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There’s a simple way for talent development professionals to improve the ROI of their work: improve flow. The concept of flow comes from lean methodology. Lean originated in manufacturing with the realization that no individual step in the manufacturing process created value. The only way to deliver value to the customer was to ship the…

To earn a seat at the business table, L&D leaders are asking their teams to drive business outcomes. This ask requires a new set of skills from instructional designers. Just being able to identify the knowledge and skills of expert performers is no longer enough. Now, instructional designers need to put those skill demands in…

Over the last six years, I have read over 730 books. That works out to between two and three books per week! Through this journey, I have discovered several insights about the learning process itself. If you want to improve your own ability to learn, these lessons will help you accelerate your personal development. Readers…

I have a confession: most of what I do on a daily basis is not high-level talent development. A significant chunk of my professional life involves grunt work. I analyze reports, enter data into our learning management system, review task lists and project milestones, and build slide decks. All of those activities take real time.…

It’s been a year since the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into emergency remote work. The vaccine is being rolled out, employees are returning to the office, and companies are evaluating the lessons from a year of remote work. This last year has proven that collaboration can be done remotely. Organizations have learned to hire,…

One of the most frequent challenges I hear from peers in talent development is how difficult it is to build metrics for assessing soft skill development. This challenge is actually not as significant as it appears at first glance. Is the problem that we in talent development don’t know how to capture the business impact…

Do the development goals you set for your direct reports matter? You may want to say yes—but unless you create the same level of accountability for development goals as you do for business results, you are communicating that development goals are second-class priorities. The pace of change is determined by the speed of accountability. When…

One of the most powerful techniques for improving your performance is deliberate practice. When you go through the motions, your skill level is unlikely to improve in a given situation. Structuring practice to deliberately focus on a particular element of a skill is the way to break through the plateau of your existing skills. There…

Too often, we judge the success of our training by the exceptional students. We highlight the most impressive successes from our most driven participants. The problem is that these participants would succeed no matter what. In any population, some people have an inner drive to flourish and will do what it takes. If they have…

As learning professionals, we face a challenge: people forget what they learned from us, and they don’t feel the need to review what they used to know. We are constantly fighting a war against the forgetting curve. There are several strategies that can defeat the forgetting curve. One is to make the material so sticky…