Our Blog
We pride ourselves on staying up-to-date on the latest research and information available – so we are always bringing fresh, innovative and significant ideas to our clients. Immersing ourselves in the latest thinking, coupled with our vast experience in the industry, gives us a robust capability when it comes to effective learning design and delivery. We share our unique point of view through our blog.
Whatever It Takes – Unless It’s Snake Oil
The art of closing the sale is about more than making a deal no matter the cost. Sales ethics is an important part of a winning sales strategy. In January of 1996, I watched the spectacle that was Diana Ross as she ended her Super Bowl halftime show and ascended into...
Design Matters: Who Your Training Program Design Should Target
Effective training program design is not one-size-fits-all. With so many levels of performance in your organization, are you focusing on the right people? In a recent pursuit of a new training and development opportunity, the training buyer commented that we were the...
A Little Food for Thought: Bad Organizational Training is Like a Bad Meal
It’s clearer now, perhaps more than ever, that traditional organizational training is ineffective. The traditional training approach is – write a book, start a training company, build learning that believes the model is the answer, and then require participants to...
Cooking Up Successful Learning Solutions
Successful learning in the workplace requires learning solutions that not only include all the right ingredients but also use them effectively. This article delves into what it takes to cook up a good learning strategy. Good cooking is like good learning in that both...
From Devil’s Advocate to Wise Advocate: Wise Leadership in the Group Decision-Making Process
When it comes to ensuring that a group makes the best decision, the conventional wisdom is to have someone play the role of “devil’s advocate.” The devil’s advocate role within the group decision-making process requires a team member to express a contrarian opinion in...
Resilience: Embracing Option B
What does resilience mean to you? In this post, I share what resilience means to me and how I coach clients to cultivate resilience to meet challenges when the unexpected happens. I just finished reading Option B, a book that Sheryl Sandberg wrote with...
Setting the Table for Complexity: Do You Understand Your Team Dynamics?
Your team members are like ingredients. To make a tasty dish, you need to promote good team dynamics. Good learning, like good cooking, is within reach for everyone. That’s part of our philosophy and the philosophy behind New York Times best-selling author and...
Change Models Have Failed Us – But We’ll Be Just Fine
Everyone likes a good change model, especially me. I’ve been guilty of buying into the fallacy that change models perpetuate: it will all be okay. That’s what change models do: they address our emotional need for certainty or security. The models tell us (and we...
Winnie the Pooh and You: How Good Learning Design Supports Effective Teaming
Not getting the effective teaming you need to succeed? It could be a problem with your learning design. Several years ago, I was part of a faculty at an esteemed professional services firm that taught core consulting skills to new hires who had been recruited right...
Act Like a Child: 5 Characteristics of Success Children Can Teach Us
Go to any office in America and you will probably hear about the childish behavior of some co-workers. Managers will express frustration that their direct reports are acting like children. The implication is that acting like a child is a problem because a child...
Dance Lessons and Diversity in the Workplace
Managing cross-cultural diversity in teams means finding a common goal. In this article, I discuss my personal experience with dance and what it can teach us about diversity in the workplace. In preparation for my son Adam’s wedding, my wife Rose and I are taking...
What is Culture?
Wallace stated, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” While his speech was initially intended to inspire the individual college graduate, I believe we can take the concept of “what is water” and apply it to organizational culture. The three fish could easily be three co-workers, the more experienced worker says, “We have some cultural issues here,” and the others say, “What are cultural issues?”