Future-Focused with Christopher Lind

As an L&D or business leader, does improv immediately jump to mind as a solution to a number of the human challenges we’re facing amidst the coronavirus pandemic? I wouldn’t be surprised if many answered no to that question. However, I’d advocate it should be. Amidst the ever-growing, gloomy news about the coronavirus and the negative impact it’s having on the world around us, this conversatio...

With the coronavirus continuing to spread, social distancing is one of the most effective strategies for flattening the curve. However, this leaves many organizations scrambling to figure out how to communicate and collaborate in a world where employees are suddenly required to work from their homes. Given the speed and agility required to address the crisis, there isn’t time to explore new techno...

Greater speed and efficiency while at the same time delivering content with a greater degree of relevance than ever before? Impossible, right? Wrong. That’s the beauty of today’s leading technologies. By modeling a learner’s skill signature and pairing that with #machinelearning, modern technology can quickly and efficiently determine what content will be particularly important to the learner, and...

Emotions like learning are brain activities and are far more deeply interconnected than we often give them credit. The way we feel dramatically influences the way we think and perceive the world. As a result, it can have a dramatic influence on what and how we learn. That means it’s critical that we do our best to take them into account when we think about learning and learning technology even tho...

For many organizations, the challenge in supporting employee’s knowledge management needs is not a lack of content. The content exists, but it’s everywhere, lacks context, and is impossible to find. The act of curating that content through traditional methods is near impossible. Curating it and delivering it in a way that’s personalized to the end user and reaches them where they are, absent of te...

If you’ve been in L&D for a while, you’re probably familiar with the buzz around microlearning. And, if your even vaguely familiar with learning technology, the platform Axonify probably rings a bell. However, microlearning means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and there’s no shortage of companies that have attached that term to their brand. Add to that, simply distributing bite-...

There’s an overwhelming and continually growing number of capabilities and applications for the latest in emerging technologies. Some of them you may not have even imagined possible. However, the potential being there and it being the right time to consider incorporating into your strategy are two very different things. While your organization may not be ready to implement and support these capabi...

The learning tech purchasing process may feel like an overwhelming and unfamiliar quagmire, and believe me, it has no shortage of challenges. While there are definitely some process similarities like determining your needs, finding a few providers, and evaluating their offerings, there’s a lot more to the process than you may think. However, half the battle is knowing what you’re in for and having...

Video is a powerful tool for capturing the attention of your audience, and we can further extend that impact by making it an interactive experience. However, creating that kind of content may feel like a stretch for some. It’s a process to plan and capture the video, make it production ready, deploy it to your audience. Add to that, without the right system behind the video, it can’t provide the i...

There’s a reason the term LMS makes people cringe. It brings to mind memories of painful content delivered through a painful user experience. Now, to be fair, there’s a lot more going on that has resulted in those painful memories, but the LMS is a leading actor in that movie. But, what if it didn’t have to be that way. What if the content and experience could be created and delivered in a way tha...

If you’ve ever been involved in system training, you know how much work goes into preparing all the materials, getting everything out, and getting everyone up to speed only to discover most people didn’t retain much of anything. Here’s another acronym to add to your learning technology library. The DAP or Digital Adoption Platform. Designed to provide employees with the support and guidance they n...

Too often in L&D we execute first and then seek to measure the impact when we’re finished. This leaves us scrambling as we try to find and makes sense of the right information after we’re done and frequently leaves us shaking our heads. Add to that, technology often masks itself as a turnkey solution to help us achieve the measurement we seek. Unfortunately, that’s never the case However, when...

Let’s stop the debate about whether instructor-led or digital is good or bad and focus on optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of both. The reality is, they are simply tools and whether the execution is good or bad is our responsibility. And, when you look at running instructor-led training, it’s a highly specialized operation that requires careful attention to finance, processes, and opera...

With growing regulations like GDPR and CCPA combined with digital savvy employees, the need to proactively consider data privacy and ethics is critical. Ignoring it will result in severe consequences for you and your organization. Conversely, remaining uninformed and at the mercy of IT and compliance will unnecessarily limit your success in digitaltransformation. Navigating it well requires unders...

While many associate RPA, or robotic process automation, with assembly lines and warehouses, the reality is it’s quickly proving it’s capability in developing elearning content. However, just because something can be done doesn’t necessarily mean it it should. In this episode, I talk with Micah White from CGS to explore how they’re experimenting with RPA for elearning content development and findi...

We know practice is the best ways to improve a skill and role play is a great way to practice conversations. Unfortunately, the synchronous nature of traditional role-play is difficult to coordinate, often fails to scale, and requires a great deal of effort to measure. In this episode I talk with Andrea Laus from SkillGym to hear how they’re taking digital role-based simulations in a different dir...

Developing strong leaders takes a lot more than blindly pushing leadership development and hoping something sticks. Listen to Joel Beasley and my lively discussion on why so many solutions struggle to make an impact and what makes Leaderbits stand out. You’ll hear how what started as a leadership podcast for technology professionals grew into something far greater. We talk about how they’ve taken...

Learning and development is often tasked with demonstrating the impact of the work we do with data, which can prove a lot harder than it sounds. But there are technologies out there dedicated to helping solve this challenge, the LRS being one of them. What on earth is an LRS? What does an LRS do? Does an LRS replace an LMS or an LXP? Can an LRS overcome failures to identify meaningful outcomes or...

Despite the overwhelming speed at which mobile technology is changing, there’s one capability that seems to be standing the test of time, is always in the hands of learners, and is readily available to users who lack high-speed mobile connections, text messaging. But what does text messaging have to do with learning and development? Find out when I talk with Michael Ioffe about how his quest to te...

What if the latest in emerging technology could create meaningful experiences in the digital world and provide the speed and scale required to reach our employees without sacrificing the human interaction? Impossible? Maybe Not! Listen in as Mark Atkinson and I talk about how Mursion can create virtual environments and combines AI with human interaction to make the impossible possible.

While leadership assessments have to potential to provide valuable data for the development needs of an organization’s leaders, they often do nothing more than gather virtual or actual dust. But what if artificial intelligence could turn that data that you’re already collecting into nudges, chatbots and personal insights for Leadership Development and automate the coaching process? It sounds...

Microlearning and gamification have created some controversy over the years. Some swear by them as the holy grail of learner engagement while others scoff at them as nothing more than buzzwords for ineffective practices. I don’t think you have to choose one side or the other. In reality they’re simply tools in a toolbox and when used for achieving the outcomes they were designed to achieve can wor...

The emergence of the LXP, or Learning Experience Platform, has created a healthy amount  of noise in the L&D and broader HR community. Josh Bersin went so far as to give them their own category when he defined his breakdown of the learning technology product segments. They’ve gained so much popularity that many see them as the apex of the learning tech stack. However, the rapid growth and...

Mobile optimized content is only helpful if it’s deployed in a platform that’s optimized for mobile use. That’s exactly what Scrimmage set out to do, and it has won a lot of awards for how it accomplishes that. Now, it certainly doesn’t hurt that it comes with features for robust meeting management, a built in gamification engine, social collaboration capabilities and more. But, is it the right so...

True adaptive learning is about more than making content recommendations to learners as they browse your LMS. It’s about continually assessing their knowledge, capabilities, and confidence in order to personalize content to their specific needs. It sounds so easy yet is a very complicated task that requires powerful technology. In this episode, I chat with Nick Howe, Chief Learning Officer at Area...