am that we’ve got such a great college in our community. The reality of it is there’s a fair amount of training for the manufacturing industry that we’re simply not set up to do. But, at the same time, there’s a fair amount of training and development that needs to happen for folks that are progressing in their careers that the college might not be as well set up to support as we are. And so, within our postsecondary field, we’re recognizing that we’ve got roles to play, and this extends as well to the world of professional associations.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:19:06] Now, I will be the first to admit—and my colleagues who are a part of trade and professional associations that I’ve spoken to will back me up on the fact—that our industry has not been great at partnering with trade and professional associations in the past. We’ve not been responsive. We haven’t been reactive. We’ve believed that our role in educating people happens right at the start of their career. And so, for professional and trade associations, they’ve had no choice but to pivot to serving as the training provider and training facilitator and best practice hub and relational hub for their industries. Fortunately, we have a new wave of leader coming into the postsecondary space who recognizes, increasingly, the role that postsecondary institutions need to play in the practical delivery of high-value learning experiences for folks to progress in their careers. I’m here to say that you don’t necessarily have to be everything to everyone if you don’t want to be. If the role of the association in the realm of any given association is to be the provider of training, fantastic. That’s great. That’s going to be tailored, and it’s going to be high-quality, and it’s going to be based on years of experience. And that’s tremendous.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:20:17] But, if an association feels that they would rather be a relational hub and a best practice hub, and they would rather serve as a conduit of learning needs to a learning provider, as an industry, I would say we are starting to come out of the dark and recognize our responsibility in delivering that. So I think that’s where we’re starting to pivot, and I’m finding that colleagues in professional and trade associations are starting to see the value in that approach of positioning the university as a partner for your members’ growth strategies. One thing that’s becoming increasingly common, that we’re talking about more and more with folks across industries is, as companies scale and grow, you have folks that have worked on a shop floor or worked for years, for decades, potentially, who are now in leadership positions.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:21:01] Have they been trained in how to lead people? Do they know how to read a budget? Do they know how to manage performance issues? Are they OSHA-certified? These are the kinds of things that partnering with a postsecondary institution can help to bridge those gaps and facilitate that scale. As the association evolves its role into a relational hub between the higher ed industry and the professional and trade communities that they represent, there’s an opportunity for us all to be a little bit better at doing the things we’re supposed to be doing while at the same time facilitating scale and growth. That can be really challenging when you’re doing all things for all people.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:39] Yes, I think that scale question is certainly an important one. I think the confidence, the authority in whatever the educational experience is, I think, is increasingly important if both sides—well, I’m making them sound like they’re opposing—both parties involved can help each other with that. Because it’s been clear to us in much of the work that we’re doing and in a lot of the market research we’re doing. I’d be interested to know what you’re seeing—as continuing education has evolved, as the demand for and need for lifelong learning has evolved, both the learners and the employers have higher expectations than they used to. You’ve referenced value before. It takes time, and it takes money to invest in these educational experiences, and they want to know that it’s actually had an impact—that it’s actually moved the dial, that it’s done something for them. What are you hearing or seeing along those lines?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:22:32] I couldn’t agree more. The reality of it is that the adult learner is a unique individual—and a very challenging individual to serve if you’re not set up to do it. These are individuals that have significant competing priorities for their time, energy, and attention. There are folks that are very aware of the importance of job security and job progression, but, at the same time, they have extremely high standards for digital experience and service. I think this is historically where postsecondary institutions may have missed the mark on serving adults in the past. There’s this belief that the experience that we provide for an 18-year-old, historically, should be good enough for an adult, where the reality is that an adult’s not going to line up or wait in a queue to register for something because their perspective is, “If I’m giving you the money, why do I have to line up to do that?” They think and act like consumers. And so, for continuing education divisions, we specialize in serving learners as customers while at the same time ensuring that their educational experience is meeting the mark of an educational experience. We have to compartmentalize the customer experience and the student experience, and we have to ensure both those things operate at as high a quality as possible.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:23:47] The learning experience as well has to be foundationally different. The principles of andragogy, which is the education of adults, are completely different than the principles of pedagogy, which are the principles of educating children. The way that we approach the learning experience, the way that we construct a learning experience, the way that we facilitate communication and collaboration, not just between learners but also between learners and their instructors, is totally different. And that’s really intentional. We’re adopting more seamless online experiences. We’re adopting shorter, stackable courses, and that’s because these are things that meet the needs of an adult learner who has very limited time at their disposal and extremely high expectations for distinct outcomes that they’re expecting to achieve. This is where as a continuing studies division here at Western University and broadly as an industry segment, where professional, continuing, and online education divisions have a unique role to play—if more and more adults are going to be pursuing learning experiences so that they can progress their careers, so that they can keep up with the pace of change that’s happening in their industries, we’re poised and ready to serve those individuals, and we have a mandate to do so.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:08] Where would you say we are with digital learning experiences at this point? Obviously, online has been around for a long time. It got a huge boost because of COVID, and people who didn’t want to go online suddenly had to. But I think there’s still a little bit of a sense out there that maybe online isn’t completely living up to its promise in terms of what the experience is like, what the quality is like. What’s your perspective on it?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:25:34] Yes, it’s an interesting question. I think, if it’s intentionally designed, you won’t run into those issues. The biggest problem—and this is something we covered on The EvoLLLution. Very shortly after the pandemic hit, we pivoted our entire editorial calendar to content related to adapting to the closures, adapting to COVID, adapting to the need for online learning. Very early on in that series, a leader named Sasha Thackaberry—who, at the time, I believe was at LSU, and she’s now leading a company affiliated with D2L called SkillsWave—but, at the time, she was leading online continuing education at LSU. She said, “Be careful. Because what we’re doing right now is not online education. It’s remote learning. And, if we tell people that this emergency remote education is akin to distance and online learning in terms of quality, in terms of product, and in terms of focus, we’re going to do ourselves a disservice.” Frankly, that’s largely what happened. We had a lot of people taking their first what they felt was an online learning experience that did not facilitate peer-to-peer interaction, did not facilitate peer-to-instructor interaction. It was just a lecture on Zoom.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:26:50] Their feeling was that that was what online learning was. The reality of it is that’s not what online learning is at all. And so more people experienced the capacity for flexible, on-your-schedule, in-your-location-of-choice learning, which is fantastic. I think it opened the door to people to be more curious about whether they could stack an online learning experience into their lives or stack an online learning experience into their degree program. But the experience of a Zoom lecture is not an online learning experience, and we, as an industry, have a bridge to cross on that topic in terms of highlighting to folks what online learning really is. It’s something I’m particularly concerned about as younger audiences progress to college and beyond, who maybe were in grade five, six, or seven with the shift to online learning, or rather with the shift to remote learning. And, as they enter college and as they enter their careers, hopefully, they will not feel threatened or frustrated by the potential of online learning because of their experience through COVID. But I can fully understand that might be a hill we have to climb with that demographic.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:03] We’ve gotten into technology, so I have to ask about artificial intelligence. I cannot not ask about that.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:28:10] Yes, it’s about that time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:11] What’s your perspective on AI? Certainly, it will change the delivery and the experience of learning, so I’d love your perspective on that. But also the need for learning—what we’re going to need to learn, how we’re going to need to learn. What’s your thinking about AI at this point?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:28:26] Technology is completely reshaping every component of every industry, and generative AI and the rapid advances in machine learning are only going to contribute to that. McKinsey has—this was a report from years ago, I think, 2017 or 2018 that’s been recently refreshed—but their expectation was that by 2030, about 30 percent of working tasks would be able to be automated with existing technology. Now, those are not jobs. And I think this is where the automation train really freaks people out. We’re not saying 30 percent of jobs won’t exist by 2030; we’re saying 30 percent of working tasks won’t exist by 2030 because they’ll be automated. That means suddenly you have 30 percent more time to be a human. So the challenge is there’s a fair number of jobs where about 30 percent of the focus is manual and repeatable tasks—highly manual, highly repeatable, highly automatable tasks that take a third of every day.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:29:29] As those things become automated, the question becomes, “How do you fill that 30 percent of your week?” Where we start to think about the value of a professional, continuing, and online education, where we think about the value of a learning experience, it’s really in how do we become more human? How do we make sure that our human skills are front and center for the purpose of doing more human-specific work in the era where 30 percent of our tasks are automated? In terms of what that translates to, prompts are a really easy place to start. Digital media literacy, really important. When we think about a lot of the skills that are going to be necessary for humans in a digital era, we’re talking about a lot of the things that are core to a liberal arts curriculum if I’m totally honest. Synthesis, the ability to analyze, the ability to criticize, the ability to communicate effectively—these things are core to our capacity to be human, and I think those topics are going to become more and more important, frankly, as we go forward.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:30:37] Now, from the postsecondary side, we have a bit of a challenge on keeping pace, not in terms of the development of durable skills. We arguably have been building and shaping durable skills and learners for over a millennium. We’re pretty good on that. But, when it comes to how do we keep curricula at the pace of technological change, I think there’s a philosophical shift that we have to enact there because there’s a core principle here around, again, the 60-year curriculum, which is having a more concrete sense of where the institution has expertise and where the institution needs to partner for expertise. In this new era, the university is not a gatekeeper of knowledge, and, as the online world, as digital access to information widens and widens, our ability to make our bread and butter off gatekeeping access to knowledge will reduce because knowledge in and of itself is highly accessible. So then there’s a question of contextualizing knowledge. There’s a question of verifying and validating knowledge. There’s a question of curating knowledge. And, all of a sudden, our role starts to evolve from being a place where knowledge is formed and knowledge is transferred to a place where knowledge is contextualized, and our role shifts to that of a guide through the world of knowledge.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:31:57] We have a responsibility to orient ourselves away from, exclusively, the delivery of content to more learner relationship management. How do we understand the learner’s needs? How do we understand the needs of the learner in the context of a changing labor market? And how do we facilitate access to the right learning experience at the right time that’s going to allow them to build the skills, the knowledge, and the competency that they need to be successful in the thing that they want to succeed in? That’s a very different job. It’s a very different job. But, to a certain extent, it’s incumbent upon us to find the right partners who can offer the series of courses or the series of programming that they’re able to keep pace with because that’s their specialty—and ensuring that that learner has appropriate experience. And ourselves going through and validating the quality of the offering itself. This isn’t a white-labeling, hands-off experience. But our role can’t be recreating the wheel. Our role instead needs to be being a car. The wheels already exist; we’re just going to put them together in a very unique way to provide the learner the experience they need. Some of that might be stuff that we develop internally, but some of it might be creating access to things that we didn’t create but that we believe in.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:15] In terms of your own lifelong learning, continuing education, how do you approach that? What are your habits and practices that keep you on the top of your game in life and work?

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:33:26] Well, you’re making an assumption that I’m anywhere near the top of my game, but I’ll take it. First and foremost, I do believe in informal learning, which seems ironic, but I spend a huge amount of time learning from my mentors. I’m very fortunate to have a really passionate and supportive group of leaders who seem to care about what happens with my career and seem willing to give me advice. I’m an active member of our industry association—going back to the comment earlier about the role of industry associations in sharing best practice and creating avenues for professionals to learn and to grow—but specifically UPCEA, which was formerly known as the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. Here in Canada, we also have an association called CAUCE, which is the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education. I’m incredibly passionate and incredibly fortunate, rather, to be surrounded by passionate colleagues who believe in our work and who are willing to share best practice and share experiences.

Amrit Ahluwalia: [00:34:25] For more formal, more technical learning, it’s really a matter of finding the right learning experience for the thing that I’m trying to solve. I tend to, as any consumer, identify a broad challenge that I’m trying to fix and then take both informal and formal approaches to bridging that gap. Some of those might be chatting with folks about the problem I’m having and then distilling that problem into a set of skills and a set of culture shifts and then trying to practice executing the culture shifts with the feedback that I’ve been given and then looking for the right learning experience for me to tackle the skill gap. So far that’s worked for me relatively well.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:12] Amrit Ahluwalia is the executive director of Continuing Studies at Western University, host of the podcast EdUp PCO, and founder of The EvoLLLution.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post Talking PCO Power with Amrit Ahluwalia appeared first on Leading Learning.

Nuno Fernandes is president of American Public University System. One of the pioneers of online education in the United States, APUS now offers 200 programs serving more than 90,000 students in 50 states and almost 50 countries around the world.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 432, Nuno shares how he came to lead a higher education institution, and he and co-host Jeff Cobb talk about the current state of higher ed, the rising costs of a university degree, marketing and education, the impact of artificial intelligence on education, the role of partnerships in the future of adult learning, and more.

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.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:00:00] Education is going to change more in the next 15 years than it did in the past thousand years.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:09] I’m Celisa Steele.

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

Celisa Steele: [00:00:19] Nuno Fernandes is president of American Public University System. Founded in 1991, American Military University (AMU) initially served active-duty students through distance remote learning. In 2002, the university was reorganized into the American Public University System (APUS), and American Public University (APU) was founded to provide the same education to a broader audience of motivated working adults. One of the pioneers of online education in the United States, APUS now offers 200 programs serving more than 90,000 students in 50 states and almost 50 countries around the world. Those 200 programs include associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs; continuing education; certificates, and NanoCerts. In this episode, number 432, Nuno shares how he came to lead a higher education institution, and he and Jeff talk about the current state of higher ed, the rising costs of a university degree, marketing and education, the impact of artificial intelligence on education, the role of partnerships in the future of adult learning, and more. Jeff and Nuno spoke in August 2024.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:47] Can you tell us a bit more about the path that led you to being the leader of a higher education institution?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:01:53] I was born in Portugal, in Europe, on the other side of the world, and I was born in a very small family in a very small village. My grandparents were very simple people. They were farmers, and they essentially did not know how to read or write. In that village, nobody ever had access to higher education. Most of them were completely illiterate. They literally didn’t know how to read or write. My parents were the first ones from that small village that had access to education. They became first-generation; they graduated. My father became a lawyer. My mother became a teacher, coincidentally. And, because they were able to transform their lives with education, then they were able to transform my life as well because they moved out of that small village, they moved into a bigger city, they got a much better job, they were able to build their lives, and, consequently, they were able to afford and provide me with education. I always call this the “butterfly effect,” which is these things that happen, you don’t really know where they start, but then they impact everything in such a meaningful way.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:02:56] The butterfly effect says that a butterfly in Asia could cause a tsunami in our lives (something like that)—all these sequences of events. My butterfly effect started when my parents decided to attend higher education because they changed the course of my family. To be honest, I never really thought a lot about it. It was just my life. “Okay, well, my father is a lawyer. My mother is a teacher. I have my friends. I go to this school.” I never thought about it. I always had a passion for building bridges between what people want to buy and what companies want to sell. I ended up studying economics because I thought it was broad enough to…. When you’re an economist, you can do pretty much everything. In fact, nobody’s an economist—unless you work for the World Bank or something like that. But it’s very hard to meet somebody that says, “I’m an economist.” Nobody presents themselves like that. I ended up studying economics, and I ended up working for a Fortune 500 company, a German company named Bosch—you might have heard the name. I started working for them after my graduation, and I started working for them in Madrid, Spain.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:04:01] Back then, it was interesting because I got an internship job in marketing and product management by coincidence, and I was happy because I always wanted to do the marketing part. I didn’t know what product management was, so I had to learn. And then eventually I built my career with Bosch. I’ve been around the world. I’ve lived in different countries. And, within that journey, I ended up in the United States in the year 2008, being the senior vice president of marketing for Bosch in North America (that was U.S. and Canada). I did that for four years in the U.S., and, when I came here, I honestly thought this is just another stop because I’ve been traveling. I was in Mexico. I was in Brazil. I was in the U.K. I was in Germany, in Spain. And so I thought, “This is just another stop, and then I’m going to go and do something else.” And what happened is that I met a woman, we got married, we had a kid, and then I decided, “Okay, this is where I want to stay.” So I made the decision of staying in the U.S. with Bosch.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:05:02] A few years after, I was approached by a headhunter in Miami that was looking for a CMO for an education company. Until that point in time, I never thought about education as a service that you could market. I always had a lot of respect for education because of what it did to me and to my family, but I never thought about it as something that you could promote. Even more, coming from Europe—now it’s a bit different—but, back then, it was mostly public education, free of charge, essentially paid with the taxes, but it was free of charge for the student. It was not something that I had considered—how do we promote education?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:05:41] But then I started talking, I started the interview process, and I started seeing the incredible impact that I could have by promoting education and building that bridge. I started the conversation, saying, “Building the bridge between what people want to buy and what companies want to sell. How do you build that bridge between what people want to study and what universities offer in a way to transform and improve their lives and their families, just like education did to my family?” It almost became like this social motivation of impacting the world in a positive way, and I became obsessed with it. I think that’s the word because we started that particular company, which at the time was one of the largest OPMs [online program management providers] in the world. In terms of students, at the peak, we had about 300,000 students that we were serving in different countries. We were the pioneers of online education in Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Panama, South Africa, Greece—many, many countries around the world.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:06:43] You could see these students coming into the system, and you could perceive that most of them were exactly like my parents. They were working adults. There were people that were left out of the system, that, if it were not for an opportunity like the one we were offering, they would never be able to graduate, and they would never be able to have an ambition for a better life or to provide a better life for their families. I started at APUS on September 1 of 2022, two years ago, and what caught my attention at APUS was the fact that I’d been working in education at that period of time for 10 years, and I said, “I’ve always wanted to work in the U.S. for the U.S.” I’d been living in the U.S. for 15 years. I said, “I would love to have an experience with an American university that shares that same philosophy of expanding access to higher education to improve lives and to improve societies.”

Celisa Steele: [00:07:40] 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.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:15] You’re obviously coming from a more business-oriented background than your average higher education administrator or leader does—and even a lot of our audiences, trade and professional associations, may not be coming out of that more corporate business and certainly not that high-level marketing background. If you had to boil it down, what are some of the main lessons or tips that you would share with others in this education world that reflect what you learned, coming from that more business-type background?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:08:53] I’m going to say something that could be a bit controversial, but I’ll explain it. I’ve worked with marketing for many, many years, and then eventually I built my career. I became the CEO of that education company. I became the CEO and president of that company. I had executive vice president roles before. I started with marketing. I’ve always been very involved with marketing, but then I’ve evolved to more senior jobs, eventually becoming the CEO of the company, the president of the company, now the president of the university. But my background is my background. The controversial statement is that, when you work with marketing, as involved as I was, you come to the realization that marketing is not that important. That’s the controversial statement. Why is that?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:09:32] Because the really important thing is to build the brand, and you learn that branding is really what matters more than marketing because marketing is usually a tactical activity. You say, “Okay, I’m going to do this ad. I’m going to try to get a lead. I’m going to try to convert the lead,” and it’s a tactical investment that you do in the short term to try to do something in a very short period of time. Building a brand is a lot different; it’s a lot harder, but it’s a lot more exciting, and it’s a lot more valuable. I’ll ask you something. If you think about the brand Volvo, for example, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? The car’s safety. If I tell you, Apple, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:17] Design.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:10:18] Yes, design, innovation. And why is that? Do you think that the Volvo car is safer than, let’s say, an Audi?

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:25] Probably not at this point. Maybe once upon a time.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:10:29] Probably not. But they decided that that was how they were going to construct their brand, and all their ads, all their communication, and all their branding initiatives were around safety because they said, “My brand is going to be recognized for safety.” They did such a good job that everyone recognizes them for safety. And then they were getting to families with young kids because they want to have safer cars and things like that. But it’s very hard. If you bring it back to the higher education—or the education space, even without being in higher education—if I give you the names of big universities, you’re certainly going to connect them with something like Harvard, MIT, Stanford. But there are 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, and most of them, if I give you the name, you can’t connect that name with anything because they’ve not been focused on building the brand value of the university. They’ve been focused on doing marketing initiatives to get students. That’s a big lesson that I’ve learned.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:11:25] I’ve worked, as I said, for a company for many, many years, for Bosch. Bosch, their DNA is about quality. They’re obsessed with quality. They’re not a cheap brand, but they are a very high-quality brand. It’s very rare that you see an ad for Bosch—you’d see eventually—but they would invest the money in research and development, and they would invest the money in having people on the ground telling their customers how good their products are, as opposed to just doing an ad for a refrigerator or whatever it might be. They were building the brand based on quality, which they did very well, but they’ve been doing this for 200 years or more. Bringing that to education—we’re trying to do that APUS, by the way—build the reputation, the prestige, the image that people have about APUS and associate that with positive things. Because we do a lot of positive things for our students. So we want them to know, and we want the world to know about it.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:12:21] In education, everyone is going to tell you, “Yeah, we have quality. Yeah, we are flexible. Yeah, we are accessible (most).” But those words don’t really mean anything anymore because everyone tells them. No university is going to tell you, “No, you know what, I really don’t have quality, but you should still come here.” Nobody’s going to tell you that. So we need to differentiate ourselves by doing things in a different way. And we created this path; we call it the digital journey, which is we have the ambition of becoming the first truly digital university in the United States. What I mean by that is online education has been around for about 30 years. During and after COVID, everyone went online, so, being online today, there’s nothing special. It’s nothing innovative. It’s nothing new. Every university has online programs and an online offering. It was probably innovative 20 years ago or 25 years ago, but not so much anymore. But the world is changing rapidly, and again going back to what people want to consume and what companies want to offer, I believe that current and future students will look for a personalized experience when they go to a university, as we look for everything else that we do in our lives.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:13:34] We expect that personalized experience now can be done because of technology. Before, it could not be done. A simple example of this—let’s say, Netflix—if you have Netflix. If I go to your Netflix, certainly it’s going to be different than mine because they’re going to be recommending things that they believe that you want to see, and they’re going to be recommending to me things that they believe I want to see, which is very different than 10 or 15 years ago. We would go on a Friday night to Blockbuster to get one DVD, and we would pay $10 or $15 for that. Today, you pay $10 or $15, and you watch as many movies and series as you want from all over the world. Technology allows you to do more for less. Technology allows you to do more quality for less cost because you can scale, and eventually you can transfer that cost reduction to the public, to the market and create a lower price tag in whatever industry we’re talking about, just like Netflix did. You can watch for the same price as one DVD. You can have unlimited movies today.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:14:30] In education, something similar is going to happen where technology will allow us to scale, to produce better and cheaper content, to produce better and cheaper services, to produce a personalized experience, 24/7 support in any language, etc., etc., etc. But eventually, to do that today, you would need to hire thousands of people. But more and more you will be able to do that with technology, a better experience. It’s cheaper, and eventually you can transfer that to the market. That’s what we’re trying to build—the APUS brand and the reputation based on innovation, on excellent student services, and hopefully also excellent outcomes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:13] The branding point is such a good one. We’ve for years now told the community that we serve how important we feel it is to build a brand in the current education market. As you mentioned, if you’re in higher education, you’ve got the Harvards and the MITs, those are recognized brands. But, if you’re not Harvard or MIT, then you’ve got to work harder to make sure you’re going to stand out in some differentiated way. And then, of course, many of our listeners are part of a trade or professional association, and that organization may have a brand as a membership organization, but they don’t have a brand as an education provider. They’re not positioned and differentiated for that. It is so important these days for the individual education provider to have that brand, to stand out as a brand.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:05] What’s your perspective on the current state of higher education, and what needs to change?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:16:11] I think there’s certainly something specific about the United States. If you ask me the same question about other countries, my answer would be completely different because, in some countries, higher education is highly valued, especially in developing countries where people see that as an opportunity to progress. But, in the United States, I believe that education is becoming so expensive that, for the first time, people are starting to doubt if there’s a true value in entering the system, which is interesting because that has been fueled by the media. But the facts show something completely different. The facts still show that, if you have a bachelor’s degree, you’re going to have more than on average, almost double the income over your lifetime than if you don’t, if you only have a high school degree. If you have a master’s degree, that doubles again versus a bachelor’s. And, if you have a doctoral program, it doesn’t double, but it increases. When we talk about return on investment, there’s a clear return on investment if you have a bachelor’s degree, if you have a master’s degree, or if you have a doctoral program or a PhD.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:17:17] However, I believe the problem is that the price tag is so expensive that people are starting to doubt if that’s really what they want to do. “Do I want to spend four years inside a classroom and then graduate with $200,000 or $300,000 of debt? I’m starting my life. I’m starting to think about planning on getting a family and trying to buy my first house” or whatever. You’re already have this backpack with $300,000 of debt. It’s not a good proposition. But the problem is that I think the cycle feeds itself, and that’s the problem in the United States. Because, when we talked about this, Jeff, briefly, traditional universities keep investing in things to promote their institution and to differentiate themselves from others, so they need to build these big libraries and these football stadiums.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:18:09] I read the other day there’s a school in Florida that now has a wave pool. A wave pool. Do I really need a wave pool in a university? That’s not what I should be doing in a university, but they build them to differentiate themselves, and I understand why. But the problem is that all those things cost a lot of money, so then they have to transfer that cost to the student or to somebody. And that’s why the tuition has increased 300 percent over the last 20 years. But here’s the problem, Jeff—if it were a completely free system, where there would not be money available to fund these initiatives, I think we would see a completely different reality. But, because the government in the United States is very generous, and they offer Title IV, and they offer financing to the students—that’s a great benefit for students in the United States; when you are 18 or 19 years old, and you have access to Title IV funding—if you’re paying, let’s say, $20,000 a year or whatever it is that you’re getting, and now the price is $23,000, say, okay, I’m going to still get it, $23,000, $25,000—that’s an increase of 10, 20, 15 percent year over year, but you don’t really value that as much as if you would be paying that out of pocket because you get access to this funding.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:19:25] Because of that, the universities keep going in this spiral of expenses, and then those expenses have to be transferred to the market somehow, either through more allocation of tax dollars to the universities or transferring that to the tuition that the students pay. At some point it has to stop, and people have to say, “Okay, what is really the tuition that should be charged for a higher education program?” And the government, by the way, ed is trying to do a few things that I believe are correct in this instance. They are trying to look at gainful employment, which means, are you getting a return on investment for what you pay?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:20:01] When you graduate, what kind of compensation do you make after you graduate? Are you making more money than an average person that does not have that degree and that kind of thing? Which I think is very valuable because you should measure, for the most part, what is the outcome of your investment. Some people study because they want to study, just because they want to learn more, and certainly there are people like that. But the vast majority of people study for two reasons: They want to get a job, or they want to get a better job. That’s it. In that sense, you need to connect what you pay with the return on investment, and I think that there’s some work to be done there because it’s becoming too expensive.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:43] One of the factors that’s now impacting not just education but the society in general is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence now comes into the situation you described. It’s changing the labor environment. It’s changing what work is like and how companies are going to operate. It’s going to change how and what people need to learn. And it’s going to impact universities, colleges, and adult learning in general. It feels like the entire landscape of learning is going to be fundamentally altered by artificial intelligence entering the picture. You’ve just described this university and college landscape; now insert artificial intelligence into the equation. What’s that going to change going forward, from your perspective?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:21:29] It’s interesting you mentioned that because I believe that education is going to change more in the next 15 years than it did in the past thousand years. And this is not hyperbole. I truly mean it. What I mean by this is that, if you go back in time, let’s say, the first university in Europe, to Bologna, Italy, 1,000 years ago (plus or minus), the concept was a professor, usually a man was talking, and then the students were there listening, taking notes, eventually doing an exam, and then they graduated. Then the book came along, and the book, if we think about it, was really the first tool for distance learning because now you don’t need to have the author of the book; you can just read the book.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:22:09] But the system was still the same because now you have a professor talking about that book, and the students are there sitting down and taking notes and doing their exams and moving on. That system was valid in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. It’s still valid today, where, if you attend a traditional education university—they’re great; I’m not saying this as a criticism; I’m just talking about how it works—it’s still the same concept. You have a professor, and then you have the students, and the students take notes, a lot of times memorizing things so that they can be successful in their exams and eventually graduate.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:22:43] About 30 years ago, online education became a reality, but it’s still the same because you still have the professor, you still have the students, but now you are delivering education through a computer. The delivery methodology changed, but the concept is the same. That’s why I say that education has not changed in a thousand years. Probably one of the few things that has not changed is the delivery methodology in a thousand years. But now, with AI, that’s going to change for the first time, and it’s going to be completely disruptive because what it will allow you to do is what I mentioned briefly before. It will allow you to do a lot more for a lot less. Now, faculty—always professors and faculty think, “This AI is going to replace me,” and they’re concerned about that. I don’t think that’s going to be the case.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:23:32] What I think will happen is that AI will augment the capacity that the faculty person has to serve the students much better in a much more efficient way. Think about if you are an online student today, and you are in California on a Friday night, and it’s 7 pm. It’s 10 p.m. on the East Coast, and you have a question. When you put the question in the chat, most likely you’re going to get an answer 24 hours after or maybe not until Monday. It doesn’t make sense in this time and age that you have to wait 24 hours or 48 hours or whatever it is to have an interaction with a faculty person. It should be immediate, and AI will allow for that. I also think that AI will allow you to produce content that is adapted to each student.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:24:18] And that’s another thing that I talk about a lot, which is everyone is a bit different. Everyone learns in different ways. Everyone has a different personality. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and things like that. If we both go to the university or to college, we are two completely different people, but we get the exact same academic program, delivered in the exact same way, in the exact same order. That’s not maximizing the impact that you could have on the student because, certainly, the students are different. Some students might be better at biology, and some students might be better at math. So why should you deliver the exact same amount of content or the exact same content to them if they are two completely different people? It’s been around for a while, the debate of this adaptive learning, but I truly believe that that will occur, where the content will adapt itself to maximize the learning experiences of the students, and that can only be done with AI because it’s impossible to do that with humans.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:25:14] Another thing that AI will do is that, because the faculty will become a lot more efficient, the faculty will be able to serve more students than today in a classroom, and that will lower the cost of delivery because the faculty is one of the most expensive things in a university. If you have a faculty that is able to now serve the students better—and more students but better—then that cost is going to go down, and eventually that cost is going to be translated to the market. I do think that AI will allow universities to transform themselves. This does not mean that all universities will want to do that. I think there’s going to be a lot of resistance. But I think that eventually this is like the Internet; you just cannot stop it. I always use a photo in my presentations, from 1980-something in South Carolina, I think, and there were some mad professors protesting about the use of calculators inside the classroom. They didn’t want calculators. That didn’t go very well for them, did it?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:26:14] But, besides the calculator, kind of a funny story, as educators, we should be educating our students not only academically but also preparing them for real life, for the things that they will face once they graduate. And most likely, when you graduate and get a job, you’re going to go to a work environment where you’re going to be exposed to AI tools, and your colleagues are going to be using AI tools. So you should be ready to use those tools on day one. You should be ready to maximize your impact on a job. Or when you’re an entrepreneur or whatever it might be, you should be able to maximize your impact, and using those tools will allow you to maximize that impact. We, as educators, our job is to help the students develop that AI literacy and have them feel comfortable using AI inside the classroom because we want them to use AI once they graduate. Because they will. It was the same case with the calculator. If you’re studying to be an accountant, but you can’t use a calculator, what’s the first thing that you do on day one on the job? You’re going to get a calculator. So why don’t you learn how to use the calculator? It’s the same logic here. It’s going to be incredibly disruptive, but it’s also going to open a lot of opportunities for better quality and for lower tuitions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:36] When we’re talking about that larger landscape of adult learning and adult lifelong learning, higher education institutions are only one part of that. They typically are there at the beginning but increasingly play a role throughout the life of adults. But then there are trade and professional associations; there’re corporate L&D departments; there are all these other providers that are part of what we characterize as a third sector of education—that lifelong learning sector. I’m always interested in the perspective of leaders from any of those sectors on the opportunities for partnership, the opportunities for collaboration across those different types of providers because, just as every student is different in terms of the content they’re getting, there’re different strengths and weaknesses to who’s delivering the education in any particular instance. What are your thoughts around the role of partnership in the future of adult learning?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:28:30] I read recently that, during the Roman Empire, the average age of a human was something like 35 years old. Today, the average age—I don’t know the exact number—let’s say it’s around 80, and there are a lot of theories and studies, especially with AI and other advancements in technology, that, in 50 or 60 years, humans could live more than 100 years. That might sound absurd today, but you have to go back and say, well, if you go back to the Roman Empire and say in 2,000 years people are going to live 80 years, but then the average age was 35. They would say, “Well, that’s impossible.” If somebody says the average age in the future’s going to be 160 years. Well, that’s impossible. But it’s the same logic. And the reason why I’m saying this is because the adult life period and your professional period are going to be a lot larger in the future than what it has been so far. You could say, if a person lives up to 120 years, most likely that person is not going to retire at 55; the person is going to retire at 60, 65, 70, whatever it might be, especially if that person is healthy.

Nuno Fernandes: [00:29:36] Today, what a student learns in higher education, especially if you are in careers of technology or careers related to innovation or engineering or things like that, most likely what you learn today will not be academically relevant in the next 10 years, just because things are changing so fast. That’s when lifelong learning comes into the equation because more and more people will need to continuously update and upgrade their knowledge because things are going to be moving much faster than before and also because humans are going to be living much longer than before. Certainly, we haven’t been particularly active at APUS. But we do have a nice offering, what we call NanoCerts, which are short-duration programs, and we have a large number of certificates as well. But we are always open to exploring possibilities of partnering with companies that want to offer great products to our students. I do think that lifelong learning is one of the areas in education that is going to be growing for a long time, and it’s going to be growing a lot for a long period of time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:45] Speaking of lifelong learning, this is probably a great place for us to wrap up because we always like to ask guests about their own approaches to lifelong learning. I suspect, just from having known you for the last hour or so, that you are a voracious lifelong learner, if I had to guess. What are some of your habits and practices, and maybe even some resources that you could share with listeners?

Nuno Fernandes: [00:31:07] I used to read a lot of books, and I still do, but about six years ago I started listening to podcasts. When I go to the gym, I’m always listening to some sort of podcast, or, after work, I’m usually home listening to some sort of podcast. I became a very avid consumer of podcasts in several topics, not only in education but business, space exploration, or whatever it might be—cars, airplanes, different topics. But I really enjoy these kinds of conversational opportunities, to listen to someone that is an expert in whatever field it might be, talking without being rushed and talking in an open environment where it would be impossible by listening to a TV interview or a regular media interview where you have 30 seconds to answer, and then you have five minutes to tell the whole story. It’s virtually impossible to discuss deep topics with substance when you have to give answers in 30 seconds. So I moved away from traditional media many years ago because of that, because I could not find that substance there. But then I found podcasts, and I became an avid consumer of podcasts. I would say that I probably listen to 10 or more per week.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:24] We certainly agree with that practice here on the Leading Learning Podcast. We think it’s a great way to get your lifelong learning content—or one of many ways that you can do that.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:42] Nuno Fernandes is president of American Public University System.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post Talking Education with Nuno Fernandes appeared first on Leading Learning.

Motivation and mindset are two of the baseline requirements for effective, lasting, and enjoyable learning. Through thoughtful design and delivery, learning businesses have the ability and opportunity to influence the motivation and mindset of the learners they serve.

In this episode, number 431, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele look at these two related but different concepts and talk about how each impacts learning.

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.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:00] Through thoughtful design and delivery, learning businesses have the ability and opportunity to influence the motivation and mindset of the learners they serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:13] I’m Celisa Steele.

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

Celisa Steele: [00:00:23] Learning, of course, is a big part of our focus here on the Leading Learning Podcast, and today, in episode 431, we want to focus on motivation and mindset, which we view as two of the baseline requirements for effective, lasting, and enjoyable learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:41] We’ve talked about motivation and mindset before, but part of what we want to do today is compare and contrast these related but different concepts and talk about how each impacts learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:54] Both motivation and mindset are integral to creating and sustaining learner engagement.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:00] And both mindset and motivation are central to the success of learning businesses because they directly impact learner outcomes and learner satisfaction. So let’s jump in and start with some definitions that will help us set up for comparing and then contrasting motivation and mindset.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:20] Let’s start with motivation. Motivation really is about why someone is engaging in a learning experience. There are two types of motivation, to speak in very broad terms. There’s intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, sometimes called internal motivation and external motivation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:42] Of course, motivation is key for getting learners to engage deeply and consistently over time, and it’s often instrumental in getting them to the learning in the first place.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:54] Right. To say a little bit more about intrinsic and extrinsic, intrinsic is about that learner’s own reasons for engaging in learning, their own internal satisfaction or their own reasons or desire to learn something. Extrinsic motivation is signaled by rewards or pressure. You have to take this training to comply with such and such—there’s that stick approach. Or it could even be more of a carrot—if you take this training, then you’ll get a raise next month or whatever it is. But, again, extrinsic and intrinsic. The thinking and the research out there is that intrinsic motivation is stronger and that extrinsic motivation, while it can work, if it’s not applied consistently, then the learner can fall off, and it can actually erode intrinsic motivation. For motivation, we really want to be thinking about intrinsic. Why does the learner care about it?

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:57] Right. That’s the motivation side of the equation, and then there’s the mindset side of the equation. We’re obviously putting them together in this podcast, but I think they can often get lumped together in a way that people don’t tease them apart like we want to today. When we’re talking about mindset—if motivation is about the why of learning, the reason, what drives the learner to participate and continue to participate in learning—mindset is more about the beliefs that the learner has about learning and how they’re going to approach or potentially not approach learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:36] Just as we had two flavors of motivation that we talked about—intrinsic and extrinsic—with mindset we also have two flavors to talk about: growth mindset and fixed mindset. These are terms that were popularized by Carol Dweck. With growth mindset, someone with growth mindset believes that abilities can be developed and that those abilities are developed through things like effort, practice, and feedback. Someone with a fixed mindset believes that abilities are innate and unchangeable. So someone with a growth mindset is going to think, “Okay, if I practice enough, if I apply myself, I’m going to be able to learn how to do X,” whereas someone with a fixed mindset might think, “I don’t know how to do X now; I’m never going to know how to do X.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:24] This whole idea of mindset, as Dweck has defined it, has become really pervasive in the educational world. In adult education, certainly in K-12 and in higher education, mindset is a very big thing. You hear elementary school teachers, principals, administrators talk a lot about mindset and grit—two terms that have become embedded there. I think it’s easy to take it for granted that there is this fixed mindset, there is this growth mindset. But, of course, as with any good theory, there’s been at least a little bit of pushback around Dweck, and there may be some instances where mindset is a more useful concept than others.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:05] There’s been some meta-analyses of studies on the mindset, and some of those have called into question how big an impact does mindset really have on learning? I would say that, from our reading of the literature and those meta-analyses, mindset does have an impact on learning, but it almost certainly has a larger impact in certain situations. For example, if you think about learners who are struggling, they’re going to benefit more from having that growth mindset and thinking, “Okay, maybe this struggle is part of my journey to being able to learn how to do this thing.” If you have a high-performing student—if we use the K-12 example, that straight-A student—flipping her mindset may not make that big of a difference because she’s not really feeling a struggle anyway, and so it doesn’t necessarily change things. So there’s a little bit of variability, of course, in what impact mindset can have. But I do think that the studies and the literature that’s out there do support the fact that having a growth mindset can contribute to increased learning, at least for certain populations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:17] You can tell by the way we’ve set up this discussion and titled the podcast we believe both of these are important—mindset and motivation—being aware of each of them as a learner, being aware of each of them as a learning business, trying to connect with and support learners. Both are very important, but, again, they are different; they have different ways in which they apply, different ways in which they’re going to impact learning. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about the differentiation between them—what mindset might look like versus what motivation might look like in particular circumstances.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:51] I think you alluded to this near the top of our conversation, Jeff. Motivation really is about what gets the learner started and then keeps the learner going, and it’s tied to the why. Why learn? What matters? What do you think you’re going to get out of that experience? Why do it in the first place?

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:10] That classic “what’s in it for me?” Motivation is at the root of the WIIFM acronym.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:16] Mindset, as you also mentioned, is really about how a learner approaches the learning process. What kind of attitude do they bring to the learning experience? Mindset becomes really important when you think about challenges and difficulty. Because, if someone has that growth mindset, then they’re going to tend to respond better to obstacles, to see that as a natural part of the learning process, and to persevere. Whereas, if they have the fixed mindset, and they hit that challenge, it might be like, “Okay, I tried. Not for me.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:48] You might think about the case of, say, an athlete. We’ve had the Olympics recently. Certainly, to get to the Olympics and compete in the Olympics, an athlete has to have a lot of motivation. You have to have the energy and endurance to get out on the field and to stay engaged and drive ahead with things. But I think also, particularly if you’re going to make it to the Olympics, you have to have a belief about your ability to grow, change, and improve. That’s going to make you believe you can get there in the first place and then handle the challenges that are always going to arise along the way in your training and when you’re actually competing.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:23] Right. If we take that athlete example, where we have motivation as the athlete’s energy, the athlete’s endurance, we have mindset as the athlete’s strategy, the athlete’s ability to change how they’re doing something in the moment in response to, say, an opponent or in response to whatever specific circumstances they’re competing in. You can imagine a case where an athlete has one but not the other. An athlete with high motivation but a poor mindset could have all the energy in the world, but they’re going to struggle when they start to lose. They’re going to start to believe, “Oh, there’s no way I can win this.” On the other hand, you could have an athlete with a great strategy. They really do have that growth mindset. But, if they don’t have the physical endurance, if they don’t have the physical energy—this is motivation in our analogy here—then they’re not going to get very far either. In our minds, both motivation and mindset are very important for success in the long run, success of the learner, success of the athlete in our analogy here.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:22] And obviously interrelated. Because, if you hit those challenges, and you don’t believe you can get past those challenges, it’s going to damage your motivation, which then is going to damage your ability to believe that you can then get back up and go forward from there.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:33] We can double down on our analogies here, maybe take one more comparison that might help tease out this motivation mindset difference. You can take the example of a car trip and think about motivation as the fuel that powers the car. Without that fuel, the car is not going to start. Without that motivation, the learning won’t begin.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:56] You could say that mindset is like the GPS that guides the car through the journey. It’s going to shape how you navigate the path ahead. With a growth mindset, a GPS is set to “find alternate routes.” If you’re faced with a roadblock, it’s going to reroute you, showing you how you can keep going despite whatever that challenge or that roadblock is.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:16] And the fixed mindset might be like you just have that paper map, and it only knows that one way to get you there. If you hit that roadblock, that literal roadblock, you don’t know how to get around it. Motivation (fuel) keeps you going, but, without the right mindset (without that good GPS), you may struggle to reach the destination or to deal with the obstacles along the way.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:39] The best scenario—we can borrow from our analogy here—the best learning journey occurs when you have a full tank of intrinsic motivation. You are internally motivated to pursue whatever learning you’re trying to pursue. And then a GPS that’s set to a growth mindset, that means you’re both energized and adaptive, open to meeting those challenges and the changes that you’re going to need to make to address those challenges.

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

Celisa Steele: [00:11:48] We’ve talked about motivation and mindset, how they’re both important to learning, but they serve slightly different roles in the context of learning. Let’s talk a little bit more about the role of motivation in learning, and then we’ll talk a little bit more about the role of mindset in learning. When we’re talking about motivation in learning, a lot of the research that we have to draw on comes from self-determination theory.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:17] Right. As that name suggests, the ability for adults to determine their own trajectory in the world and their own trajectory in life. Mainly associated with Richard Ryan and Edward Deci. They did a lot of the foundational work in this, and they broke self-determination down into three components that definitely play a role in learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:39] Those three components are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy, in the case of learning, speaks to the learner’s need to feel a sense of choice. That can play out in various ways. One perhaps obvious way is for the learners to be able to choose their own path, to be able to choose the right offering from your catalog or, even within the context of an online course, for example, be able to choose the path that they follow based on their interests or their needs in the moment.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:17] A second component is competence. In many ways, this is a bridge between motivation and mindset in my mind because this is the idea that learners need to feel that they can achieve success, that they’ve got the ability to be able to achieve success.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:34] And then the third part is relatedness. The idea here is that connection to others enhances motivation. In terms of learning, we can see clear applications around peer learning; we can see clear applications around mentoring—anything that gets that learner connected to others so that they feel like they have other resources to reach out to, so that they have others who they believe are in the same position, that they are struggling with the same issues. That sense of relatedness that comes from that can be very important to motivation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:08] Let’s ground this in the real world a little bit with some examples. There is some evidence that learning solutions that support autonomy—that do things like, for example, offer flexible learning paths—those types of solutions do in fact see higher learner engagement.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:24] Yes, we’ll include a couple links in the show notes if you’re interested in checking out a couple of articles. But one comes from Deci and Ryan themselves, and they were looking at that notion of environments and how environments, learning environments can support autonomy and how that can then enhance the intrinsic motivation. When learners have greater control over their learning, then they do feel that greater sense of autonomy. They feel that greater sense of intrinsic motivation, which helps them stay engaged. There’s an article—”Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being” from the American Psychologist that we can cite. That was from 2000.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:11] Another study is from 2015 and looks more at the context of online learning specifically and the use of flexible learning paths and how that led to improved learner engagement and improved learner satisfaction. We’re not going to go into deep depth on these studies, but we want to say that there is research out there that does support this assertion that, when you provide learners with more autonomy, when you allow them to determine more about the learning experience, they do tend to have higher levels of engagement and motivation, and these are the kinds of things that you can be thinking about when you’re designing and developing what goes into your learning business’s portfolio and thinking, “What can we do to increase the learner’s ability to make choices?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:59] Yes, I think having self-determination theory broken down in this way…because it really is about how adults are going to be motivated to engage with the world. And so, if you’re thinking, “How are we providing autonomy in what we’re offering? How are we helping to support that sense of competence for our learners? How are we helping to establish that sense of connection to others, that relatedness?,” when you break it down into these terms, it becomes easier to analyze and diagnose your learning portfolio and see where you’re doing this well and where you’re not doing it well.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:32] And these don’t have to be high-tech solutions. Perhaps if you’re talking e-learning, and you’re thinking branching scenarios, where they get to determine…that might sound more complex. But you can think too in the context of a Webinar, where you’re offering multiple reflection questions so that, if nothing else, the learner gets to choose which of the three that you’re offering to spend time reflecting on. Or that you’re providing that opportunity to turn and do a peer share in the context of that seminar. There can be some very simple solutions to these.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:04] Even simple things like offering a beginning, an intermediate, and an advanced level in a particular topical area so that learners can choose what applies to them, that contributes to a sense of autonomy.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:15] Let’s talk now a little bit more about the role of mindset in learning. We talked about growth and fixed mindset. Let’s talk a little bit more about some of the advantages of the growth mindset. The main advantage is that learners with that growth mindset are much more likely to persist through difficulties. And, if you’re teaching something that really represents a leap for that learner, odds are they are going to encounter a difficulty, and you want them to persist. You want them to be able to see that difficulty as desirable and something that’s going to actually contribute to their learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:52] I was going to raise that whole idea of desirable difficulty. That’s going to factor into pretty much all learning experiences to some level or another. You’re not going to learn if you don’t have some level of desirable difficulty there. And so somebody with a growth mindset, as you said, is going to be able to push through that because—again that bridge back to motivation theory—they feel they’re competent to do that, that if they trust the process, they are going to be able to get to that next level.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:17] People who embrace the growth mindset are also more likely to seek out feedback and then to also be receptive of what feedback they do receive and take action based on that. We know that feedback can be so critical for improvement. That again gets to this idea of competence. Often we need feedback to understand where we’re deficient, where we’re doing a good job, or where we’re doing a great job. To help you get an accurate sense of your own competence, feedback is often one way to do that. If you have that growth mindset, you’re going to be asking for that feedback. You’re going to be open to the feedback that you get. You’re going to be thinking about what modifications and changes you can do with the feedback that you get.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:58] Yes, this openness to seeking out feedback and seeking out feedback, this ability to persist through difficulties, these two factors are going to have a huge impact on your adaptability in fast-changing industries or the fast-changing times that we live in. To have this type of mindset is going to make you much more capable to roll with the changes.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:24] And then the fixed mindset—we’ve touched on this a little bit, but a little bit more about some of the dangers. The main danger there is that learners with a fixed mindset are going to avoid challenges; they’re going to tend to fear failure, not see that as a sign of progress but as something to avoid, which means they’re going to stay within their comfort zone rather than that zone of proximal development, where you’re really trying to ratchet up your practice, your skill, or your knowledge in a particular area. You’re trying to push yourself and move forward. If you have that fixed mindset, you’re much more likely to stagnate, to stay in that place where you’re comfortable, and you’re going to try to avoid those challenges and not take on the challenges that can result in significant learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:07] I think it can lead to or contribute to this whole notion of learned helplessness—that you feel like you can’t help yourself out of a situation because you are confined by this mindset. We were recently having an interesting discussion internally about learning styles. One of the real downsides of learning styles is, if you believe that you have to learn according to a certain style, in my mind that’s a form or a permutation of a fixed mindset, and it can lead to that kind of learned helplessness. Learning styles have been roundly debunked. This is one of the reasons they need to be debunked.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:44] One of the takeaways is to think about what you can do to encourage growth mindset among your learners because, when you have learners with that growth mindset, that’s going to increase that learner engagement, it’s going to increase their satisfaction, and all of that’s going to help drive better outcomes, not just for the learners but for your learning business as well. This is a good segue into talking a little bit more about some of the practical strategies that we can use, as learning businesses, to cultivate motivation and to cultivate that growth mindset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:22] Let’s start with fostering motivation. Within that, it’s helpful to have that breakdown in your mind of those different components of motivation: autonomy, competency, and relatedness. Anything you can do to encourage autonomy by offering diverse and flexible learning formats and other ways that learners are able to make choices about what and how they learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:47] And then you can help with that sense of competence by setting some clear learning goals. That’s going to help learners see a direction. It’s going to help them see their achievement. It’s going to help them see their progress.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:57] And then providing constructive feedback to boost competence and self-efficacy. This may also occur in the context of relatedness and connectedness, whether that’s peer evaluation or expert evaluation, but the sense of being a learner situated with other learners and people who are there to support you and provide that feedback.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:16] When you think about promoting growth mindset, one of the biggest things you, your presenters, your facilitators can do is create an environment, create a culture where mistakes are seen as part of the learning process.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:33] Yes, because there is no learning without some level of failure, usually. You have to make some mistakes. You have to have those desirable difficulties that you encounter and try things and maybe not have them work out and then be able to recalibrate. We know that that’s a huge part of what makes learning stick is when that happens. Making people feel comfortable, that is okay. That is, in fact, what needs to happen for learning to happen.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:59] One example of how you can do that or how a facilitator can do that is being careful about how you respond when a learner answers a question, for example. What you want to do is celebrate and emphasize their effort, their progress, their improvement. You don’t want to just say, “Great answer!” or “You nailed it!” or something that speaks to this idea of either you knew it or you didn’t. You want to speak to something that shows, “Okay, wow, you did a great job reflecting,” or “You did a good job synthesizing that reading,” not just something that’s like, “Oh, great, you read the reading, and you can memorize that fact.” It’s not either you knew it or you didn’t; it’s about, even if someone provides a partial answer or there’re only aspects of what they say that are good, you want to praise that because, again, you’re trying to emphasize where they have made progress, where they have put in effort, even if it’s not 100 percent of the way where you want to get that learner ultimately.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:58] Yes, and that should be part of the stories that we share or the case studies that we provide, whether that’s in the context of learning or, of course, even especially in our marketing of our learning because that’s where we’re going to help to communicate that idea of a culture where learning is valued, where that growth mindset is valued, where motivation is valued.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:18] You just mentioned marketing. In essence, a lot of what we’re saying here boils down to messaging. You want to shift your messaging around learning so that you are encouraging that growth mindset. You are trying to tap into the learner’s intrinsic motivation. I’m thinking here, Jeff, of the conversation you got to have with Robert Cialdini. There’s this idea of pre-suasion. Let’s try to pre-suade our learners around the growth mindset and around intrinsic motivation so that they’re coming in primed to learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:48] Yes, there’s a lot of education that can be done here, and I think it’s incumbent upon learning businesses to do that, to make people familiar with these concepts, both consciously and unconsciously.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:59] There are some easy ways and some harder ways in which you can try to foster a growth mindset, in which you can cultivate intrinsic motivation or motivation in general, but be thinking about how you can help to leverage those so that you can help your learners get past burnout. If they have that fixed mindset, and they’re like, “Oh, I’m never going to be good at this,” and it feels like they’re beating their head against the wall, you can help flip to the growth mindset, and they begin to feel like, “Oh, that effort I’m putting in is really a sign that I’m on the verge of learning something and making progress.” I think one of the other things is to think about how you’re talking about the benefits of learning with you and make sure you’re not overemphasizing extrinsic motivators.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:45] Yes because that can kill intrinsic motivation, or at least keep it from emerging to the level that it could in the first place. An emphasis on this will get you a promotion, you’ll earn more money, those are important; it’s not that there’s not a place for extrinsic rewards. Just don’t overemphasize it. Sometimes we see this kind of thing happen with a lot in how gamification gets applied with things like digital badges, and it’s just racking up badges for doing whatever you’re doing, which is nice, but, if you’re doing that at the expense of figuring out where the intrinsic motivation is and what’s really going to keep people going, eventually they’re going to be tired of those badges.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:23] Our main takeaway is that we would encourage you to think about how is your learning business fostering motivation? How is it fostering a growth mindset in the context of your learning programs? Can you do it better, or can you do it more often? Maybe you’re doing it really well in certain contexts or certain products but not across your portfolio. Think about what you’re doing. Can you do more? Can you do it more consistently?

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:48] And focus on incremental growth as well. Everything doesn’t have to be a huge leap forward. Just consistently mark those points where learners have made progress, and make sure that that’s communicated, that it’s appreciated, and that, again, as you were saying earlier, that it goes back to the sense of culture that you’re helping to create as a learning provider to the audience that you serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:13] If you want to look into these concepts more, we will recommend a handful of books. For more around mindset, we recommend Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:26] It’s a classic. We also recommend Why We Do What We Do, which is Edward Deci with Richard Ryan. I think Deci primarily takes the lead on that, but it’s a fairly slender volume that is great. It’s really eye-opening around the whole area of motivation.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:42] And then Make It Stick is a book we return to often. It touches on both mindset and motivation as well as many other aspects of what goes into effective and lasting learning, so that’s always a good one to revisit if you haven’t revisited it recently.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:11] Motivation and mindset are essential for effective, lasting learning. Through thoughtful design and delivery, learning businesses have the ability and opportunity to influence the motivation and mindset of the learners they serve.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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

The post Why Motivation and Mindset Matter appeared first on Leading Learning.