Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

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.

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.