Leading Learning

Studying Innovation with Mary Byers

This podcast series is our attempt to offer a theoretical learning business MBA program, and we invite you to play along. Imagine you’re in business school and about to hear a guest lecture by Mary Byers, a speaker, facilitator, consultant, and author of several books, including Race for Relevance: Five Radical Changes for Associations. She’s also host of the Successful Associations Today Podcast. Her work centers on helping organizations remain relevant in a rapidly changing environment, and her main area of interest is innovation and evolution in all things—organizationally, educationally, and otherwise. In this third episode in our seven-part learning business MBA series, Celisa talks with Mary about what it takes to succeed as a learning business and her related thoughts around innovation and continuous evolution. They discuss the idea of shrinking to grow, why organizations need a digital-first mindset, and the importance of a go-forward strategy. To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet. Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio. Read the Show Notes [00:31] – Intro and background info about Mary What it Takes to Succeed as a Learning Business [02:04] – What do those leading and working in a learning business need to know or be able to do to be successful? Mary mentions three things: Be committed to continuous evolution. Complacency leads to irrelevance.Be comfortable launching small pilots and recalibrating if necessary. Flexible organizations are successful organizations.Be comfortable dancing with uncertainty. We dance with uncertainty all the time, and the more we lean into that and acknowledge it, the more realistically we’ll approach our work. [04:11] – Out of the skills, knowledge, and behaviors you just mentioned, where do you typically see learning businesses struggle, and where are they more open to embracing that attitude or mindset? Where we struggle is in keeping the pedal to the metal on continuous evolution and being comfortable with small pilots and recalibrating when necessary. We also struggle in the area of risk tolerance. We can’t move our educational efforts forward if we do the same things in the same way. So much has changed. Whether you’re talking about in-person learning, online learning, or a combination of the two, we just have to be more aggressive overall, period.Mary Byers Where we often excel—and these aren’t things that actually help us—is in protecting the status quo, in meeting deadlines, and doing the comfortable things. We need to get comfortable with discomfort, especially going forward in the educational arena. [05:53] – When you think about the skills and behaviors that it takes for organizations to succeed, is there a hierarchy? If so, which ones are the most important? The willingness to experiment is one of the most important, but that comes along with risk and no guarantees. Because we’re not comfortable with uncertainty, there’s tension between those two things. Many cultures don’t support this aspect of innovation and reward consistent performance instead. [06:38] – How do you see organizations helping their internal team get the needed skills, knowledge, behaviors, and mindset to succeed? The ones that are doing it well are being very intentional and deliberate about having conversations related to needed skill sets. Mary suggests each team member should have a personal learning roadmap for two reasons: If you’re an educational organization and you believe in continuing education, you should walk the talk and make sure your employees are engaged in continuous education. It’s a way to be intentional and deliberate and to have a plan each year for what we need to learn, how to do it, and where to get the necessary resources. Complacency leads to irrelevance…. A lot of times we think of employees as serving our learners externally, but we also need to think about employees as learners internally as well.Mary Byers Sponsor: Cadmium [10:02] – If you’re looking for a partner to help you make continuous learning a reality, check out our sponsor for this series. The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the merging of events and education for organizations across the globe. Organizations have realized that synergizing their education and events strategies produces immeasurable benefits, but they need a technology solution that facilitates that merge. Cadmium is focused on providing a full suite of technology solutions enabling organizations to meet the changing environment head on. From a host of event technologies to integrated learning management and content creation tools, Cadmium offers everything an organization needs to generate revenue and drive engagement. Learn more, and request a demo to see how Cadmium can help your learning business at gocadmium.com. Role of Data in Organizational Decision-Making [11:02] – This is a concept that you talk about in your book Race for Relevance. What is the role you see data playing to help organizations make decisions? As we’re talking about experimenting and innovation, if we are using data, we are taking less risk because we’re not just guessing. We’re using what we know to be true to help identify new opportunities such as potential new topics that people are interested in for their own learning. Data is important because it can help you meet learner needs more efficiently. It can create efficiencies internally as well. However, data isn’t always sexy, and Mary thinks that’s one of the reasons it’s underutilized. The second reason is we aren’t set up to capture data, and, even if we have the data, we don’t always use it. Also, sometimes we have data that we don’t even know we have. To look at data effectively, you need people who are skilled enough to be able to interpret it and help you make sense of it. They need to help you identify trends that the data is showing you and help you make decisions based on what you know to be true rather than what you think or hope to be true. Understanding Cost [14:49] – How should organizations go about understanding the cost of the programs that it offers? It is not enough to look at the direct cost; we have to consider overhead and staff time as well. But many organizations are not set up to track this, so it isn’t easy. Sometimes we don’t give ourselves the freedom and flexibility to step back and assess staff time, even at a very simple level. Therefore, many organizations think they’re making money on a product or program, but, if they accounted for overhead and staff time, they’d find they really aren’t profitable. We have to be more deliberate and intentional about tracking our costs so that we get a true picture of whether we’re making money, breaking even, or actually losing money on some of our offerings. Volume Doesn’t Equal Value [16:28] – Would you talk a bit about the arguments that you see for an organization having a narrower product and service line? The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) tells us that 80 percent of value comes from 20 percent of programs. For a learning business, this means that a few of its programs are going to be the most popular and likely provide the most revenue. This means that you could lean into 20 percent of your programs and probably be more profitable right off the bat. We’re very slow to retire programs, and that leads to educational clutter…. We need to think about regularly, purposely abandoning less popular or dated courses.Mary Byers Besides retiring less popular and dated courses, Mary recommends leaders consider the following to increase both revenue and impact for learners: Have a strong search function so that prospective learners can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily (without having to hunt through layers and years of programming).Consider creating packages so that if a learner buys one thing, they can get other related material for one fee. Think about learning pathways or learning journeys so that once learners have started with an area of interest, you’re able to recommend what they can do next. The bottom line is to not make your learners work to learn with you. Help them access your programs, services, and curricula. [20:28] – One of the ideas from Race for Relevance deals with opportunity cost. When you pursue more than you should, that means you don’t have bandwidth or resources to pursue something else. If you’re busy doing one thing, you can’t be doing another—and if the “another” could hold more value for your audience, that is a sad way to use resources. We want to be using resources, like time, at the highest and best use, not only for your curriculum developers but also for your learners. You also want to make sure there’s a good match between what you’re offering and what learners desire. Regarding sunk cost, a lot of the times we won’t abandon, sunset , or retire a program because we have a high level of sunk cost in them, and we want to keep going to turn a profit. That’s why experimenting is so important. If you put a small piece of learning out there, and nobody’s interested, you don’t have to build it out. You can go on to find the next piece of learning that somebody would be interested in. That approach keeps your sunk costs low, making it easier to abandon a program when needed. A Digital-First Mindset [22:08] – How you would describe a digital-first mindset, and what would that look like in the context of a learning business? Mary defines a digital-first mindset as embracing technology in order to deliver what learners want, when they want it, and how they want it. And that doesn’t mean only in a virtual environment. A digital-first mindset is understands that technology also plays a role even when you’re meeting in person. A digital-first mindset requires a close relationship with your audience, constantly asking them, listening to them, and inviting input. Many organizations are behind in building a robust technology framework. That may be due to lack of money or lack of expertise, or it could be as simple as they’re intimidated. The reality is that none of us has time to embrace or create a digital-first mindset while we’re doing the work of today’s business. We have to have two-horizons thinking—short-term, immediate deadlines and long-term deadlines focused on the infrastructure and technology needed to support the learning business’s mission and learners. When we hold hybrid events, we need to consider the needs of the two audiences. There are certainly places where they intersect, but we have to be cognizant of what our goal is and then work backwards to figure out how to best meet that. We need to be thinking not just about the online experience but how technology can support the in-person experience as well. Check out our related article “Hybrid vs. Blended Learning: The Difference and Why It Matters.” Advice for Learning Businesses [25:34] – What advice do you have for a learning business that is looking to grow and to move up to the next level? Mary encourages thinking about three things: Don’t wait to determine and articulate your strategy. Put it in writing, share it with your team, and make that the focus of your longer-horizon thinking because the decisions and actions you take today will determine where you’re going to be in the future. Watch the video to see what Mary says is a secondary benefit of strategic planning. Be prepared to invest and invest regularly. Investment involves not just money but also time and expertise. Areas and efforts that are under-resourced or inadequately resourced often fail.Consider finding collaborative partners. In many cases, the expertise we need to grow exponentially isn’t necessarily on staff, but a collaborative partner (whether a vendor or another organization) has it. Collaboration is the new currency. [29:40] – Mary adds that sometimes the data from an early experiment isn’t mature enough to be helpful. She tells people not to pull the plug too soon, especially if you’re launching something new that’s never been tried before. Also, the more you do it, the more you can get testimonials, social proof, and social media working so you can promote the new initiative, and then momentum may take off. Although there is a time to retire, sunset, and purposely abandon, it’s not always right after your first attempt trying something new. [31:07] – Mary encourages listeners to think about developing a go-forward strategy. We hear a lot about going back to “normal,” going back and just doing things the way that we used to.… But I’m encouraging anytime you hear the words “go back” out of your mouth to gently switch that and change it to “go forward” because “go forward” is positive and optimistic and forward-looking and forward-thinking. Those words “go forward” just have power and momentum and energy in them. And that’s what all learning organizations need to have. They need to be looking further down the horizon than anybody else is.Mary Byers [32:15] – Wrap-up To make sure you don’t miss the remaining episodes in the series, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also helps us get some data on the impact of the podcast. We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple. We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business. Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Other Episodes in This Series: Learning to Get Down to BusinessThe Strategy and Marketing Episode Episodes on Related Topics: Learning Design Thinking with Carol HamiltonDigital Transformation with Ashish Rangnekar Risking Innovation in Disruptive Times with Shawn Boynes of AAA The post Studying Innovation with Mary Byers appeared first on Leading Learning.

The Strategy and Marketing Episode

Both marketing and strategy are fundamental to the health and success of a learning business, which is why we’re addressing them in the context of the learning business MBA. Of course, the learning business MBA doesn’t exist yet. Rather, we’re using it as shorthand for the key skills, knowledge, and behaviors needed by those working in market-facing learning businesses so they can ensure their organizations survive and thrive. While a single podcast series won’t allow us to do the work of a true advanced graduate degree, we can cover some key areas, give you ideas to ponder, and offer tools to try in your learning business. In this second installment in our seven-part series on the learning business MBA, we focus on two fundamental areas of knowledge for those leading and working in learning businesses: strategy and marketing. We offer definitions of each and share related resources and tools to help you grow your learning business in each of these areas. To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet. Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio. Read the Show Notes [00:25] – Intro Defining Strategy: A Framework for Decisions [01:28] – Strategy drives—or should drive—essentially all that happens in a learning business. When it comes to defining strategy and understanding what it is, we may not have a clear and common understanding. Our go-to definition of strategy is based on the work of Benjamin B. Tregoe and John W. Zimmerman in a book from 1980 called Top Management Strategy. They define strategy as a “framework which guides those choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization.” There are thousands of decisions, some big, some small, when it comes to running a learning business: How do we define our target market? What products and services should we offer? How should we price them? What technology should we use? We like that Tregoe and Zimmerman think of strategy as a framework that guides your decisions. Strategy assumes there is something you’re trying to do and that you have a general approach to how you’re going to do it. Strategy should guide how you behave, particularly with respect to the market in which you operate. It should also guide how you allocate resources. Strategy has to lead to action. We also like the Tregoe and Zimmerman definition because it’s short and sweet, which makes it easier to remember and therefore more actionable. The definition can remind you and your team about what you should be doing with strategy: setting the organization’s direction and making choices. Three Essential Components of Strategy [03:51] – That focus on action is something that really comes across in a 2011 book on strategy that we highly recommend: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt. Rumelt breaks strategy down into three essential components: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent actions. A diagnosis involves gathering critical information about your learning business’s current situation, identifying the key challenges represented by the situation, and identifying the most compelling opportunities that would result from tackling one or more of the key challenges and lead you to a future where your learning business is successful and thriving. A guiding policy is a general approach to overcoming the challenges identified and making significant progress. A guiding policy describes the trajectory, or general path, for how to achieve a desired future state. A critical part of a good policy is that it reflects some advantage or strength your organization has that will appeal to your audience and won’t be easy for others to copy. Coherent actions are the set of major, coordinated steps you will take to support the guiding policy. They don’t describe every action you will take, but they do indicate your major initial actions, the big projects and areas of focus, and indicate the general categories of action that will be important going forward. The tricky thing about strategy is that it’s deceptively simple, and the best strategy usually comes from some insight, and insight isn’t easy. You have to diagnose the situation accurately and honestly to have a shot at a good strategy—and that’s much harder than many organizations appreciate. We appreciate Rumelt’s title Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters because it suggests it can be hard to tell good strategy from bad strategy. They can look alike, and it can take some work to see the difference. Because the best strategies are usually simple that can lead to imposters who mimic the simplicity of real, good strategy. But when it comes to strategy, imitation isn’t effective. You can’t copy and paste and expect to thrive. Strategy should not be confused with best practices. You can’t copy a brilliant strategy from another organization. Strategy needs to be organic, born out of out your learning business’s unique set of circumstances, taking advantage of your strengths while addressing your weaknesses and with an awareness of competition and change in your market. And, most importantly, strategy should be proactive, not reactive, and following someone else’s strategy, even a good one, keeps you in a reactive, let’s-see-what-they-do mindset rather than looking out to the future and proactively shaping that future and your learning business’s role in it.Jeff Cobb Sponsor: Cadmium [07:59] – Your choice of learning technologies should be driven by strategy. If you’re looking for a strategic technology partner, please check out our sponsor for this series. The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the merging of events and education for organizations across the globe. Organizations have realized that synergizing their education and events strategies produces immeasurable benefits, but they need a technology solution that facilitates that merge. Cadmium is focused on providing a full suite of technology solutions enabling organizations to meet the changing environment head on. From a host of event technologies to integrated learning management and content creation tools, Cadmium offers everything an organization needs to generate revenue and drive engagement. Learn more, and request a demo to see how Cadmium can help your learning business at gocadmium.com. Blue Ocean Strategy [09:02] – Being proactive, not doing whatever everyone else is doing, looking for your learning business’s unique positioning jibes perfectly with another of our favorite strategy resources: Blue Ocean Strategy. This is the work of Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, both professors at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading graduate business schools. In 2005, they published Blue Ocean Strategy based on over a decade-long study they had made of key strategic moves spanning more than 100 years and 30 industries. In 2017, they published a follow-up, Blue Ocean Shift, based on another decade of research and real-world examples of organizations that have implemented blue ocean strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy challenges the tenets of competitive strategy, which was the dominant school of strategy when the book was published. Kim and Mauborgne called for a shift from focusing on competition to a focus on creating new market space, which would make the competition irrelevant. Their view was that cutthroat competition results in a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Lasting success, they argued, comes from creating “blue oceans”—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Tied up in that challenge to competitive strategy was a challenge to the conventional wisdom that an organization has to choose between either being low cost or differentiating to add more value. The blue ocean strategy approach is that you can differentiate and add value while also delivering at low cost—so it’s a win-win for the organization and its customers. With the traditional competitive view of strategy, an organization begins by analyzing the industry and competitors and then carves out a distinctive position in the existing industry where they outperform the competition by building a competitive advantage. With this approach an organization’s strategic options are circumscribed; they’re limited by the environment. Blue ocean strategists recognize that while market and industry conditions exist, they were created by organizations. And, just as organizations created those market and industry conditions, organizations can shape them and even create new industries and markets. Strategy Canvas [13:41] – Like Rumelt, Chan and Mauborgne focus on execution. They don’t leave strategy at the theoretical level. They offer tried and true tools to help identify strategy, and these are tools that we have first-hand experience using in the context of learning businesses. Here we’ll touch on one we’ve used in our consulting work called the strategy canvas. The strategy canvas serves two purposes: The strategy canvas captures the current state of play in your known market space and allows you to clearly see the factors that the industry competes on and lets you see clearly where the competition currently invests and where your organization invests.Once you have your current-state, as-is strategy canvas drawn, it prompts you to begin rethinking your position, to think about what you could do differently to stand out from other players, as shown on the strategy canvas. The strategy canvas is both a diagnostic tool and an action framework. The strategy canvas does all this in a simple picture. The example strategy canvas below looks at factors organizations typically compete on in the continuing education (CE) market (convenience, speaker, quality of content, price, etc.) and shows how one particular organization (the dotted blue line) diverges from the industry focus (the solid pink line). The strategy canvas focuses you on the competitive factors in your market—i.e., the factors on which organizations tend to compete in order to win customers. Price is almost always a factor, and it certainly is a factor in the continuing education and professional development market. Other factors in that market include things like the reputation of the presenters or instructors, location, and amenities like food in the case of face-to-face events. It can include things like the availability of credit or the amount of access learners will get to the instructor or another expert for help. The strategy canvas helps plot out the competitive factors by rating (from low to high) the level of emphasis that different competitors place on those factors and the level of emphasis that your organization places on them by comparison. This gives you a really useful visual of where things currently stand in the market, and, just as importantly, it starts giving you ideas for how you might change your approach to the market by increasing or reducing, maybe even eliminating, your emphasis on certain factors and possibly adding new factors that no one seems to be competing on at this point. Blue Ocean Strategy offers more tools. In addition to the strategy canvas, we also really like the four actions framework and the six paths. See our break-down of the six paths in the context of a learning business. Check out our related episode Blue Ocean Strategy for Your Learning Business. Defining Marketing: The 4 Ps [17:25] – Marketing is a perfect follow-on to our discussion of strategy because the two are intertwined. Strategy will help a learning business determine what to do in the market, and a deep and meaningful understanding of the market will influence strategy. We’ll start with being clear about what we mean by marketing. The American Marketing Association definition states: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” This definition makes it clear that marketing is broad—it’s not just advertising or other types of promotion—and it’s ongoing. We also like its mention of value. Marketing is about identifying what a particular audience values, building products and services that provide some or all of that value, making the audience aware of the offerings, and then delivering the products and services—and thereby the value. And, of course, creating value is generally at the core of strategy. In marketing classes and textbooks—the kind you might find in an MBA—the 4Ps of marketing are often covered: product, place, price, and promotion. Product [19:38] – Product is most fundamentally about identifying and creating an offering that meets the needs of your audience and that will result in the outcomes you aim to achieve for your learners and as a business. In other words, the product P is about creating something that clearly delivers the desired learning outcomes, that people will buy, and that—as a result—will generate revenue for your learning business. While product, as part of the marketing mix, addresses obvious areas like features and benefits and the quality level of the offering, it also includes less obvious elements like branding, how you name it and package it, what sort of services and levels of services you provide to support it, and any guarantees you plan to provide. Beyond that, the product P also includes making decisions about how and when to update and revise the product over time to meet market needs. But most people don’t tend to think of these areas as “marketing.” With elements like features and benefits for a learning product, for example, it’s easy to think that these are purely the domain of the subject matter experts and instructional designers and developers. But we know that the biggest issue learning businesses face is that they create products and then no one buys them—and that’s because they have not applied the marketing perspective to the product. They haven’t gotten the kind of market insight they need to be confident that whatever they create will actually resonate with a fundamental desire or need in their target audience. That brings us to the tool we’d like to offer to help with the product P: the Market Insight MatrixTM. The Market Insight MatrixTM [21:28] – This is a tool we developed and have used with consulting clients. The matrix can help your organization manage a rigorous and practical market assessment process, through three stages and three types of activities, to identify learning products that will address market needs. The three stages are idea generation, idea verification, and idea testing. Idea generation: The higher the quality of the ideas you come up with initially, the easier and more effective the subsequent parts of the market assessment process will be. You want diverse input at this stage. Don’t rely only on the input of a small group or team. You also need input from staff and volunteers, important customers, and influencers in your market. Idea verification: Many organizations effectively stop at the idea generation stage. They come up with a few good ideas, prioritize one or two of them—often based on the thinking of a small number of people in the organization—and then begin building a product. A better approach is to take the ideas generated in stage 1 and verify them by looking at what Web searches, customers’ and prospects’ discussions in social media, and surveys and polls can tell you. Idea testing: To test the idea, put the concept—or even a version of the product—into the marketplace and see if you can get people to take action. Will they sign up for future notifications via a landing page? Can you pre-sell the product and thereby ensure purchases from the get-go? The stages are one key part of the process. The next part is the types of activities you should engage in across these stages. [23:20] – The three types of market assessment activities covered by the matrix are tracking, listening, and asking. Tracking: Tracking focuses primarily on historical, quantitative data. What can you tell—based on a variety of tools like Google Analytics, Google Trends, and data from your e-commerce and learning management systems—about the behavior of your customers in the recent past? What content has been of interest? Where have they found it?Listening: Listening focuses on observing what your learners are saying and doing. What are they saying as they interact with each other, your organization and its offerings, and even your competitors and their offerings? You can find out by monitoring social media, conducting user testing, and mining evaluations.Asking: Asking involves you engaging directly with stakeholders and requesting their input on specific questions. This is the path of traditional tools like surveys and focus groups but also includes activities like pre-selling and crowdfunding. The matrix combines the three stages and the three activity types, with the goal of ensuring you have a process that generates diverse input and doesn’t rely too heavily on any one source. Place [26:11] – The second P is place, and it addresses the question, “How will customers purchase and access the offering?” Place may get overlooked or undervalued because people aren’t intuitively sure what “place” means in the context of marketing, but, even when it’s clear that we’re talking about distribution, learning businesses don’t necessarily consider all the nuances and possibilities. Deciding to distribute a course online, for example, is an example of addressing place. But you can go beyond that decision to consider whether the distribution will be only through your own learning management system and only through a single, standard interface or whether you will support distribution through branded sub-portals or even allow organizations to license the content for use on their own LMS. You can do the same thing with place-based offerings. For example, you might give organizations or subject matter experts the right to deliver one of your workshops internally. You can even consider franchising entire educational events or event models—similar to what TED has done with TEDx. The main takeaway with place is that most organizations simply stick with tried and true channels for getting their products and services to market. But this is an area where pushing yourself to think a little outside the box can open up big opportunities. Probably the most basic one that applies to a majority of learning businesses is to think beyond selling to individual learners and develop approaches to institutional selling—that is, selling in bulk to corporate, government, and other organizational buyers of training and education.Celisa Steele Effectively executing on institutional selling can radically transform a learning business’ prospects. The Value RampTM [28:27] – We’ll add another interpretation of the place P in the context of a learning business, and that’s thinking about an offering’s place on your Value Ramp. This is another tool we’ve developed and used in our consulting work, and it has you think about where a particular product or service sits in relationship to your other offerings. One key idea that underlies the Value Ramp is that there is a relationship between price and value when it comes to selling just about any product of service. Provide more value in the eyes of the potential purchaser, and you can and should charge more. (Note that “in the eyes of the potential purchaser” is critical.) Another key idea behind the Value Ramp is that to get to a higher place and price, you need momentum. In today’s markets, a corollary to this point is that demonstrating value early and often is one of the surest ways to build significant value. More and more, this means providing significant value before you ever charge a dime—which is why content marketing is so important. That’s why both a product’s place on your Value Ramp and where it’s available to your audience matters. Some significant portion of the value you offer needs to be free so that people who don’t know you can discover you and see the value you provide without hitting a barrier like a paywall. See our related episode 8 Tips for Optimizing Your Value Ramp™. Price [30:10] – That brings us to the third P, price. It’s one of the marketing Ps that does not tend to get ignored—pricing is a fact of life for learning businesses. If you’re marketing and selling learning products and services, then those come with a price tag. But what to put on the price tag can be tricky because a lot of organizations don’t know how to approach pricing. We’re proponents of value-based pricing. That doesn’t mean that a learning business shouldn’t know the costs (both direct and indirect, hard and soft) that go into making and offering a learning product or service. Often organizations know the direct and hard costs, but many don’t have a good sense of indirect or soft costs, like staff time. Even if not precise, even if just an educated guess, having some sense of the staff time and effort required to create, manage, and deliver an offering is so important to understanding the financial performance of a learning product or service. Understanding costs is important, but we don’t believe in cost-plus pricing—costs plus 20 percent, for example. We also don’t believe in pricing that’s pegged to your competition. And we don’t recommend trying to beat competition on price. Definitely do your market research, but don’t settle for just matching competitor pricing. You want to beat competition by offering something better, something of higher value, or, better yet, something that’s different.Jeff Cobb Value-based pricing is the concept that the price you charge reflects the value that you believe—and that your prospect is reasonably going to believe—you’re going to create for them with the product or service that you’re offering. If you embrace value-based pricing, then it will begin to influence decisions you make about the features and quality of a product, the packaging and branding, how it will be distributed, what level of exclusivity will be associated with it, etc. All those factors drive value perception—and impact underlying costs. As a result, they directly impact your decisions about price. Those decisions include asking and answering questions like these: What will our pricing strategy be?Are we going for market penetration or expansion with low pricing?Do we price this as a premium offering?Do all customers get the same price?Are there discounts?What are the criteria for the discounts?Do we offer payment terms? It’s important to stress just what a powerful lever price is. Price impacts perception—just assigning a higher price to a product and doing nothing else can raise its perceived value. And a lower price can suggest lower value. Price also has a big impact on revenue. Raising prices is more powerful than cutting costs or increasing sales volume when it comes to generating higher net revenue. The opposite is also true. It’s very difficult to make up for the net revenue losses that occur as the result of a price decrease. Resources for Pricing Learning Products [34:09] – In terms of a tool for pricing, we’ll mention that the Value Ramp can also be used here. You’ll want your Value Ramp to tell a logical story of increasing value and increasing price, so consider that when plotting your offerings. Because we know how key pricing is for learning business, we have a lot of information about pricing learning products that can help you get thinking about your approach to pricing. To learn more, check out the pricing resources below: How to Price Online LearningPricing Your Education Products: Two Essential Factors, Part IPricing Your Education Products: Two Essential Factors, Part II Also check out our related episode How to Price Educational Products – 10 Tips from 20 Years of Experience. Promotion [34:47] – The final P is promotion. This is the P that most people equate with marketing, which may be why a lot of learning business professionals say they don’t like marketing—they don’t like the idea of promoting or selling, even if they appreciate how important they are. It’s also likely that many learning business professionals don’t appreciate the full range of possibilities for promotion. It’s easy to think of promotion as overtly selling, whether that means advertising or sending an e-mail campaign that pitches a specific offering. Those are part of promotion—and they are often very important parts—but a lot of what goes into promotion these days is much more subtle. There’s the concept of a promotional mix, and that’s going to include not just things like advertising, brochures, and mailings, but also content marketing, search engine marketing, and social media marketing, just to name a few of the possibilities. Those suggest some skills for learning business MBA students to dig into: SEO (search engine optimization), copywriting, and the use of social media for conversion. To learn more about the 4Ps, listen to our related episode The 4 Ps of Marketing Your Learning Business. AIDA Formula [36:07] – The tool we’re offering to help you with the promotion P is the AIDA formula. AIDA is an acronym: AttentionInterestDesireAction Those are the four stages that prospective customers move through in a typical buying process—from initial awareness to some interest to the desire to do something to making an actual purchase. The goal of anyone promoting a product or service is to help prospects move through these stages so that they will be converted and buy or register for the course or turn over their e-mail to get that resource. AIDA reminds us that no matter how much we want a customer or prospect to take action, to click the Buy button, we first have to get their attention—and getting their attention is no small matter. Then we have to create an interest in what we’re offering. Then we have to take that interest and get them to desire, and then and only then might they take action. To learn more about AIDA, listen to our related episode The 4-Part Formula for Selling Education. [37:56] – Wrap-up To make sure you don’t miss the remaining episodes in the series, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also helps us get some data on the impact of the podcast. We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple. We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business. Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Other Episodes in This Series: Learning to Get Down to Business Episodes on Related Topics: Blue Ocean Strategy for Your Learning Business8 Tips for Optimizing Your Value Ramp™Leveraging the Learning Business Maturity ModelThe 4-Part Formula for Selling EducationThe 4 Ps of Marketing Your Learning BusinessHow to Price Educational Products – 10 Tips from 20 Years of Experience The post The Strategy and Marketing Episode appeared first on Leading Learning.

Learning to Get Down to Business

Chances are, if you’re in the learning business, you probably didn’t go to school knowing this is where your career would take you. Some of you may a have strong background on the learning or education side, while others may have it on the business side—but likely, you don’t have an equally strong background when it comes to both, and it may be difficult to combine the two. And because we want you to have the core skills and knowledge needed to run a successful learning business, we’re focusing our newest series on the learning business MBA. In this first installment in our seven-part series, we discuss the idea behind the learning business MBA and the related skills it requires. We also pull in perspectives from Josh Goldman—who we credit for giving us the term for the learning business MBA—and Arianne Urena and Cristyn Johnson. To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet. Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio. Read the Show Notes What Is the Learning Business MBA? [00:29] – We’ll credit the term to Josh Goldman, who now serves as the senior director of consulting at Tagoras, the parent company of Leading Learning, which we co-founded. He was not part of the team here when he first used the term. He was at a CPA society then, and he reached out to us because he was in charge of putting together programming for a gathering of the educators from the CPA world. The idea of an MBA (a master’s in business administration) emerged and having that be a theme for a day of education. Of course, we weren’t going to accomplish a true MBA in a day, but the idea was that we could focus on the business side of providing lifelong learning and continuing education in a one-day session with these educators. We had a chance to talk with Josh much more recently than that initial conversation about this idea of an MBA for learning leaders. [03:27] – Josh shares what he remembers about the original of the learning business MBA. As I looked across the landscape, I realized that the market was changing. There were a lot of competitive forces at play, and I needed a skill set that I hadn’t earned either formally through formal training and education or informally via on-the-job learning…. As I advanced in my career and worked with different audiences and in increasingly complex associations, I recognized I personally was lacking some of the explicit knowledge, skills that you would find inside of a traditional MBA program…. And so the market was changing needs, and I felt at that time that that collective audience—all of those learning leaders across a number of CPA associations and myself—could use something like a learning MBA that helped us focus on some of those more business-focused or corporate-focused knowledge and skill sets.Josh Goldman Josh speaks based on his personal background working in associations, but we don’t think what he’s describing is unique to people working in the association world. People who wind up in the learning business probably do so accidentally more often than not. Even if you come to a commercial training firm that might be focused on the adult lifelong learning market, chances are you didn’t go to school thinking that’s where you were going to end up. So you may be lacking some of those skills. Also, it can feel a little bit distasteful to some to combine learning and education with business. Perhaps there is some tension inherent in how we describe our audience. We talk about learning businesses. Learning is an innate impetus—all humans learn—and so it seems learning should be wide open, freely available. Business, on the other hand, is about competition and profit and charging for access. So it can feel distasteful for people who really buy into the learning mission of a learning business to think of it as a business. Some people who end up in a learning business come a learning or education background. Others (probably fewer) land in a learning business with business skills and acumen, and they might be unfamiliar with the learning side of things and feel at a loss when it comes to understanding what goes into making an effective learning experience, which, of course, is what a learning business provides. [06:45] – Back to the question, “What is the learning business MBA?” The learning business MBA is shorthand for getting at the core skills and knowledge needed to run a successful learning business. Just as the traditional master’s of business administration focuses on key areas that are important for the successful operations of a business, the learning business MBA does the same thing. It identifies the core skills and knowledge in specific areas that are necessary for one particular type of business, for a learning business, and what it takes for that to be successful. The main difference is that the learning business MBA focuses on learning businesses that serve learners and help them learn, and so learning is so important to their profitability. One of the things we’ll aim to do over the course of this series is to enumerate some of those skills and knowledge areas required for running a successful learning business, dig into them a bit, and have conversations with people who can help to illuminate them in the context of a learning business. Another model is something like the altMBA that Seth Godin introduced a number of years ago. The altMBA and executive MBAs play off the idea of the full-blown MBA and focus on offering content to people who are already in the work world and are going to be able to put what they learn to work in the context of their day-to-day jobs. While obviously this podcast series is not going to be any sort of true MBA, we hope to MBA-type skills, knowledge, insights, and conversations with people from a business perspective that you will be able to put to work in your learning business. What Would the Course of Study Cover in the Learning Business MBA? [09:38] – Let’s talk about what would we study in the learning business MBA. What are the skills and knowledge learning businesses need to be successful? It’s going to vary from program to program, but there are some core areas you find in most MBA programs—things like accounting, finance, strategy, management, marketing, and communications. These aren’t unique to learning businesses, but they are definitely important to learning businesses. When talking about skills he wanted and felt lacking in years ago, Josh mentioned product development, pricing, market assessment, and risk assessment. Those are arguably more specific domains—subdomains you could call them, under some of those broader categories. There are some domains that are unique to learning businesses, the main one being an understanding of how adults learn efficiently and effectively. An understanding of how learning happens is, of course, key to developing and delivering products that are going to help a learning business in its arguably most fundamental goal.Celisa Steele The business elements are really built all around developing and delivering effective, efficient learning products and services. Fortunately, we’ve got good resources to help you understand how learning happens. We just completed a great series on learning science for learning businesses, which we recommend particularly if your background is more in business than in learning. Depending on your role in a learning business, you’re going to go deeper or shallower in some areas. Sponsor: Cadmium [12:49] – The effective use of learning technology is a core skill of successful learning businesses. If you’re looking for a technology partner, please check out our sponsor for this series. The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the merging of events and education for organizations across the globe. Organizations have realized that synergizing their education and events strategies produces immeasurable benefits, but they need a technology solution that facilitates that merge. Cadmium is focused on providing a full suite of technology solutions enabling organizations to meet the changing environment head on. From a host of event technologies to integrated learning management and content creation tools, Cadmium offers everything an organization needs to generate revenue and drive engagement. Learn more, and request a demo to see how Cadmium can help your learning business at gocadmium.com. The Most Important Skills for the Learning Business MBA [13:43] – What are the most important skill sets for those leading and working in learning businesses? The answer to that will change depending on the nature of the organization, the people involved, and the situation. It’s hard to generalize too much, but anybody working in a learning business needs to have at least a good grasp of the fundamentals. You need to know how to work with a spreadsheet. You need to understand things like the four Ps of marketing and why they matter and have some basic understanding of how to develop strategy. In addition to these sort of concrete core skills around business, anybody working in the learning business—and maybe this applies to any business—has to be skilled in critical thinking. Critical thinking has aspects of judgment and aspects of what we’ve written and talked about before as metalearning. It’s the ability to step back and make sense of what’s going on and figure out how to find the value and how to move forward, whether we’re talking about big organizational decisions or just small day-to-day decisions. We’ve already said there can be this sort of cognitive dissonance between the idea of business on the one hand, where you’ve got competition and profit, and learning and education on the other hand, where people often have a sense of purity about that. You have to be able to look at those two areas and recognize the ways that maybe they legitimately are in opposition but also recognize the ways in which they overlap—and overlap very strongly when your business is learning—and be able to figure out what to do with that. That’s one area where that kind of critical thinking judgment really applies. Jeff Cobb Another area where critical thinking applies is around trends and buzzwords. You have to be able to step back, make some sense of the situation, and come to judgments that are going to result in value for the business and for the learners that you aim to serve. Critical thinking is going to help you no matter where your organization is. There are also perennial issues that we see come up that you have to have skills to address. [17:43] – When we asked Josh what he sees as the most important skills for those leading and working in learning businesses he offered two. Understand the current and potential customers, beyond a surface-level understanding. Know their motivations, the decision criteria they use, and why they’re working with you versus working with others.Know how to translate and transition that understanding into how you position the value you credibly bring to the market. We also spoke with Arianne Urena, who has served on the Elevate LMS team at CommPartners and is now part of Cadmium, and she focused in on the same two areas as Josh: homing in on the needs and wants of the learners and then ensuring that your offerings are accessible and that the value is shown. To understand the audience, a learning business needs to “get” market research and market analysis. Then to translate that understanding into products and services, a learning business has to understand product development and the pricing and promotion aspects of marketing. To learn more, check out our related episode, The 4 Ps of Marketing Your Learning Business. [21:24] – Critical thinking and judgment are needed because there are so many cut-and-paste things you can do around things like market assessment and understanding your audience. Those can be useful, but, if you can’t really apply that judgment to both crafting those instruments and then analyzing and evaluating what you get out of them, then you’re not going to get very far. You have to understanding your audience, and apply judgment and critical thinking to then make the decisions that are going to create the value that you need to create as a learning business. Is your approach going to be market-focused or product-focused? What Josh and Arianne are talking about is that market-focused approach—really understanding that market and then giving them what they need and want. But there’s an alternative to that. There’s leading the market, leading your audience, giving them what you can see they need, even if they haven’t fully recognized that. Deciding between a market focus and a product focus gets back to the critical thinking skill. It also ties very clearly to strategy. There are choices, decisions to make, and it takes critical thinking to decide which strategic approach you’re going to follow and execute on. Deciding between a market focus and a product focus is a strategic question, and our talk of strategy reminds us of something that Cristyn Johnson, who focuses on training and development for clients and staff at Cadmium, said when we spoke with her. We asked her what she thinks those leading and working in a learning business need to know or be able to do in order to be successful, and she talked about planning, which is an important aspect of strategy. Cristyn says it may seem like a no-brainer, but you need to create a plan to achieve the learning goals that you’re looking to achieve, and the plan should have a mix of short-term and long-term goals and objectives. During this planning process, she recommends thinking about the things that you have control over that can really help you achieve your goals. Cristyn also likes to reiterate that an engaged learner is much more likely to not only retain the information that you’re giving them, but they’re also more likely to return, to come back and purchase again—and they’re also more likely to tell their friends and colleagues about the amazing experience that they had. Cristyn adds that you should strive to foster an environment of learning both internally within your organization and externally with your learners. A learning mindset goes a long way for everybody embracing it. It’s hard to have a successful learning business if you haven’t really thought about the learning culture in which you are working, the different constituents that make up that culture—not just your internal culture at the learning business—but more broadly, that universe of your learners and the different providers and subject matter experts, and really understanding the context in which you’re working as a learning business. Growing a learning culture is a fundamental skill for any learning business looking to thrive. [27:36] – Wrap-up Reflection Question We’ll offer a reflection question for you to ponder: If you were putting together a learning business MBA, what subjects and skills would you include? What was missing from the topics we touched on today? To make sure you don’t miss the remaining episodes in the series, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also helps us get some data on the impact of the podcast. The kind of market data that’s so important for learning businesses. We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple. We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business. Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Episodes on Related Topics: The 4 Ps of Marketing Your Learning Business7 Metalearning Moves to Empower Lifelong Learning8 Tips for Optimizing Your Value Ramp™ The post Learning to Get Down to Business appeared first on Leading Learning.

Taking Action with Learning Science

This is the last installment in our seven-episode series on learning science’s role in a learning business, and we’ve covered a variety of interesting topics. But we want learning science to be more than interesting. We want you to apply it so you can elevate the success and impact of your learning business, as well as the success and impact of the learners you serve. In this episode, we revisit comments from the interviewees in the series about the one tenet or aspect of learning science they wished was better understood by those designing and delivering learning for adult lifelong learners. We connect their perspectives and uncover the common theme: actionability. And, to help your learning business take the important step of applying learning science, we offer a framework we developed—the MIDDLE ME learning product lifecycle—to get you started. To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet. Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio. Read the Show Notes Perspectives on Key Tenets of Learning Science [00:27] – We spoke with Megan Sumeracki for the episode that focused on behavioral and cognitive psychology. She explained that we’re actually really bad at putting ourselves in the future context related to what we’re learning and assessing how well we’d do in that context. We’re bad judges of our own learning. That is a significant finding. It shows that we can’t just ask learners if they’re getting it and if they’ll be able to do it when the time comes. We need to get them to try to do and see. That’s when we’ll know—and they’ll know—whether or not they’ve really learned it.Celisa Steele [04:04] – We asked learning designer and technologist Myra Roldan what aspect of learning science she wishes those designing and delivering adult lifelong learning better understood. Her comments connect with Megan’s. Myra explained that a lot of instruction focuses on theory and understanding concept, but instruction tends to fall flat on the hands-on, application piece. What both Megan and Myra homed in on is cause and effect—or at least a logical consequence. If learners aren’t good judges of knowing if they’ve learned something, you need to give them opportunities for for trying things out. Those hands-on opportunities allow them to not only learn but to also get some feedback about their learning. By doing something, learners often produce something that an instructor can evaluate and provide feedback on too. There’s a lot of work to be done in helping instructors and subject matter experts learn how to scaffold hands-on, application opportunities well. Not just any doing will have good results—learners need doing and application that are spot-on, relevant, and align with how they will use whatever they are learning in the future. That can sound obvious and easy, but we know from our own experience that when you’re trying to design something impactful in a limited amount of time, it can be hard to determine appropriate opportunities for doing and application. It requires work over time, and learning businesses should help their subject matter experts in understanding the importance of practice and scaffolding application opportunities. [07:14] – The aspect of learning science Ruth Colvin Clark wishes learning designers better understood is the fundamentals of the mental processes and a better appreciation of the limits and strength of working memory. This is one I’ve been guilty of, time and time again, and always have to pay attention to. So many subject matter experts, so many presenters, teachers, facilitators are guilty of this. Just stuffing too much into a learning experience, not taking the time to cut down to what’s truly essential and what’s truly reasonable for a learner to process…. Less content really can be a beautiful thing.Jeff Cobb [09:35] – The limitations of working memory that Ruth brought up are also an argument for microlearning, which Brenda McLaughlin, CEO at SelfStudy, raised in regards to designing effective learning experiences. She thinks we need more normalcy and systems around creating smaller interactions with education so that we’re not always thinking in terms of mapping to a course but of mapping to a competency or skill. Brenda’s comments remind us of Cathy Moore’s take that we really need a mindset shift to get away from content-heavy learning options and offerings that can then favor more doing because there’s less emphasis on content. Microlearning embraces the less-is-more approach, and Brenda points out that, to realize its full potential, it isn’t just chunking longer content; it’s truly a different approach. [12:04] – We asked evaluation experts Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter to pick one aspect of effective evaluation they wished was more broadly understood by those charged with looking at the impact of learning programs. Daniela emphasized that there has to be a focus on performance—what the learning is about, what you want to get out of it, and if it’s actually being used. Rob stressed that that an evaluation must be actionable. You need to know what the return on investment of the evaluation is, and it has to be actionable because, if you can’t do anything with it, there’s no point. We struggle with this ourselves, and it’s not easy territory, but the Success Case Method is one approach that can be used. Listen to Mark Nilles speak at the Leading Learning Symposium about how he’s made use of the method to evaluate training programs. Mark Nilles presenting on the Success Case Method Sponsor: SelfStudy [15:17] – If you’re looking for a technology partner to help you optimize the learning experiences you offer, check out our sponsor for this series. SelfStudy is a learning optimization technology company. Grounded in effective learning science and fueled by artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the SelfStudy platform delivers personalized content to anyone who needs to learn either on the go or at their desk. Each user is at the center of their own unique experience, focusing on what they need to learn next. For organizations, SelfStudy is a complete enterprise solution offering tools to instantly auto-create highly personalized, adaptive learning programs, the ability to fully integrate with your existing LMS or CMS, and the analytics you need to see your members, users, and content in new ways with deeper insights. SelfStudy is your partner for longitudinal assessment, continuing education, professional development, and certification. Learn more and request a demo to see SelfStudy auto-create questions based on your content at selfstudy.com. The MIDDLE ME Learning Product Lifecycle [16:29] – We’d like to offer a framework we developed that can help you think about where and how learning science might play a more strategic, thoughtful, and intentional role in your learning business: the MIDDLE ME learning product life cycle. The MIDDLE ME learning product life cycle has four phases: Market interface (MI): understanding what your learners need and want and communicating with them about the value you have to offerDesign & development (DD): creating what your learners need and wantLearning experience (LE): the learners interacting with what you’ve createdMeasurement & evaluation (ME): looking at the impact of learners interacting with what you’ve created The MIDDLE ME framework can help you focus efforts among your stakeholders: the staff that you have who are charged with providing the learning that you offer, the volunteers, facilitators, the subject matter experts, and the learners. The framework can help give you insight into what’s going on at different points for each of those key stakeholder groups. [18:32] – Here’s how learning science might fit in in each phase of MIDDLE ME: Market interface (MI) is all about knowing and connecting with your audience: learners, customers, and your potential learners and customers. Here’s where learner needs assessment and/or market assessment come into play. Your internal team/staff will need to be engaged to conduct the assessments. Once you have the results of those assessments, you need to share them with your designers and developers.Design and development (DD) is where you plan and create the products and services that your learners need and want. This is where you cut and chunk to help with the limitations of working memory. You scaffold practice so that learners aren’t passive or getting theory only, but they engage and try things. The main stakeholder group involved here are those people doing the design and development of your learning experiences.The learning experience (LE) phase is where learners interact with what you’ve designed and developed based on your market interface. Mostly, you have to make sure that the good design and development work of the previous phase doesn’t get thwarted. This is also where feedback and practice happen. Stakeholders here are the learners and those supporting them in the moment.In the measurement and evaluation (ME) phase, we look at the impact of learners interacting with what we designed and developed. We measure and evaluate our products and services and look to draw business insights. As we heard from Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter, this is where you can look for evidence of the impact of the learning experience, and, in particular, you might look for success cases and failures and analyze those. This is valuable in multiple ways—marketing potential, improving offerings, proving value, and more. We’re providing this MIDDLE ME model as a tool because it can be a simple framework for helping you put learning science into action. Providing education and learning experiences for your adult lifelong learners is really at the core of being in a learning business. To thrive in the learning business, what you deliver has to be effective. It has to get the learners to where they’re supposed to go, and that’s what applying learning science can make happen for your learning business.Jeff Cobb Evidence-Based Practice Requires Evidence [24:41] – Learning science, as a science, is grounded in evidence. That evidence-based approach is consistent with how we tend to approach life and work—we strive to try and test and study what’s working or not working and why. We hope you’ll choose at least one action to take in at least one of the four phases of the MIDDLE ME model and then look at the results. Use the evidence you gather to grow and improve your learning business in general and your offerings in particular. Get out and do/try/measure something so you can get some evidence that will allow you to test ideas and hypotheses and make informed decisions throughout MIDDLE ME. Learning science has the potential to help you across the board with the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business. It’ll help you as an organization be more successful. It’s going to help your learners be more successful. It’s going to help the field, profession, or industry that they’re working in do better. Then, of course, those served by the learners are going to fare better as well. It really is a win-win-win-win when a learning business can really leverage learning science.Celisa Steele [26:19] – Wrap-up This is the last episode in the seven-part series on the role of learning science in a learning business. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series, and we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for the future. You can leave a comment at below or e-mail us at leadinglearning@tagoras.com. We’ll resume releasing episodes of the Leading Learning Podcast with a new series starting in October 2021, which means you have some time to experiment with infusing learning science more intentionally in your learning business before the next new series airs. To make sure you don’t miss the remaining episodes in the series, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts,Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also helps us get some data on the impact of the podcast. Recommendations offer evidence of the podcast’s impact, so please take a minute to rate and review the Leading Learning Podcast at https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple. We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business. We encourage you to learn more about the series sponsor at selfstudy.com. Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. [28:21] – Sign-offOther Episodes in This Series: Learning Science for Learning ImpactEffective Learning with Learning Scientist Megan SumerackiNeeds, Wants, and Learning ScienceDesigning Content Scientifically with Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra RoldanPractice and Feedback: Evidence-Based Tools for LearningEvidence-Based Evaluation with Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter Episodes on Related Topics: Cathy Moore on Action MappingDesign for How People Learn with Julie DirksenTelling Ain’t Training (Still) with Harold Stolovitch The post Taking Action with Learning Science appeared first on Leading Learning.

Evidence-Based Evaluation with Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter

Learning science uses evidence-based practice to support learning, and evaluation plays a critical role in providing that evidence by revealing its true impact. To help us unpack how evaluations should inform decisions about learning, we spoke with Dr. Robert Brinkerhoff and Dr. Daniela Schroeter, co-directors of the Brinkerhoff Evaluation Institute (BEI). Rob is an internationally recognized expert with four decades of experience in evaluation and learning effectiveness and he’s the author of several books including, The Success Case Method and Telling Training’s Story. He’s also the creator of the Success Case Method, a highly regarded and carefully crafted impact evaluation approach to determining how well educational and training programs work. Daniela has a PhD in interdisciplinary evaluation and has spent the past 15 years providing evaluation and capacity building to a wide range of private, public, and nonprofit organizations around the globe. In addition to co-directing BEI, Daniela is an associate professor at Western Michigan University. In this sixth installment in our seven-part series on learning science’s role in a learning business, we talk with Rob and Daniela about how to effectively leverage evaluations to maximize outcomes from learning. We also discuss the Success Case Method, the value in using evidence-based stories to demonstrate the impact of an offering, and why evaluation must lead to actionability. To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet. Listen to the Show Access the Transcript Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio. Read the Show Notes [00:19] – Intro and background info about Rob and Daniela. Flaws of Traditional Evaluation Methods [02:13] – What do you see as the primary flaws or shortcomings of traditional typical evaluation methods? There’s currently an emphasis on evidence-based practice focusing on quantitative outcome data and sophisticated methodologies. Those are challenging because they’re often not practical and don’t allow you to adapt a learning intervention while you’re still implementing it. There’s also too much emphasis on comparison groups and singular outcomes rather than looking at the intervention as a whole and the unique environments of each individual learner. Evaluations shouldn’t focus on the end point, but rather they should be used from the beginning to continuously improve the program, the impacts from it, and to leverage learning and maximize outcomes from learning. Success Case Method [04:03] – Can you briefly introduce the Success Case Method? Rob describes how he got the idea for the Success Case Method when he realized the need for an evaluation method that focuses on the success of something when it was actually used, not just on average. This is because the average always underestimates the good. The Success Case Method identifies the most successful users—and not so successful users—of the initiative being evaluated. It then answers questions to identify what needs to be done to make more people perform as well as the few best people. The Success Case Method (image from www.monicawabuke.com) [08:13] – Would you talk a little bit about some of the purposes that the Success Case Method can be used for? The Success Case Method can be used to: Improve learning interventions and maximize the outcomes from the learning.Pilot programs to find out what works well and for whom.Market to downstream audiences. Once we know what is working and for whom, we can leverage that information to push the learning to new audiences.Help program deliverers tell the story. Often learning providers want share outcomes that are the result of a learning experience, and a success case story provides information that can be shared.Teach participants and their supervisors about the value of the learning that they’re participating in. Too many times we’ve seen evaluation studies that are hard to interpret, hard to understand. They use a lot of statistics and a lot of jargon. And what really compels people is stories…. That sort of evidence really compels action and drives emotional response and buy-in.Rob Brinkerhoff Rob stresses the importance of stories. There are fictional stories, and there are evidence-based stories. We need to look for the truth of a program. Almost always there are successes, and it’s important to leverage those. Value in Impact Evaluation: Past and Future [11:46] – Do you think impact evaluation should always have a future-facing aspect, where you’re looking to improve? Or do you see value in a purely historical look at a particular course’s impact in the past? There’s value in summative, endpoint evaluation and being able to provide evidence that a particular program is working and making a difference. We can learn a lot from history. Being able to learn about programs that didn’t work and why is valuable, but, even with that, there’s a future orientation. It can provide information that helps you defend why you want to continue with a program. All evaluation should be used for learning at one point or another. While our method directly tries to focus on current learning and what we can learn now for future learning interventions…there’s also a longer-term effect in doing historical evaluation because, without looking back at the past, we cannot innovate in the future.Daniela Schroeter [13:56] – How do you respond to people who get tripped up trying to show direct causation between an educational offering and specific results? Learning is never the sole cause for anything other than paying the bill for having participated in it. Any change in human performance or behavior is driven by a complex nexus of causes. It’s not important to show that the training is the sole cause of an improvement or change, but it’s critical to show that the training made a worthy and necessary contribution to an individual’s success. As a methodology, the Success Case Method gets away from looking at the average. Instead, it looks at outliers and the best an intervention can do when it works well, as well as why it doesn’t work for people at the very bottom. Too many valuable babies get thrown out in the bathwater of statistical reporting. We want to be sure that we understand, when it did work, why did it work? And, when it didn’t work, why didn’t it work? Because that’s the real leverageable information that we can do something useful with.Rob Brinkerhoff Causation is really a question for knowledge generation when we want to build a research base, and that’s very important—that’s what academia does. For learning providers, the primary interest is how to leverage an intervention and make it better for the people who are using the learning, rather than generating academic contributions. It’s also important to understand that a judicial context factored into the creation of the Success Case Method. When saying the Success Case Method produces “evidence that would stand up in court,” it literally means it has to be testimony that can be corroborated with evidence. Sponsor: SelfStudy [17:41] – If you’re looking for a technology partner whose platform development is informed by evidence-based practice, check out our sponsor for this series. SelfStudy is a learning optimization technology company. Grounded in effective learning science and fueled by artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the SelfStudy platform delivers personalized content to anyone who needs to learn either on the go or at their desk. Each user is at the center of their own unique experience, focusing on what they need to learn next. For organizations, SelfStudy is a complete enterprise solution offering tools to instantly auto-create highly personalized, adaptive learning programs, the ability to fully integrate with your existing LMS or CMS, and the analytics you need to see your members, users, and content in new ways with deeper insights. SelfStudy is your partner for longitudinal assessment, continuing education, professional development, and certification. Learn more and request a demo to see SelfStudy auto-create questions based on your content at selfstudy.com. Defining Success for Effective Evaluation [18:49] – In Telling Training’s Story, you define success as “the achievement of a positive impact on the organization through the application of some skill or knowledge acquired in training.” In the case of learning businesses, how might you define success? The root definition of success is that you learn something that makes a difference. It’s not whether you learned something or not; it’s whether you made use of it for some worthy purpose in your life. If it isn’t making a difference to people, then it doesn’t have value. Many learning interventions don’t necessarily teach a new skill. Then the question becomes, “What is this current learning doing to reinforce, change, or provide for greater success?” Each individual learner may have a unique context and experience, so a cookie-cutter evaluation approach doesn’t work. It’s useful for the learning provider to understand what the biggest challenges for people are in different contexts. This also allows people who are asked to sign up for a certain learning experience to make good decisions about what works and why. One exception to this is people who sign up for a course only to get a certificate. This isn’t a good candidate for the Success Case Method if the only motivation for people is to show participation and they don’t care if they ever use it. The Evolution of Evaluation [23:05] – How have you seen evaluation practices change? Do you think there’s a better or broader understanding of effective evaluation now than there used to be? There’s a lot of change and innovation going on in evaluation and there’s more interest now in practicality. There’s more need for useful information, and Rob and Daniela are trying to maximize the value of evaluation for the people who want a program evaluated. It’s about empowering people to engage in evaluative activity so they can maximize the learning from their programs. Academically speaking, there’s a lot going on with transformative evaluation methods that try to engage marginalized groups and support sociocultural developments. Also, there’s more interest in getting evidence for more savvy consumers. There’s a trend toward making evaluation more of a partnering activity, working more in tandem toward the common goal of doing something good for that program and helping it be more successful. Partnering in that way is more fulfilling for the program side and for the evaluation side. [25:43] – Are there areas of evaluation that you would love to know more about? Anything you’re keeping an eye on to see how it evolves or what we learn about it in the years ahead? As an evaluation scholar, Daniela keeps up to date with the evaluation literature and new developments in evaluation theory, methodology, and practice. In terms of the Success Case Method, she looks forward to better understanding how it works in different evaluation contexts. While the Success Case Method has traditionally been marked as a methods-oriented approach to evaluation, she considers it more of a user- or consumer-oriented approach and a transformative type of evaluation that can engage stakeholders. Rob adds that, because their evaluation work is conducted as a business, they have to always keep an eye on the competition, making sure they maintain a competitive advantage in their approach. They’re constantly looking at who’s doing what in evaluation and how they can learn from them to get better. Transformative Evaluation [27:46] – Can you explain what you mean by the term transformative evaluation? Transformative evaluation approaches take marginalized groups into account. For example, feminist, culturally responsive, and LBGTQ evaluation approaches exist. Transformative evaluation brings in the perspective of groups that are often on the edge of a learning intervention. It directly engages with those individuals and brings their issues to the center of the evaluation. It’s not just the program, but it’s how we engage the learner or the marginalized group in the program to maximize the benefits for disenfranchised people. We want to know if we’ve needle moved for those people in the organization who are especially vulnerable. We can then focus on that group because that’s where the gold is buried. When you look at a broader statistic that takes everybody into account—those who aren’t being affected by these practices anyway—you wash out this impact. [30:05] – What role do you see evaluation playing in the realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion? The role evaluation should play in DEI is helping get the truth out—getting evidence and bringing it to people who otherwise would not be aware of it. It’s hugely important to get the story told of the marginal groups that are being impacted by lack of diversity and inclusion so that people who don’t understand their experience can learn some more about the truth of their experience. Evaluation is searching for the truth. And we need to then get that truth to the people who can do something valuable with that understanding.Rob Brinkerhoff DEI also means engaging the right people to ask the right questions and to use the right ways of communicating findings. Understand This About Effective Evaluation [31:29] – If you had to pick one aspect of effective evaluation, what do you wish was more broadly understood and implemented by those tasked with looking at the impact of learning programs? Rob says the one criterion an evaluation should meet is actionability. As a learning business, you need to know the return on investment of the evaluation, and it has to be actionable. Daniela thinks there needs to be a focus on performance—what the learning is about, what you want to get out of it, and if it’s actually being used. How the Success Case Method Has Evolved [32:59] – How has the Success Case Method evolved over the years? With the introduction of technology, it’s changed a lot. Evaluation studies can be done for less money because we can be much more efficient. For example, survey software has eliminated the need to mail surveys. More conceptually, there’s more demand for value and actionable performance from evaluators, and we’re more adaptable than we used to be. On a broad level, evaluation is very much the same, but the way things are being done is very different—for example, how reports are being written, the way things are communicated, the way the surveys are implemented, turnaround times, how interviews are being conducted, etc. You can engage more people in a more efficient way, which impacts the way methodologies are implemented. There’s also a shift towards technology-based digital platforms for delivering learning journeys. Rob and Daniela have had to become savvy about how the expectations for impact and value differ when dealing with virtual training. You can harvest success stories earlier on and produce knowledge—and integrate it back—much faster. The findings are much more immediate and actionable. [37:00] – Is there anything else you’d like to say before we say goodbye? Rob says evaluation is common sense applied. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s not rocket science. He would like people to keep in mind the tagline for BEI. Evaluation is for making it work. When it works, notice and nurture. When it doesn’t work, notice and change. That in a nutshell is evaluation. Daniela emphasizes that evaluation is not about making people feel bad about themselves or making programs look bad. Evaluation is about learning, innovating, and getting to better learners, better learning programs, and better organizations. [38:24] – Wrap-Up Dr. Robert O. Brinkerhoff and Dr. Daniela Schroeter co-direct the Brinkerhoff Evaluation Institute. Rob developed the Success Case Method, an impact evaluation approach used by BEI to help determine how well learning programs work. Daniela is also associate professor of public administration at Western Michigan University, and Rob currently serves as head of impact and evaluation at Promote International. Be sure to check out “Using Evaluation to Build Organizational Performance and Learning Capability,” co-written by Rob. You can also connect with Daniela and Rob on LinkedIn. To make sure you don’t miss the remaining episodes in the series, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts,Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also helps us get some data on the impact of the podcast. We’d also appreciate if you give us a rating on Apple Podcasts by going to https://www.leadinglearning.com/apple. We personally appreciate your rating and review, but more importantly reviews and ratings play a big role in helping the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business. Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. [40:22] – Sign-offOther Episodes in This Series: Learning Science for Learning ImpactEffective Learning with Learning Scientist Megan SumerackiNeeds, Wants, and Learning ScienceDesigning Content Scientifically with Ruth Colvin Clark and Myra RoldanPractice and Feedback: Evidence-Based Tools for Learning Episodes on Related Topics: Rethinking a Dangerous Art Form with Dr. Will ThalheimerAction Mapping and Activity Design with Cathy MooreReach, Revenue, and Impact The post Evidence-Based Evaluation with Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter appeared first on Leading Learning.