Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

Developing strong leaders takes a lot more than blindly pushing leadership development and hoping something sticks. Listen to Joel Beasley and my lively discussion on why so many solutions struggle to make an impact and what makes Leaderbits stand out. You’ll hear how what started as a leadership podcast for technology professionals grew into something far greater. We talk about how they’ve taken the data from their hundreds of interviews with successful leaders and translated it into leadership journeys that include rich content and action-based challenges designed to develop the behaviors that matter.

Learning and development is often tasked with demonstrating the impact of the work we do with data, which can prove a lot harder than it sounds. But there are technologies out there dedicated to helping solve this challenge, the LRS being one of them. What on earth is an LRS? What does an LRS do? Does an LRS replace an LMS or an LXP? Can an LRS overcome failures to identify meaningful outcomes or magically identify the right measurments for success? Listen in as I chat with Tim Dickinson to answer those questions and more while taking a deeper dive into how Watershed’s LRS is successfully pulling together data from across a multitude of business and learning systems and helping tell a compelling story about the impact of our work.

Despite the overwhelming speed at which mobile technology is changing, there’s one capability that seems to be standing the test of time, is always in the hands of learners, and is readily available to users who lack high-speed mobile connections, text messaging. But what does text messaging have to do with learning and development? Find out when I talk with Michael Ioffe about how his quest to teach entrepreneurship to teens in conflict zones led him to discover the power of text message education. With astonishing completion rates and learner feedback, is it something you should be exploring for improving the way you deliver your content? Listen to find out.

What if the latest in emerging technology could create meaningful experiences in the digital world and provide the speed and scale required to reach our employees without sacrificing the human interaction? Impossible? Maybe Not! Listen in as Mark Atkinson and I talk about how Mursion can create virtual environments and combines AI with human interaction to make the impossible possible.

While leadership assessments have to potential to provide valuable data for the development needs of an organization’s leaders, they often do nothing more than gather virtual or actual dust. But what if artificial intelligence could turn that data that you’re already collecting into nudges, chatbots and personal insights for Leadership Development and automate the coaching process? It sounds futuristic, but the future is now. Listen in as I talk with Kevin Kruse about how LEADx is using technology to reduce the effort required to transform data into meaningful development opportunities for your leaders.

Microlearning and gamification have created some controversy over the years. Some swear by them as the holy grail of learner engagement while others scoff at them as nothing more than buzzwords for ineffective practices. I don’t think you have to choose one side or the other. In reality they’re simply tools in a toolbox and when used for achieving the outcomes they were designed to achieve can work quite well. Conversely, when used incorrectly they do nothing but create a faux boost in your NPS scores. Listen as Jordan Fladell and I talk about the right situations to leverage these techniques and how MLevel’s digital platform can help you achieve success.

The emergence of the LXP, or Learning Experience Platform, has created a healthy amount  of noise in the L&D and broader HR community. Josh Bersin went so far as to give them their own category when he defined his breakdown of the learning technology product segments. They’ve gained so much popularity that many see them as the apex of the learning tech stack. However, the rapid growth and popularity has also resulted in a number of misunderstandings about the parameters that define an LXP and created unrealistic expectations regarding their capabilities. In reality, like any learning technology, it’s simply a tool and when used for the wrong job, it is incapable of achieving the desired outcomes. Listen in as I sit down with some of my friends over at Degreed to get their take on what it means to be an LXP, what problems their platform is designed to solve and what problems it’s not, and find out what it takes to ensure a successful implementation.

Mobile optimized content is only helpful if it’s deployed in a platform that’s optimized for mobile use. That’s exactly what Scrimmage set out to do, and it has won a lot of awards for how it accomplishes that. Now, it certainly doesn’t hurt that it comes with features for robust meeting management, a built in gamification engine, social collaboration capabilities and more. But, is it the right solution to the problems your trying to solve? In this episode you’ll get the information you need to make that decision while I sit down with Derek Lundsted to find out more about what Scrimmage is all about.

True adaptive learning is about more than making content recommendations to learners as they browse your LMS. It’s about continually assessing their knowledge, capabilities, and confidence in order to personalize content to their specific needs. It sounds so easy yet is a very complicated task that requires powerful technology. In this episode, I chat with Nick Howe, Chief Learning Officer at Area9 Lyceum, about the specifics of adaptive learning and how their platform successfully accomplishes it while realistically assessing what it takes to bring it to live in an organization.

An LMS that delivers performance at the speed, scale, and quality your business needs with a frictionless user experience that addresses critical points of failure and provides learning relevancy in the flow of work. Sounds awesome! But what exactly does that mean? In this episode I chat with David James, Chief Learning Office, at Looop to dig beneath the buzzwords and marketing speak to find out how Looop is solving real problems, the range of its capabilities, how it’s unique in the market, and what it takes to make it a success.