Leading Learning Podcast

For over 25 years Ed Morrison, founder and director of the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue University, has been studying challenges related to how humans collaborate and engage in complex work. In that time, he pioneered the development of Strategic Doing, a new approach to strategy and complex collaboration in open, loosely connected networks. He is also a co-author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership, which outlines this new discipline of leadership strategy with practical ways to unleash the power of collaborative networks. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, Celisa talks with Ed about the Strategic Doing protocol including its key features, examples of related skills and tools, and specific ways learning businesses can apply it to improve collaboration. Full show notes available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode210.  We are grateful to our sponsor for this quarter, Community Brands: ** Community Brands provides a suite of cloud-based software for organizations to engage and grow relationships with the individuals they serve, including association management software, learning management software, job board software, and event management software. Community Brands’ award-winning Crowd Wisdom learning platform is among the world’s best LMSes for corporate extended enterprise and is a leading LMS for association-driven professional education programs. Award-winning Freestone, Community Brands’ live event learning platform, is a leading platform for live learning event capture, Webinars, Webcasts, and on-demand streaming. 

It’s not unusual to be asked for feedback by a colleague or friend. And, likewise, it’s not unusual to be offered unsolicited feedback, whether from a boss, colleague, or friend. But giving—and receiving—feedback is arguably harder than most people think. It’s an art and a science. And it’s exceedingly important that learning professionals take the time to learn that art and science because of the critical role that feedback plays in learning. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, Celisa and Jeff delve in to the topic of feedback, including how to effectively give and receive it, common misconceptions around it, and the tremendous impact it can have on learning. Full show notes available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode209.  We are grateful to our sponsor for this quarter, Community Brands: ** Community Brands provides a suite of cloud-based software for organizations to engage and grow relationships with the individuals they serve, including association management software, learning management software, job board software, and event management software. Community Brands’ award-winning Crowd Wisdom learning platform is among the world’s best LMSes for corporate extended enterprise and is a leading LMS for association-driven professional education programs. Award-winning Freestone, Community Brands’ live event learning platform, is a leading platform for live learning event capture, Webinars, Webcasts, and on-demand streaming. 

It’s hard to believe but this officially marks the 200th episode of the Leading Learning podcast! What originally started as the lead-up to one of our Leading Learning events four years ago, the Podcast has continued to grow and evolve while providing us the tremendous opportunity to connect with learning business professionals from all over the world. In this milestone episode of Leading Learning  (which also happened to be recorded live at Podcast Movement 2019!), Celisa and Jeff reflect on why they do the podcast and where podcasting as a medium is, in general. They also share what’s new with Leading Learning  ­– and where they are headed – in the ongoing effort to provide value to your learning business. Full show notes available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode200.  Thank you to our sponsors for this quarter: CommPartners helps learning businesses conceive, develop, and fulfill their online education strategy. Their solutions begin with Elevate LMS, an award-winning learning platform that provides a central knowledge community and drives learner engagement. To extend the value of Elevate, CommPartners provides a wide range of online education services including curriculum design, instructional design, fully managed Webinars, Webcasts, livestream programs, and virtual conferences. Find out more at https://www.leadinglearning.com/goto/commpartners. ** Authentic Learning Labs is an e-learning company that offers products and services to help improve your current investments in education. One key product is Authentic Analytics, a dedicated suite of visualization reports to help analyze and predict the performance of education programs. Organizations use Authentic Analytics to easily scan through volumes of data in intuitive visuals, chart performance trends, and quickly spot opportunities, issues, and potential future needs. Find out more at https://www.leadinglearning.com/goto/authentic.

Courses and conferences are the backbone of many learning businesses’ portfolios, but for frontline and deskless workers—who make up roughly 80 percent of the global workforce—that model often doesn’t fit how the jobs actually get done.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Celisa Steele talks with JD Dillon, founder of Every Shift Counts and author of The Frontline Enablement Playbook. JD explains why frontline and deskless workers need a different approach to learning—one built on reliable access to information and connection to peers rather than courses and events—and makes the case that what works for frontline learners tends to transfer to desk-based ones too, so there are lessons here even for learning businesses that don’t serve frontline workers directly today.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode487.

Many learning businesses are data-rich and insight-poor. It’s easy to track what’s easy to count—e-mail opens, registrations, completions—but harder to know if the products are doing what they were created to do.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss what learning businesses should be measuring and why. They identify the most common metric traps—including surrogation and vanity metrics—and introduce a five-lens framework for thinking about which metrics matter at which stage of a product’s lifecycle: Validate, Reach & Convert, Engage, Retain & Reactivate, and Prove Impact. They also make the case that a metric without a target is just a number and that the most valuable feedback often comes not from dashboards but from conversations with learners and employers.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode486.