278. Learning That Sticks: Why Most L&D Programs Stop at Content

0:00Welcome to the Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources podcast. I'm Traci Chernoff, and I've spent my entire professional career in HR. Each week, we'll explore the delicate balance between people and business with the aim to reconnect the two and create meaningful outcomes. Listen in as I share my own experiences, challenge the status quo, and chat with guests from various industries about our mission to bring the human back to human resources. Hi everyone, welcome back to the Bringing the human Back to Human Resources podcast.

0:28Thank you so much for being here for another week. I know, right? Such a it should I should have a Jingle. I have to I have to come up with something. I won't be the one to come up with the Jingle. I would have to hire someone to come up with a Jingle. Anyway, don't forget to write, review and subscribe wherever you're catching this episode. Whether you're watching or listening doesn't really matter as long as you make sure that you are getting information for the next episode. All right, let me tell you, this week we're going to talk about learning and development, but not in a stuffy way and not in an antiquated way.

0:57We're going to be turning L&D on its head a little bit, which I can always appreciate. So let me introduce you to Chris, who is the founder of actionable.co, a company that helps consultants prove the impact of their programs and deepen their client relationships. Through the Actionable Consulting Partner Network, consultants get access to powerful technology that tracks and sustains behavior change, training on the impact certainty methodology, and a global community of peers who all believe in making learning stick.

1:25Actionable.co has supported more than 400 consulting firms worldwide, helping them differentiate from edutainers, demonstrate tangible results and build strong, longer lasting client partnerships. These days, Chris is especially focused on helping founder LED consulting firms move beyond the grind of trading time for dollars, working with small, carefully selected cohorts several times a year to truly transform their businesses. Chris, how does that sound?

1:54Tracy, I want to take you on the road with me. That was fabulous. Thank you for that. It's great. I'm glad that you you enjoyed hearing a little bit more about yourself even though you do all this work. Who doesn't enjoy hearing a little bit about themselves? Seriously. Is that not the human condition? If it's not, I don't know what it is. Well, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, I've been looking forward to this.

2:18Yes, same here. Same here. Well, first of all, I have to admit, learning and development is one of those topics for me that I do often find to be a stuffy topic. And so I really appreciate that you and actionable take what might be some preconceived notions about learning and development, what businesses get out of those programs and you effectively turn turn it on its head. So maybe we start a little broad. Where, where did you start? Where did you like dig your heels in and say, OK, I'm creating actionable.co. This is what I'm doing with my life. And it's because I'm passionate and I know that this is, you know, this is where change and transformation needs to live. Sure.

3:02Well, I'd love to say that there was this clear vision from the very beginning as to exactly the change that we're going to create in the world. But like most things, I think it was fairly iterative. But I started actionable almost 18 years ago and the one through line that has been true is that, well actually I guess 2 through lines. So one that I don't think learning for the sake of learning. It can be, it can be entertaining, but it's not actually changing our lives until we put something into practice.

3:30Ideas are only valuable when applied has been one of my core beliefs since the beginning. It started with business book summaries, it moved into training, it's moved into licensing and now technology for the last nine years. The whole point with it is being how do we overcome that knowing doing gap? How do we as learners go from, oh, that's interesting. I should do something with that to actually doing something with that and improving our lives as a result. So there was sort of that through line that's very like participant focused, whether we are the participants or we're talking about people in a training session. But over the last now 16 years, I've worked almost exclusively with consultants and trainers and facilitators and I have found that these folks are so passionate about the work they do.

4:14And when they create impact with their programs, it is single handedly one of the largest levers, one of the most effective levers for helping organizations achieve the outcomes that they want. Having people aligned and moving in the direction that supports the business. And yet the industry writ large is largely reliant on happy sheets to determine how effective a training session was, right? It's like, how are we possibly associating the impact of training a $300 billion industry in the US with people like the sandwiches like I?

4:45So this, this gap has just driven me nuts. The critical component of achieving lasting change. Exactly. Wow, that's you know, I've never thought about it that way, which sounds honestly really disappointing. I'm disappointing myself in admitting that. But it's so true that, you know, you get a survey and you're like, do you have do you share the happy face or do you do you share the sad face? Because the thing that you're walking away with is remembering whether lunch was, you know, up to your standard or not because the company either didn't spend, spend enough or, you know, spent the perfect amount based on your, you know, standards.

5:19Again, it's a, it's a great point. How, how would would you say companies in general kind of react to that, to that, almost like your mission statement in a way? Yeah, I mean, it depends who I'm talking to. And again, you got to keep in mind I started this back in 2008, 2009. So I would say that for about 10 years, it was a real uphill battle. People, I would say universally, executives, HRLND, everyone went, yes, this is important, you're absolutely right. But it never felt urgent.

5:51Like it was kind of, yeah, we'll get to that at some point. And for about 10 years, it was a slog. And then COVID happened. HR is suddenly thrust into the spotlight on a global stage. LND by extension pulled into the spotlight and there's been over the last five years this increased expectation or demand from executives on the LND function to show proof of impact, show us some sort of impact. I, I was reviewing a deck earlier today from the ROI Institute and and the Association of Training and Development. 96% of business stakeholders believe impact should be measured, yet less than 4% of LND programs are actually measuring organizational impact at an excellent level. 4 That's abysmal. It's right, yeah.

6:40And I think, you know, if anyone in L&D is listening to this, I don't think it's their fault. I think what happened, it's sort of like the marketing industry 30 years ago. We went from, we spend money on ads and then a little wire later we get some sales. And so we go, well, I I think the ads worked and then, you know, we entered the digital age and, and advertising has become so metrics driven. Marketing in general is so metrics driven and I think the L&D function is following a similar track.

7:06We're just at the equivalent of 1998 to 2002 right now, as was for marketing, where we're just getting to a place of actually having data to be able to connect the dots between what happens in the room and the KP is the execs care about. That's so interesting. You know, I actually was watching Shark Tank last night, some reruns. I love sharks. I There is no such thing as a bad episode of Shark Tank if you ask me. Do. You have a favorite shark. Well I'm thinking of the Ogs cuz I tend to watch like all those original ones. I think.

7:40Well, Mark Cuban is definitely probably my my #1 or #2 and I really like Damon too, because I like that he challenges the the, I believe he challenges the status quo in the way that the sharks even like interact with the people who are presenting. Like, he'll, you know, he has no problem calling Mr. Wonderful out and saying, hey, wait a second. You know, I have to say they all kind of do like they. All really, because that's like part of. Their stick, Yeah, but I. Think.

8:11Yeah, Mark Cuban, I think is someone that I find to, I really relate to him in many ways. And I think he, I don't know, I just find him to be like really authentic. And at the same time, I find them all to be that way. And a fun fact, actually, when I was still living in the city, because now I'm in the suburbs, I would frequently pass Mr. Wonderful, like where I lived. I won't say where because, you know, privacy, But yeah, I was like, I remember the first time I realized I was like, I know that voice.

8:39I know that voice distinctly. And I'm like, it's New York. I don't even, you know, normally you don't even pay attention to anything that's going on outside of just yourself. And I was like, Oh my God. And I remember he was wearing this is so specific, a denim jacket with like patches. I'm like, this is so out of context. Like if I if I didn't know his voice, I would have been like, nice denim jacket. But I'm like, that's it's Mr. Wonderful. But anyway, yeah, so.

9:05We digress. We digress. I was watching Shark Tank last night with my husband and they, this was these, a lot of the episodes were like 2020 through 2023. And the sharks were often calling, calling out like what the attributing factor to the success of that particular presenters business was. And so many people talked about TikTok and social media and influencers. And there was one business in particular, I can't remember specifically which one, where the person was like, yeah, you know, I launched and then within six weeks, I hit 90% of my goal because of TikTok.

9:48And so when I think about and reflect on what you were, and here I am not on TikTok, what the heck am I doing? What the hell is wrong with me anyway? I can't. Again, I digress. My point being that when you talk about, you know, this like causation or correlation or what we attribute, you know, success to or even how we measure, you know, the success of L&D initiatives or training initiatives. I do think that there are so many tools at our disposal.

10:19Now, TikTok obviously is an example for marketing and driving revenue. But when I think about a company and how, you know, so many people are using Chachi PT or Gemini or these different generative AI programs like that is an example of a tool that people are using to constantly upskill not only themselves, but their businesses. And so I, I relate all of this back to companies that don't have any LND initiatives at all. And I've worked for companies that have fallen into that kind of grouping and it feels like a huge miss. Just generally I don't know.

10:58Those are my thoughts. Yeah. I mean, cuz, you know, people are learning and so it's either we're helping to shape that and make it easier for them and more potentially consistent or we're not as an organization, right. It's like organizations be like we, we don't have a company culture. It's like, well, you do, you just haven't defined it, which is, or shaped it intentionally. So yeah, all of these things sort of happen naturally. So how do we help make them happen?

11:25Yeah. And then for us it becomes how do we? Because again, I think learning often gets lumped in with training or content consumption. And you know, my sort of driving purpose for being is that that's that's just not true. That's the first step. We need to consume things in order to understand things differently. But then we need to find a reason why it matters to us personally. We need to take action on it. And ideally, the organizations that we work with support us in those behavior changes so that we can actually make the change stick.

11:56I'm curious and I totally agree with all of that. I guess my curiosity is, is there like a, a secret sauce or a recipe for the right frequency in learning initiatives or the right approach? Like for example, a lot of companies are like, we have to do everything in person because that's when we're getting the most engagement, the most value, doesn't matter what it costs. And then there are other companies who are like, I need low budget and I need fast and so it has to all be virtual. But is there?

12:25Is there a recipe for success there? Yeah. Well, and I think what you're describing is exactly how most of the market operates and it's unfortunately it's starting from tactics as opposed to outcome, right? It's like saying I wanna buy the right car. It's like the right car for what? It's like, well, I only have so much money. It's like, but what? So it's we we wanna get. So the way that we look at this is what are the strategic priorities of the organization?

12:51What are they trying to achieve this year? And assumingly, those strategic priorities require people to act differently than they did before because otherwise it wouldn't be a strategic priority. We would have already achieved it, right? So strategic priorities amongst other things, include the need for competency development inside the organization. Those competencies, I'm oversimplifying here, but they can either be bought, IE hired for, or they can be built, IE, developed.

13:17So we go, OK, these strategic priorities require these competencies. Competencies are great, but they're usually like 30,000 foot things like we need more inclusive leadership. It's like, OK, but people don't do inclusive leadership, right? It's like, what, what is that? And so where we focus is taking it one step further to say what's a daily practice version of that competency? And once you've identified what the daily practice behavioral shifts are, then you can start to ask the question of, well, what does training need to look like in order to be the most efficient way to inspire people to want to shift those behaviors? And so now we get into questions like, does this need to be in person or should it be virtual?

13:58Is this a one day intensive or is this spread out over the months? Is it small group format or is it large format? Is it async or is it sync? All of those questions around the shape, style, frequency, cost, all of that, in my opinion, which everyone's entitled to, should be aligned to what are the behaviors we're trying to shift in the 1st place? Because otherwise we get into, we should do a day of training. It's like, but why? Like, well, because people need training. It's like, well, no, we don't need to spend a day sitting in a room unless we just want to give people a vacation. People are trying to achieve things. Yeah, I'll take one too.

14:32But and actually, you know, we joke about that, but that's, that's one of the questions that I encourage the consultants we work with to ask clients is when they're approached about running a training session or program going back with the very first question being OK, perfect. And just so I'm clear, are you looking for someone to deliver content or are we trying to drive change with this program? Because if it's change, then let's not start with what happens in the room or where the room even is. Let's start with what kind of change we're trying to drive and then get into the mechanics.

15:03Right. Well, this, this specifically is something that you and I spoke offline about before we, you know, when we first kind of met. And that is changing the mindset and shifting the mindset within this, you know, the framework of L&D and whether it's taking it from something that is just content specific and so focused on, OK, what are we doing versus why are we doing? What's the impact that we that we want to have? What are the transformational agents that we need to think about?

15:36And I think when, when I also think about that, if I even just think about someone who maybe needs upskilling or like project management development, right, like something that is maybe really specific to someone's role, the content is arguably maybe the easiest part of it. Figuring out why or what they're what we want them to walk away with is really the hard part that needs the most attention. So when you're working with clients, how do you how do you help them to actually shift the way that they think about these things versus having to queue it up every time? Yeah, good question.

16:14So with the participants themselves, there's ultimately 3 things that need to be true for them in order to make change happen. This is true for all of us when we're learning something, and it's pretty straightforward. We need to know how to change, which is usually the content. We need to have a strong enough reason to want to change, which is a contextual layer that so often gets missed. And then there needs to be a path that makes it easier for us to actually engage in change than to succumb to the status quo because that's our default position.

16:44So what does that look like? As you say, the content part is actually the easiest part. And I would suggest the content is becoming highly commoditized. Like any consultant, trainer, facilitator that hangs their hat on content. It's like, yeah, but Chachi PT Gemini, just like, grab it and get it. And even the contextual layer to a point where most folks mess up the context piece, like the strong enough reason to want to change is that they get into a position of telling people why it matters, when what we really need to do is go with as little content as possible so that we have more space for people to find their own reason why it matters. And that typically happens through discussion, reflection, scenario mapping, etcetera.

17:24And that's as a slight tangent on my own. That's one of the reasons why I am a big fan of synchronous learning, whether it's in person or virtual. Less relevant, but self-directed learning online. Really really challenging to create the the circumstance where an individual actually takes the time to reflect and digest. Totally. Yeah, because we need that. We need, we need a reason why in order to like, OK, I'm going to go do something different. Yeah, it's true. I mean, even if I think about some of the foundations of my education, I had a really, really amazing history teacher in middle school.

18:01Was it middle school or was it elementary? That's amazing. Oh my gosh. Oh, no. Was it? No, no, it was definitely middle school. I'm like which? I need the sound effects, like we're going back in time and young Tracy's life. Seriously, like, Oh my gosh, I don't even want to say how many years ago, but it was middle school. I was like, I had to like, think about, OK, did I have a locker? What what was the carpet color? Where did I enter? I'm like, OK, it was middle school.

18:28There was carpet at your school. This is already. Freaking, I know it's already a carpet and tile or vinyl or whatever. They, you know, not the real time, not the real, No. Yeah, just wasn't like that. But anyway, this amazing high school teacher of mine, he would always talk about the Socratic method, which was this method of, you know, asking questions to seek answers and asking questions to learn. And, and it was very foundational in my experience, because you know what, I, I ask a lot of questions. And that was, you know, an environment where question asking was really amplified.

19:05And when I think about, you know, however many years later thinking about and reflecting on what you've just said, it's true that if you are doing, and I am totally guilty of this, by the way, I'm the first to admit that if I'm doing self-guided learning or training, I'm, I'm doing the most that I can to skip through like I really am. I'm, I'm 1 1/2 speed, 2 speed. Like, I don't care if they sound like chipmunks. I'm going to, if there's a quiz, I'm going to do the best that I can to ace it without actually going through the content.

19:36Like it's just really, you know, it's the way that it works. It's actually probably why anti harassment training. I know that this is where we're starting to blend learning and training, but it's probably why anti harassment training can't be fast forwarded because there are people like me who would rather just get through it as quickly as possible. And I know that I am not in the minority there. But to your point, the synchronous learning is so valuable and I like that you said that it doesn't have.

20:02It can be virtual, it doesn't have to be. In person. So when I think about what companies can do to still make an impact without necessarily spending like all of their money or budget on one training or two trainings, or I should say learning opportunities, There's really no reason as to why a company wouldn't put forth effort in upskilling or developing or creating opportunities for learning. So with that, I'm curious like where do where do companies generally start?

20:34Are there certain types of programs, learning, development, etcetera, that are good places for them to start just from like a foundational standpoint? Yeah, I think and for someone who's working on a really lean budget or maybe has no L&D function at all, the, if we think about that content and context being the two critical pieces that take a participant to a place of I know how to change and now I want to change the content so commoditized that it's now almost freely available. Like if you're doing something around project management, you could do a GPT search for, you know, give me sort of a 5 minute primer guide on best project management tips. I don't know, you'd get a thing, you'd want to read it, make sure it made sense.

21:18But then you go, yeah, this, that 5 minute read becomes the content for a learning experience. The and we so OK, 5 minutes of content. You would share that with the participants ahead of time to say, hey, read this thing before we get together. And then we're going to get together for an hour and there's going to be a set of questions that we're going to walk through together around that content. And this is the context side. It's not like quiz questions, but it's questions like, what are we doing currently? What would happen if we did the stuff that's in this guide? What are the advantages of that?

21:50What are the challenges with that? Who would it impact? How would it impact them? How would I feel if it impacted them that way? Like, these types of questions help people connect to the content in a different way as they goes from words on a page to projecting forward to, oh, if actually that could be. Yeah, I can totally see how that would help. And it would make Jenny's life easier. And I want to make Jenny's life easier. Whatever. Right. So it gets people to a place of good intention.

22:15So to your question around what could they do? They could literally start there. Like, you could put that together for free in about 20 minutes. Say, here's a piece of content, Here's a set of questions that help people turn over that content to find the So what and what we've found. So within the actual platform we've got, I don't know about 100,000 people have made commitments to behavior change following learning sessions. What we've found is that as a general rule, the majority of the population genuinely wants to grow and improve. You give them the tools to have a conversation about a piece of content and invite them to commit to change. And globally speaking, 78% of them will actually make a commitment to a behavior change leaving that session, I think. And now I'm going way off script from my usual talking points. Tracy, you brought it out and made. Love it.

23:03I think this weird thing happens in some LND functions where I wanna be careful here, but we treat participants like they need to be directed, like rats in a maze, and I just don't believe that's true. My experience is that that's not true. If we invite people to have adult conversations around a piece of content and say, do we care enough about this to do something with it, most of them will say yeah, and then they'll take action. And because they chose to take action, they'll actually take action. Not the lip service right clicking the quiz thing, but really driving change.

23:41No, I think I, I love that. Thank you for sharing. We're getting some tea here, everybody. No, I, I agree that when you treat people as you hope for them to act and interact like, IE like adults, they rise to the occasion when, and we see this a lot in HR, unfortunately, where, you know, HR leaders or other business leaders will say, you know, we can't share that much information. They're not going to know what to do with it. You know, they, they're not mature enough or there isn't, there isn't enough ability for them to whomever them is to dissect this information and, and, and digest it.

24:24And I think that that type of mentality ends up cutting people off at the knees. Like the inevitably, if we treat employees like children, they're not going to act like adults and beyond acting, they're just not going to feel that good. Who wants to be treated like a kid when they're an adult? I mean, if even you could, you could even really think about this from the lens of communication, but also leadership. Like if a leader is, is micromanaging someone because they have such little trust in that person or, you know, they, they think that giving autonomy to someone or room to breathe is going to mean that they're going to fail. They're not going to be productive, they're going to waste away their day.

25:11Like that person's not going to be happy at work, let alone in that company. And so there are a lot of pieces to what you said that not only are true, but also, I think remind people that you have to, you just have to treat people correctly in order to get more out of them. And there has to be that, that level of trust. And it's, it's almost more than trust. It's also reliance that like, oh, what we've we've hired all of these capable, competent people who are talented in their own thing. So like, let's let them do something cool with it. Let's let them shine.

25:50Let's let them grow, let's let them develop. It's, it feels like something that should be really easy to do, but it's not so easily done by a lot of people, which actually leads me to probably my last question for you, because I know that I can just keep going on and on and on and on and on with you on this on my show here. But my question is, is there like a hierarchical approach that companies need to take to LND meaning? Or I should say, in other words, if if there's a challenge at the leadership level, whether it's the highest level of leadership or otherwise, where there is maybe kind of an example of some of that mistrust or lack of dependency or whatever it might be that those people need to be trained or not necessarily trained, but developed first. Or is it just something that any population would benefit from it?

26:47So it doesn't really matter when or at what point people go through development. Yeah, it's a good question, particularly at the leadership side. So they sort of the general response would be it starts at the top. And I would echo that that's true. If you know, if the leaders of the top are sort of walking the walk of, you know, being your example of good leadership, then it becomes easier for that because it starts to establish more of a cultural norm.

27:16And having said that, the people that your participants interact with most often on a daily basis are the people that are going to have a disproportionate influence on whether that participant is likely to change behavior or not. So what does all that mean? You can absolutely work with frontline leaders that are within a toxic organization or not even toxic, but just not, you know, ideal the frontline leaders if given the right support mechanism.

27:42So accountability partners, facilitator engagement, post learning session, something like the habit builder action most tool to help keep them on track. These types of we go, I'd call it social scaffolding, the people that they interact with, reinforcing and encouraging them to shift the behaviors is going to be more impactful than the overarching big C culture of the organization. And this, this is social psychology. Like this is there's a book called Liars and Outliers that was awesome, came out like 1518 years ago, but it talks about St. gangs and kids that come from perfectly good homes. And then within like a month of being on the street, they're engaged in all of this illegal activity. It's like, well, why?

28:24It's because the people that they're spending their time with have a disproportionate level of influence over their behavior than the larger laws of society. And it's an extreme case, but it it serves a nice point. The same thing is absolutely true in corporate learning. So as long as we activate the people that that those participants work with, we can absolutely drive change from within, even in that that organization that's not living their ideals.

28:49Yeah, that makes total sense. And what a great example to it's, it's very easy to visualize the impact and the influence that people ultimately have on people. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And and I I like that you talked about how, you know, naturally there is this kind of gravitation to say that things start at the top, which a lot of things do start at the top. But there is also in the same way that I believe culture is owned by everyone, development is something that everyone can benefit from.

29:23And to your point, when there's all of this influence from other parts of the organization, potentially even just from peers, let alone, you know, this hierarchical standing there, it makes a lot of sense to look at development programs in a bit of a different way than maybe what our initial like gut instinct would kind of call to. So, Chris, thank you so much. I mean, this has been riveting and we've touched on so many interesting things. Mr. Wonderful got a shout out.

29:54He definitely. High school slash elementary school, right? Right, middle school is true. I mean, yeah, shout out to good old Central Jersey school. I'm not going to say which one. Love that. I love the New Jersey education. Well, Chris, where can everyone find you, learn more about actionable, maybe even take action themselves? Sure. So generally speaking, LinkedIn is the best place to find me. Chris Taylor, there's 40,000 of us, but you can find me.

30:24Sure. I'm sure you can find me. For anybody that wants to go deeper on how to make learning stick. We have a toolkit that we created a couple years ago. We got asked a lot, so it's totally free. It's got almost an hours worth of training in it around everything that we know from data around what makes learning stick. And you can get that at toolkit.actionable.co. And yeah, it's right there for you. So I'm. Amazing thank you. We will link everything so that they don't have to sift through 40,000 Chris Taylor's they will go right to you.

30:55Thank you so much for coming on the show and please, if if anything comes up in the LND world in the actionable world in the future, come back on the show and maybe we'll talk about some other crazy sidebar topic in the in the interim. So thank you so much Chris. It's been awesome having you on Hey, just. Before you go, don't forget to subscribe to the show so that you are the. 1st to hear. When an episode drops each week and maybe leave. A five star review. And a comment about how much you loved this episode. Plus, if you have someone in mind who would really enjoy this episode, make sure you share it with them. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you next week.