Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

The kind of solutions we can create to help employees see, touch and experience is changing dramatically. We’re no longer limited to text, images, and video that’s to augmented and mixed reality. Even better, augmented and mixed reality isn’t just for large organizations with big budgets and teams of technical designers. This technology allows us to take passive content and bring it to life by connecting the digital and physical world. In this episode, we're talking with Caspar Thykier about what it really means to bridge the gap between these two worlds and how Zappar is helping. We’ll dig into different ways to use this form of technology to move beyond the trend and solve real problems while improving the user experience.

Regardless of what you call them, competencies are fundamental elements that guide your talent strategy and provide the framework required for managing employee skills. However, managing skills and competencies well takes more than a fancy chart that looks nice on a PowerPoint slide. It requires comprehensive tech capability that allows organizations to create and assess the frameworks while assessing where employees and designing a path that gets them to where they need to be. And, while you’re not alone if you’re not currently using technology to manage the competencies and skills of your employees and unlock the power of a competent workforce, it’s a gap that’s too important to ignore. In this episode, I talk with Jai Shah and Tom White from Kahuna Workforce Solutions to define what it means to manage competencies and skills and explain why this critical step will help solve the skill dilemma at the apex of every organization’s priority list.

Knowledge is only as powerful as the individual’s ability to demonstrate or articulate it. Fortunately, video is a great way for individuals to practice synthesizing their knowledge by practicing how they would apply it, getting feedback, and modifying their delivery. However, the logistics behind a solid video workflow is often more complicated than many L&D organizations or learning tech tools are prepared to manage. However, video workflows are overcoming these challenges. In this episode with Julie Zinn and Josh Kamrath from Bongo we’ll explore how can you use them to transform the way you assess knowledge, measure skills, and develop talent in your organization through practice, demonstration, and feedback. We’ll also take a look at how technology is making it scalable through automation.

An LXP is nothing more than a fancy front end for an LMS, right? Not quite! Seamless user experience and central interface for employee learning are important features when considering a learning experience platform, but you can’t just stop there. For one, an LXP needs to also consider the social connection between employees whether it’s helping shape what content is relevant to a learner or enabling the actual creation of it. In this episode, I talk with Danielle Hamilton and Mark Ward while taking a closer look at Thrive Learning’s swing at the Learning Experience Platform. We’ll see how they’re connecting the ecosystem while personalizing learning through relevant content and actionable data giving more time to employees to focus on the things that matter.

Making the jump from in-person to virtual events is about a lot more than copying and pasting your content into a new environment. To do it well, we need to think beyond delivering content to delivering experiences. It requires rethinking the content, architecting an experience, and measuring whether the resources invested in the design and time spent by the participants actually delivered the desired outcome. While we’re all familiar with the latest video conference tools, they often lack the features and functionality required to deliver an impactful experience. In this episode I’m talking with Matthew Parson from Benji about the platform they’ve designed to take some of the powerful tools we use for in-person events and and apply them in the virtual world to transform the learner experience.

Neglecting or poorly managing the front-end analysis of the L&D supply chain has consequences for everyone involved. It’s here where decisions are made to fill gaps or solve problems that don’t exist. This leaves everyone working on things that don’t really matter. Add to that, inefficiencies and poor management in this area have dire downstream consequences. It doesn’t get any easier when you start collaborating with SMEs and Stakeholders to build your content. Unfortunately, cleaning up these processes can prove to be a more challenging task than people often realize. In this episode, I’ll be talking with Ryan Austin about Synapse and how it’s designed to take control of these critical steps by creating standard processes and workflows designed to collect and manage the critical data and feedback while ensuring you’re working on the right needs and managing the status of everything.

Technology being aware of your environment and augmenting the it with digital information, guidance, and support. Experts guiding you through new and challenging tasks from anywhere in the world in real-time. It may sound like something from a science fiction film, but it’s actually a powerful capability being used by organizations around the world to dramatically improve performance by enabling technology to augment our reality for the better. In this episode I talk with Mark Rydman and Troy Segale from CraneMorley about the work they’re doing in partnership with Microsoft to combine AR technology and the Hololens to reimagine the possibilities. We will not only demystify the technology but talk about the ways it’s being used today amidst travel and proximity restrictions as a result of COVID19.

The way people communicate or fail to communicate may be one of the biggest inhibitors to the success of your organization. But, what can you do about it? One of the most impactful ways shape and develop human skills is through coaching. It develops the confidence and skills required for an individual to effectively to share their ideas and develop their own teams. One of the biggest challenges with pulling this off is that coaching done right requires a personal experience tailored to the unique needs of the individual. This proves to be exceptionally difficult to accomplish at scale. In this episode, we talk with Tyler Muse about why he and the team at Lingo Live have set their targets on unlocking the potential of talent through coaching and how they’re technology is making it possible.

When many people hear the word elearning, it doesn’t invoke a positive response. It's often associated with poorly designed content that forces people through a painful user experience. While there are reasons why people don’t typically see it in a positive light, it doesn't mean the tool and delivery mechanism is completely ineffective. In this episode I’m talking with Alexander Salas from eLearning Launch to dig into this often polarizing topic and address the reasons why elearning has the reputation it does and what we can do about it.

When you hear Artificial Intelligence, what’s the first application that comes to mind? Perhaps robots or a mischievous computer program comes to mind. How about workforce development or employee experience? The reality is, AI isn’t just for IT or business functions. It’s something every talent and HR leader should be intimately familiar with as a powerful tool for transforming our work and our workforce. In this episode, I’m nerding out with Ben Eubanks from Lighthouse Research and Advisory. We’ll be exploring the different possibilities and important ways augmenting the work we do with technology can dramatically impact our organizations and employees for the better. We’ll also address the risks and important considerations we need to make to ensure we’re making these decisions carefully and ethically.