DDX Day 6 & ATD Day 1 – The Juggle is Real

It’s on! DevLearn DDX & ATD Fall Virtual Conference are BOTH happening this week. It makes me wish I’d spent more time learning to juggle in my early goaltending training. And reminds me of just how fragmented I may be this week, even while listening to Amy Cuddy’s opening keynote for ATD on presence. (Although every time I listen to Amy, I find myself sitting up straighter.) ?? As usual (check out her TED talks) Amy’s research and findings on posture and presence make me stop and think, and adjust my posture. But what really resonated with me in a new way were her opening remarks on power and powerlessness. As learning professionals, how can we help people feel powerful and confident as they learn?  

Oh and you know the whole power posing thing? Now think about how your body is shaped when you are using your smartphone. Yeah. I’m chewing on that, too.

Over at DDX, Kevin Yount & Marc Donelson of Charter Communications shared their learning ecosystem, with the learner at the center, and the learning professionals as a key component of that ecosystem. I took this to heart because I can get so caught up in the tools and platforms that make up an ecosystem, that I can forget our role as the learning professionals in pulling all this together. I was also impressed by the people-centric approach the whole presentation took, from partnerships and relationships within and outside the organization to defining an escalation and resolution process for when things go wrong (because something will happen along the way!). When asked to create elearning for a major internal software rollout, Kevin & Marc convinced business champions that a better use of their (and learners’) time would be to build quick reference guides that could be used on demand in and in the workflow. They then put those guides right where people would be looking for and tracked the usage and performance. They determined that the learning experience was successful: learners experienced no slowdown in productivity through a software rollout. And they estimated they’d saved 8 months of an FTE in not rolling out an hour long elearning course. What’s more by putting the reference guides where people were looking to find them, they saved even more time. And, yes, I checked – there’s xAPI under the hood.

TechSmith’s Matt Pierce shared a number of active and passive tips for creating engaging videos for learning. This was a fun session – including the Kmart Ship My Pants commercial – and included a ton of useful tips. (Including: be careful with humor!) Curiosity, story, inspiration, emotion, credibility and relevance are some of the very active and intentional strategies we can use in crafting our videos. We can also employ some subtle strategies to keep viewers engaged with intentional use of color, motion, people’s faces (feature your SME!), conversational scripting & tone. And I love the very practical idea of just suggesting the viewer pause the video to reflect, write, or do something.

Over at ATD, Julie Winkle Giulioni laid down one of the essential reasons that we do the work we do in L&D: Career development is a leading reason that employees COME to an organization…and a leading reason they LEAVE an organization! 70% of employees believe that supporting the development of employees is a fundamental responsibility of employers. Julie is the co-author of Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Organizations Need and Employees Want so pick that up if you want to explore this more. She shared an updated framework for career development grounded in GRACE: Growth, Relationships, Agility, Creativity and Equity.

I have missed my regular dose of JD Dillon so it was great to see him talk about how AI can support L&D teams in the work that we do. He shared a bunch of resources on his site that you can get, too. JD started with connecting us with the AI tools we use all the time: mapping & directions, recommendations, writing guides. And some of the AI tools that we use every day are things we don’t even recognize as such (including traffic lights!). We discussed “narrow AI” tools that use and see patterns in large data sets to solve problems at greater speed and/or scale than humans can alone. 

In these cases, AI doesn’t solve the problem. It powers the tool (or the person) that solves the problem. JD focused on tools that will augment (but not replace) the L&D role to help us be better, faster & less expensive. For example, the Axonify (where JD works) and Wildfire platforms are capable of taking content in text or video format and creating draft quality test questions. This gives learning experience designers a big step ahead, enabling us to focus on the nuance of the learning. 

JD also threw in a plug for his podcast, The 80 Percent – focusing on learning strategies for front line learners. Something new for my listening list!

And then there were elephants!

As usual, Julie Dirksen’s DDX session was full of curiosity and insight about why people do (or don’t do) what they should, even when they’ve been trained to! 

Julie walked through her motivation to change behavior formula. What’s really powerful for me about this formula is that it includes the relatively objective and logical variables of value and effort (the old cost/benefit equation) with the social component as a multiplier. 

Monday’s Mind-Blowing Sessions

Back to the ATD conference … Why do we need a business case for equity? Allison Manswell’s session Moving From Color-Blindness to Racial Consciousness at ATD was absolutely mind-blowing. She started her session with some historical context in how the current “best” thinking about race in social and work contexts has evolved from overt racism, to “color blindness,” to tolerance … and recently moving beyond that to a “business case” for diversity. And in each generation and each evolution, we felt like these were the best approaches and they very well may have been appropriate in the current situation. However, she took issue with the need for a “business case for diversity.” Are the people who make decisions so devoid of humanity that they need a dollars and sense reason for inclusive policies? What’s more, do we need a business case for white people? Do white people have to justify their presence with a business case? If not, then why does everyone else? 

With that, a business case for diversity can be limiting, offensive and even does white leaders a disservice in assuming that they make decisions solely on a financial outcome. If you missed this one live, and you’re at the ATD conference, by all means go catch the on-demand play for this.

You what I love doing? Sending people to Nick Floro’s sessions and seeing them come out with their minds blown. After hanging out with Nick and his team at the DevLearn Expos all these years, Michelle Ucar finally got a chance to take in his session at the ATD conference. “Tons of stuff in here. Love this guy! If something looks cool, go to the link and check it out!” It’s entirely possible that your next favorite productivity tool is on this list from Nick.

Taco Tuesday!

The best part of conference-at-home … you get to pick your own lunch. I’ll be having tacos on Tuesday. That’s after I kick off my day with a panel discussion with Frank Nguyen and Mark Lassoff  at DDX on the business of learning. At 3pm ET my Intro to xAPI on-demand session drops and I’ll be there live in the chat to answer questions during the session. I’d love to hang out with you there.

Pro Tips for Juggling

Are you participating in one or both of the conferences this week? Welcome to the juggle! Even if you’re in one of the conferences, you’re still likely to be juggling a few work meetings, family and life happening, and a wealth of choice at every time slot.  I suggest you take some time to make a plan … and then feel free to hop from one session to the next to get the most from your experience. With everything online, you don’t have to walk a conference center half mile to get to your 2nd-choice-backup session if your first one isn’t a great fit for you. (You might have to refresh your browser window, though.)

And … in case you can’t get enough of online programming … Wednesday morning Zsolt Olah will be appearing on IDIODC (Instructional Designers In Offices Drinking Coffee), sharing his framework for reframing business problems that might not need a training solution. And it’s free!

Want to be xapi.ly ever after?

If you want to get great xAPI data out of Storyline, you need to use the JavaScript triggers. If you can't write the JavaScript, you can use xapi.ly to help you.

Did you know that the DevLearn DDX Expo on Wed Oct 28 is FREE? Matt Kliewer and I will be giving a demo of xapi.ly so you can check it out!

That’s a wrap!

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