As do most articles in the L&D space, I frequently talk about what we should do. And, it occurred to me, that I could (and should) also talk about what we shouldn’t do. So here’s my list of things to avoid. There’s no claim that this list is comprehensive, but it is grounded in a […]

I’ve a personal mantra that you have to generate a lot of ideas to get a collection of good ones. It’s somewhat of a joke, as I like to believe I have lots of good ideas, but it’s also true. Since systematic creativity isn’t an oxymoron, there are practices we can use to increase the […]

Of late, I find a number of my posts are about taking down silly articles. And, I find that the claims are increasingly irritating. Now this probably isn’t new, I’m just more ‘sensitized’, but I see some recurrent themes, and I think it’s worth thinking about what they’re doing and what you should watch out […]

The buzzword of the year might be ‘learning experience’. We’re seeing the concept of LX, or learning experience design, rise from idiosyncratic to mainstream. People don’t just want learning events, they want experiences. It sounds good, but to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, is there any ‘there’ there? To put it another way, while learning is clearly […]

Introduction Dealing with customers successfully is a critical skill for an organization, yet developing these abilities is not a given. And for organizations that face high employee turnover, it’s even more challenging. How can you systematically develop and deliver great customer experience skills?  The principles behind human learning are still key. The nature of the […]

The environment for commerce is changing. Change is happening faster, and this impacts both expectations and ability. Customers expect that staff can provide answers ‘on demand’, and employees expect support in the moment. We’re moving learning to the workflow, and this has some important implications. Major factors include moving from learning beforehand to supporting in […]

From the perspective of Learning & Development, performance support and learning are very different things. One is to help succeed in the moment without learning, and the other is to achieve a new capability. But from our audience’s perspective, particularly in the flow of work or use, the distinction is less clear. They just want […]

“…today’s business schools are busy teaching and researching 20th century management principles and, in effect, leading the parade towards yesterday.” – Steve Denning I recently was asked to contribute to a survey on the ‘new leadership’ in business. Without going into too much detail on the source of the survey itself, as it's not relevant here, […]

In 1999, Pine & Gilmore released The Experience Economy. In it, they argued that our business models have gone from agricultural, to product, to service.  And they argued that the next transition was the ‘experience economy’. Here, people are focused on not one aspect of a product or service, so just the food at a […]

Among the many areas drawing interest of late is that of adaptive learning. Enabled by technology advances, we can now begin to change learning on the fly.  This can be a good thing, but it can also be used poorly, and can be a source of unnecessary confusion. The origin of adaptive learning really was […]