Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

Business and HR leaders are recognizing the value of a positive and inclusive environment. Unfortunately, uncomfortable situations still occur stunting or even reversing forward progress. Unfortunately, people struggle with navigating these situations when they arise. As a result, some stay quiet, inadvertently encouraging bad behavior. Others respond inappropriately further escalating an already volatile situation. Overcoming these challenges requires helping employees build the skills needed to navigate them successfully. However, one of the biggest challenges to doing this is giving employees opportunities to practice what they’ll do when faced with the situation while providing actionable feedback for improvement. Fortunately, technology is making it easier. In this episode Mark Atkinson, CEO of Mursion, and I discuss about how to use technology to safely replicate these difficult situations, creating a secure environment where employees can improve their skills and actionably improve your organizational culture.

Video is all the rage in learning and development. Whether it’s short-form explainer videos or long-form instructional content, they’re everywhere. And, with everyone carrying around a high-definition camera in their pocket, using video to transform learning in your organization should be a piece of cake, right? Just point, shoot, and presto, video learning magic. Not quite. Great videos are about telling stories that carry the right messages and create the right emotional response. Pulling it off well requires avoiding predictable or preachy stories and striking the right balance of art and science. In this episode Austin Welch, Richard Fleming and I talk about what really goes into making a video come to life and how they’re combining the art and science of storytelling and video production to transform L&D at Sage Media.

There is no shortage of platitudinal statements in the corporate world and L&D continues to grow our marketshare. We’re digitally transforming the learner experience, crafting meaningful and human-centered learning journeys, and one of my favorites, building a learning culture. The challenge is not that these statements don’t address critical and meaningful activities. It’s that they’re often said will little to no thought into what they really mean, the clear plan for bringing them to live, and the measurements we’ll use to determine if we’re making progress and having an impact. In this episode with Simon Brown and Nina Bressler Murphy from Novartis. We’ll be collectively sharing our experiences on what it really means and what it takes for success. We’ll also share some of the painful lessons we’ve learned along the way.

All of us in learning, talent and HR functions are being faced with what can often feel like impossible challenges as a result of the coronavirus. We haven’t even had time to fully establish a steady state for the current situation and are already being challenged with predicting the ‘new normal’ and how we’ll manage that. Trying to solve for these monumental challenges in an environment where it’s easy to feel isolated from the very people we need to solve them only adds insult to injury. So, how do we rapidly solve for these complex problems in a world where we’re all physically and mentally displaced from our normal mode of operation? Enter in the virtual hackathon where you’ll combine #agile, #designthinking, #hackatons, and #digital #technology. In this episode Nicole Dessain from Talent Imperative and I are going to dig into exactly what Virtual Hackathon is, what it takes to pull off, and why it’s an solution we should all be exploring.

Preparing your workforce with the skills they need now and in the future is no easy task. It requires timely, relevant, and meaningful content that addresses needs at the pace of business. For global organizations, that complexity is exponential as you factor in adapting to and ensuring relevance for regional culture and languages. It also requires a platform capable of providing meaningful data and insights for your learners, your stakeholders, and your L&D organization. In this episode, Yvonne Chen and I unpack what Udemy for Business has to offer from a content and technology standpoint while also digging into why their strategic approach is designed to solve the many skill challenges enabling us to shift from defense to offense.

While many organizations struggle with volume of learning technology in their portfolio, others are just starting on their digital learning journey. This can often feel like an overwhelming task. Finding the right content, deploying it through and user-friendly tool, reinforcing the principles, and having even basic data.    Furthermore, successfully navigating the transformation of learning in your organization is about more than picking a platform with the right features and signing a PO, even though that’s an important step.    Listen to my conversation with Dean Pichee & Tom Braning from Biz Library about how their platform is designed to not only address your technology and content needs but has designed a client success model to ensure long-term success.

For those of you who have heard of LinkedIn Learning or maybe even taken a course, you may be wondering whether there’s really a need for yet another content provider. However, when you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll find that LinkedIn has done a lot more than build an ocean of content. You’ll see how they’ve connected learners professional experience and skills to content that can enable their continued growth while providing organizations with the critical data required to ignite their talent strategy. However, to do this, we have to think beyond the silo of corporate learning. We have to integrate with the broader talent strategy and ensure we’re seamlessly aligned. You’ll hear all this and more on when you listen to this episode of Learning Tech Talks where I chat with James Raybould from LinkedIn to learn more about the journey they’ve been on and discover what makes their solution unique.

Whether you’ve historically been for or against #virtual #learning, it’s a reality everyone has had to embrace amidst the #coronavirus pandemic. For some, it was business as usual or a relatively seamless transition. For others, it’s been an overwhelming and painful challenge, leaving learning professionals frustrated and learners disengaged. And, just because a lot of what’s been done in the past is bad doesn’t mean it can’t be done well. In this episode I’m joined by Bob Kulhan and Josh Pryor from Business Improv to share our experiences in doing virtual learning well. And, whether you’ve been doing virtual well for a while or are just getting started you’ll find something that will help take your virtual offerings from ordinary to extraordinary.

A lot of things have changed in Snagit and Camtasia since I was first introduced to it during my youthful days as an instructional designer, and it’s been interesting to watch the products evolve and the features advance over the years. They remain laser focused on improving visual communications and making it easy for users. And, despite the massive growth and transformation technology has made, tools like these remain a staple on the laptops of instructional designers and business professionals alike. Check out my conversation with Wendy Hamilton to learn more about what TechSmith is up to and how they’re diligently working to help the world communicate clearly while remaining laser focused on delivering an outstanding customer experience.

Reinforcing existing #learning, maximizing the reach of compliance training, strategically streamlining onboarding content, and improving the way you develop your salesforce are challenges anyone in Learning & Development should be familiar with. In a world where so many others are pushing to solve these problems with HD #video, massive content libraries, or complex #ai based technologies, could text messaging actually be the simple innovation you need to solve the problems you’re trying to solve? That’s for you to decide, but you can learn more about whether it might be just the solution you need in this episode where I bring back Michael Ioffe to learn more about the journey he and the Arist team have been on over the past few months and find out more about where they are today.