Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

There’s an overwhelming and continually growing number of capabilities and applications for the latest in emerging technologies. Some of them you may not have even imagined possible. However, the potential being there and it being the right time to consider incorporating into your strategy are two very different things. While your organization may not be ready to implement and support these capabilities yet, don’t be discouraged. A large majority of organizations aren’t even close to ready either, or the ones that are still have a long road ahead. In this episode I geek out with my friend Mike Pino with the goal of helping you reimagine the possibilities while considering how to pragmatically bring them to life. Here’s a hint. It doesn’t start with tech.

The learning tech purchasing process may feel like an overwhelming and unfamiliar quagmire, and believe me, it has no shortage of challenges. While there are definitely some process similarities like determining your needs, finding a few providers, and evaluating their offerings, there’s a lot more to the process than you may think. However, half the battle is knowing what you’re in for and having as many of your ducks in a row before you even start an RFP. Will you still be navigating a bit of a minefield?  Candidly, yes. And, there will always be a few curveballs you won’t see coming, but if you chart a solid path, I promise you can safely make it to the other side. Listen as I talked with Jordan Fladell from mLevel share candidly what it’s really like and share strategies for success.

Video is a powerful tool for capturing the attention of your audience, and we can further extend that impact by making it an interactive experience. However, creating that kind of content may feel like a stretch for some. It’s a process to plan and capture the video, make it production ready, deploy it to your audience.Add to that, without the right system behind the video, it can’t provide the insights and data required to evaluate whether it achieved your desired outcomes. Check out my conversation with John Hudson from LumaOne where we explored the power and ease of interactive video content designed to tell compelling stories that create impactful results. John also shared more about the technology and services LumaOne offers and how they connect to some of the problems we’re trying to solve in L&D.

There’s a reason the term LMS makes people cringe. It brings to mind memories of painful content delivered through a painful user experience. Now, to be fair, there’s a lot more going on that has resulted in those painful memories, but the LMS is a leading actor in that movie. But, what if it didn’t have to be that way. What if the content and experience could be created and delivered in a way that was relevant, valuable, and accessible? What exactly would that content and experience look like? Listen as I talk with Steve Dineen and Shys Gilles from FUSE Universal about how their platform is designed to break down the traditional barriers and create an experience that contributes to the learning culture needed for your organization’s success.

If you’ve ever been involved in system training, you know how much work goes into preparing all the materials, getting everything out, and getting everyone up to speed only to discover most people didn’t retain much of anything. Here’s another acronym to add to your learning technology library. The DAP or Digital Adoption Platform. Designed to provide employees with the support and guidance they need at the moment that they need it, this technology can dramatically change the way you think about system training and enablement. Listen as I talk with Raj Sundarason from WalkMe about ditching a large majority of the traditional methods for system training and thinking about enabling performance through real-time guidance instead.

Too often in L&D we execute first and then seek to measure the impact when we’re finished. This leaves us scrambling as we try to find and makes sense of the right information after we’re done and frequently leaves us shaking our heads. Add to that, technology often masks itself as a turnkey solution to help us achieve the measurement we seek. Unfortunately, that’s never the case However, when you start with the end in mind, you can map out the desired outcomes and measurements you’ll need to achieve along the way to ensure you’re on the right track and can demonstrate the value of the work you do. Once that roadmap exists, you can augment the map with technology to improve the effiency, effectiveness, and scale at which you can measure. Listen as Kevin M. Yates, Fact Finder for L&D, and I talk about how you manage to pull all of this together and slay the mythical learning measurement dragon.

Let’s stop the debate about whether instructor-led or digital is good or bad and focus on optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of both. The reality is, they are simply tools and whether the execution is good or bad is our responsibility. And, when you look at running instructor-led training, it’s a highly specialized operation that requires careful attention to finance, processes, and operational efficiency. Without this attention, you can find yourself struggling to justify the resources you need to drive your organization forward, or worse, in some very uncomfortable conversations with business leaders. Listen as I chat with my friends at Training Orchestra about how their platform is designed to streamline the operational activities of L&D enabling our function to do more with less or, better yet, reinvest the savings into innovation and continuous improvement.

With growing regulations like GDPR and CCPA combined with digital savvy employees, the need to proactively consider data privacy and ethics is critical. Ignoring it will result in severe consequences for you and your organization. Conversely, remaining uninformed and at the mercy of IT and compliance will unnecessarily limit your success in digitaltransformation. Navigating it well requires understanding the implications and proactively connecting them to the digital efforts we lead to ensure you and your business partners can strike the right balance of remaining compliant while not avoiding transformation due to unnecessary risk aversion. In our first practitioner episode Bas Debbink and I talk about the implications of these important topics on digital learning transformation and share our personal experiences and best practices for navigating them effectively.

While many associate RPA, or robotic process automation, with assembly lines and warehouses, the reality is it’s quickly proving it’s capability in developing elearning content. However, just because something can be done doesn’t necessarily mean it it should. In this episode, I talk with Micah White from CGS to explore how they’re experimenting with RPA for elearning content development and finding it to be effective in speeding up the process and improving efficiency along the way. However, it’s not without risk, and we talk about what considerations organizations should take before jumping in. We also address what this means for individuals who have committed their careers to elearning development and how their roles might change as a result.

We know practice is the best ways to improve a skill and role play is a great way to practice conversations. Unfortunately, the synchronous nature of traditional role-play is difficult to coordinate, often fails to scale, and requires a great deal of effort to measure. In this episode I talk with Andrea Laus from SkillGym to hear how they’re taking digital role-based simulations in a different direction. Hear how they’re using interactive video to create dynamic, asynchronous simulations that allow a learner to practice their skills when it works best for them while simultaneously assessing their progress and deconstructing the experience into actionable chunks.