Happy 4th Anniversary to Tangram!

Since the eventful year of 2020, we all get a little reflective every time March comes around, don’t we? Life changed for most people in March 2020. Something we celebrate every time March rolls around is that Julie Dozier founded this creative, colorful, puzzle-solving corner of the learning industry that fateful month. As Tangram has grown, we have been blazing trails by hacking away at the weeds that plague learning leaders and teams every day since then.

Then vs. Now

A lot has changed, but our vision of supporting learning leaders and teams in unique ways has only sharpened. Tangram will always be about helping your team do more with less, reframing learning at your org for more impact, and designing simple but effective learning solutions.

2020 – Now: Tangram Discoveries

Much of our current framework and processes have been informed by the happy discoveries we’ve made along our journey. We’d love to share our insights with you!

DISCOVERY 1

?? Leveraging Gray-Area Projects for L&D Impact

It's considered best practice to push a comms/changed-focused project to the appropriate team in your org, but we’ve discovered it’s not always the right answer. L&D can use those gray-area projects to do what they can only do: tease out the desired behavior changes, design a simple learning solution targeting those changes, and have a real impact on your organization. We realized this when a new client brought on Tangram to develop a lightweight learning-meets-change management series about virtual and hybrid working. We designed simple game-like activities that allowed learners to practice the new behaviors and skills they would need (instead of just hearing about them). The positive feedback from this project reinforced the importance of L&D having a seat at the table during times of transformation.

DISCOVERY 2

?? Engaging Business Stakeholders at the Workshop Level

Business stakeholders are often kept at arm’s length from the design process because their schedules slow us down and "they're not designers" (shorthand for challenging design ideas in ways that are frustrating). But because of the upsides — their audience knowledge, limitless passion, and inside influence — we've made it our Tangram mission to figure out the best ways to include stakeholders in every project and experience the benefits. Early on, we facilitated a multi-day design workshop for a client’s learning team and their business stakeholders, leading everyone through a series of activities to envision a high-impact experience for an important learning journey. That time we spent aligning and getting creative together saved us an amazing amount of time and costly back-and-forth down the road. It was such a rousing success that it’s become our recommended workshop model for large-scale projects.

DISCOVERY 3

?? Enhancing Leadership with Thought Partnership

Leaders are told that they need to have all the answers, but we’ve discovered how much stronger a leader is when they have a thought partner and collaborator in their corner. Getting regular input and support is helpful as you’re planning for the year, problem-solving, and innovating. The simple addition of beautifully-designed slides that effectively tell your story will give you the confidence to go to your leadership and make the case for what you need. A strong partner learns your needs in detail and creates your plan with you, pushing you to do big things and make important changes. Formulating a solid strategy for a learning leader is some of our most favorite work and has the most impact because it reaches so far into every part of your own influence.

DISCOVERY 4

?? Democratizing Skills Mapping for Organizational Development

Skills mapping is not just for huge organizations. Even the smallest organization can create something that might not be totally comprehensive but still makes a huge difference. We’ve done this work with an org with 400,000 employees and an org of 4,000. Creating home-grown skill maps in-house is not something to be intimidated by — it just might take working with someone like Tangram who can give you a jump start and talk it through with you. You can do so much if you are skills-focused — skills create a backbone that gives a natural focus for learning, allow you to create curriculums more easily, and bring efficiency to your approach.?

Check Out Our Blog Posts

Did you know that we share more of these discoveries with the world of learning professionals nearly every week? In case you missed them, catch up on the insightful posts we shared this month.

We All Need a Personal Trainer

Julie Dozier drew parallels between her personal trainer at the gym and the kind of learning strategy consultant your vision muscles need.

?Lightweight Design is the Best Design

We took you behind the screens to show you our lightweight design process — our method for ensuring learning solutions are just the right size, easy to deploy, and focused on getting results.