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Randy Laist is a professor of English and a teaching fellow in universal design for learning at Goodwin College in East Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s and The Twin Towers in Film: A Cinematic History of New York's World Trade Center.

Randy Laist

March 2020  - TD Magazine

Leaders can employ specific practices that can enhance employees' openness to change.

4 Practices to Avoid Barriers to Change

Miss the session at ATD? No worries. Catch eThink for a live webinar...
When looking for a new Learning Management System, there are a multitude of questions that must be asked, starting with: What functionality is critical to reach our L&D goals? One consideration that people often overlook is the type of technology that an LMS uses, which is important to consider when evaluating whether an LMS will be able to provide the type of functionality you’ll need to meet your goals. Determining your functionality wish list is the first step and one that goes hand-in-hand with determining whether you’d prefer an open-source or a closed-source platform.
Furthermore, it’s important to do your research to learn what functionality and tools are now available in the ever-changing eLearning market. As the eLearning ecosystem continues to evolve at a rapid rate, even if you did comprehensive research within the past 12 months, there will be new advancements, tools, and technology to consider. As a part of this session, we’ll discuss how integrations, reporting, mobile, and accessible design should be top functionality considerations.
During this webinar, we will discuss:

How to determine what is truly important to your organization’s L&D ecosystem
The LMS functionality you should consider (and not consider) when evaluating new solutions
Why the type of technology your LMS uses is important, including significant considerations regarding data ownership, security, LMS configuration, product updates and most importantly support
How to create an LMS RFP to ensure selection of the best possible vendor/platform  


Choosing an LMS: 5 Must-Know Considerations

Trust continues to be identified as a missing ingredient in today's workplace. As surveys show, only a small percentage of today's workers strongly agree that they trust their leaders. To ensure high levels of organizational performance, leaders need to tackle trust head-on. The key is to demonstrate the behaviors people most associate with trust.
In this webinar, Blanchard trust practice leader Randy Conley will show you how leaders can improve the levels of trust in their organization by identifying potential gaps that trip up even the best of leaders. Participants will learn how to:

Recognize the warning signs that people lack trust in you and your leadership.
Purposefully engage in the four trust-building behaviors.
Create strong, long lasting, trust-based relationships.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to raise the level of trust in your organization by increasing the “trust-ability” of your leaders. 

Four Leadership Behaviors That Build or Destroy Trust 

Lisa began her career in the financial services industry, where over the course of more than 20 years she led numerous learning and organization development functions, such as consumer sales, operations, mergers and acquisitions, and enterprise operations. Her last role with Wells Fargo Corporation, the fourth largest U.S. financial institution, was as head of executive and leadership development, where she was responsible for developing 22,000 leaders worldwide. After leaving financial services, Lisa joined Delhaize Corporation as the director of talent development, where she was responsible for creating and implementing the talent development strategies for a business with 1,200 stores and 76,000 employees across 11 states. In 2010, Lisa joined Ingersoll Rand as the director of global leadership development, where she designed and implemented a comprehensive global leadership development strategy, ensuring that Ingersoll Rand had effective and efficient development for frontline leaders and senior leaders, and a sustainable leadership pipeline for Ingersoll Rand’s growth. Lisa is now responsible for developing Ingersoll Rand’s strategic capabilities of operational excellence, strategy and market analytics, product management, innovation, and sales excellence. Lisa is also responsible for global learning, learning operations, and advanced learning technologies, as well as ensuring aligned learning strategies globally.

Lisa Knight Gary

Chief Learning Officer, Trane TechnologiesLisa Gary has more than 25 years of learning and development experience, working in financial, food and manufacturing industries during her career. She is passionate about learning where she always applies a business perspective to our field. For the last seven years, Lisa has served as Ingersoll Rand’s/Trane Technologies chief learning officer. She is responsible for developing enterprise strategic capabilities of leadership development, operational excellence, strategy and market analytics, product management, innovation, and sales excellence. She is also responsible for global learning by ensuring aligned learning strategies for Asia Pacific, EMEA, India, and Latin America businesses. In March 2020, Ingersoll Rand split into two publicly traded companies, Ingersoll Rand (IR) and Trane Technologies (TT) with Lisa joining the Trane Technologies company as their CLO. She and her team are focused on building the next set of strategic capabilities as well as a reskilling/upskilling strategy as the world becomes more digital and technically enabled. Lisa has served on the ATD Forum Advisory Group and wrote the first chapter in the newly published book Leading the Learning Function. Lisa has a BS in marketing from Virginia Tech and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Lisa is a NeuroLeadership Institute Results Certified Executive Coach, Hogan Certified Assessor, and lifelong learner, tackling anything from blacksmithing to clogging to glass enameling. Lisa is the proud mom of a grown daughter and son, and lives in Cowan’s Ford, North Carolina, with her husband and rescue dog, Elvis.

Lisa Gary

Although corporate training may not involve hard candy, you can infuse that spirit into experiential learning—a transformative approach that immerses participants in real-life scenarios, encourages active involvement, surfaces friendly competit

5 Game-Changing Tactics to Drive Lasting Impact in Your Training Program

Brandy Agerbeck of Loosetooth.com writes, speaks, and teaches on the power of drawing as your best thinking tool. She celebrates 20 years as a graphic facilitator, mapping out her clients’ complex conversations in live, large-scale drawings. Her 2012 book, The Graphic Facilitator’s Guide: How to use your listening, thinking and drawing skills to make meaning, quickly became a bible of the field. Agerbeck follows this much-loved volume with her new book for every visual thinker, The Idea Shapers: The power of putting your thinking in your own hands. Cultural analyst Patricia Martin calls it, “A new alphabet for the visual age.”  Blending her experience in speaking, teaching, and facilitating, Agerbeck delivers interactive, customized keynotes and workshops. In her engaging and productive sessions, she demystifies drawing to develop everyone’s thinking skills so participants can learn more easily, reduce overwhelm, communicate clearly, and think critically. You can see her in action in her 2013 TEDxWindyCity talk, “Shape Your Thinking.”

Brandy Agerbeck

Prioritizing everyday acts of kindness in education is critical to support individual well-being, societal impact, and organizational success, and we are all a critical piece of the solution. George Mason University launched the Mason Chooses Kindness initiative in 2020 to inspire its community to engage in intentional kindness by doing caring and generous deeds every day. They are now working tirelessly to encourage others outside our community to do the same. Why? Kindness is always the right thing to do for society, especially in a world that has been termed “on fire,” and research links kindness-centered cultures to positive business outcomes for society, indicating that fostering inclusive, kindness-based cultures is an essential leadership skill. At the Costello College of Business at George Mason University (Costello), they passionately believe leaders educated in environments where kindness reigns are more likely to carry that value into the workplace and navigate a complex and diverse world in ways that benefit society at large. An extensive (and growing) body of research has revealed direct correlations between kindness-centered corporate cultures and positive business outcomes. For example, Mandy O’Neill, professor of management at Costello and senior scientist at George Mason’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being, has conducted research on this topic. She and her colleagues have found that organizations with cultures of “companionate love” (affectionate bonding between co-workers) can weather higher levels of collective anxiety without incurring increased operational costs or experiencing greater employee burnout, which can have a societal ripple effect. Education can and should happen everywhere — thank you ATD for accentuating this point— therefore our ask for each of you is to intentionally embed kindness into your daily interactions personally and professionally. We challenge you to think when you see less-than-kind behavior, to stop and ask yourself “If not ME, then who?” and act to lead with kindness to affect those around you. The following is excerpted from George Mason University’s 30 Days of Kindness Calendar.An Individual Roadmap to Kindness:Give someone a genuine compliment.Take a break to prevent burnout.Ask someone what they enjoy doing (and consider doing it with them).Practice active listening.Give thanks before a meal.An Organizational Roadmap to Kindness:Identify kindness champions.Align with strategy.Secure commitment from leadership.Foster true engagement.Measure progress. For more details, refer to our article in AACSB Insights. The ripple effect of doing so is proven. And as Adam Grant so nicely stated in his book Think Again, “When we think about how to plan our lives, there are few things that take priority over happiness…it’s one of the three unalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence.” Yet how many of us intentionally create steps to make this happen in our personal and professional lives? If not you, then who? Be the change. 

An Approach to Intentional Kindness: “If Not Me, Then Who?”

ATD Blog

While facilitating leadership development workshops at Emerson (a Fortune 125 company with 90,000 employees in 140 countries), there is an interesting comment I frequently hear: “I did not realize how much time you would give me in this workshop to think!”Is that a compliment or a complaint? I believe most people mean it as a compliment because they are surprised. Most of them haven’t had enough time to think in prior trainings.I’ve heard this comment many times, and it never takes me by surprise. In fact, I would be disappointed if I did not hear it. Most learners aren’t given adequate time to think and reflect when they attend training sessions.Far too many training programs rely on content rather than application and do not offer learners time for intentional reflection. In my 28-year learning and development career, I’ve seen too many programs approach learning by telling learners as much as possible in the time provided. Many of us in L&D call that strategy “ten pounds of training in a five-pound sack.”Fred Harburg, former chief learning officer at Fidelity Investments, sums it up well: “If there is no time for reflection, there is almost no chance for improvement.”L&D professionals want to create value for learners. One of the most valuable activities we can build into the design and delivery of our courses is intentional reflection and implementation planning. To improve our training programs, we must stop talking and pushing content, and let learners think.This represents a paradigm shift for many L&D practitioners. Spend less time on content and more time on intentional thinking and reflection.L&D thought leaders Roy Pollock, Cal Wick, and Andy Jefferson (authors of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning) popularized the term “learning scrap.” Learning scrap refers to content covered in a workshop that is never applied. Most L&D programs have a typical learning scrap rate of 85 percent. At best, most learners apply 15 percent of what’s taught in a workshop on the job. If you want to decrease learning scrap and increase learning transfer, build more deliberate thinking and reflection activities into your courses.In his classic book, Learning and Memory, Donald A. Norman writes, “To remember is to have managed three things successfully: the acquisition, the retention, and the retrieval of information. Failure to remember means failure at managing one of these three things.” I argue failure usually occurs at the retention level. If there is no reflection, there is no retrieval. If there is no reflection and retention, do not expect retrieval to follow.This issue is well-documented by Ruth C. Clark, Frank Nguyen, and John Sweller in another classic book, Efficiency in Learning. They refer to this concept as “information fatigue.” We need to give learners more time to process during a training program. The authors’ research shows a lack of time for reflection leads to cognitive overload. Overload implies a malfunction; learning is short-circuited. If a person attends a program to learn, and we cram it full of content without giving them time to think, it’s no wonder learning scrap occurs.Several years ago, I codeveloped a workshop with Michael Watkins (a former faculty member at Harvard Business School and founder of Genesis Advisers) to create a workshop based on his bestselling book, The First 90 Days. Our workshop designed intentional thinking activities that asked participants a series of questions at the end of each module. The reflection activities took between 20 and 30 minutes to complete and consisted of five or six questions. These were not simply recall or comprehension questions, but rather synthesis and evaluation questions (the higher levels of cognitive thinking).Some of the top executives who attended this workshop told me that if I had not built in deliberate time to think, their goal would have been to rush through the course so they could move on to the next thing on their list.Here are some ways to build time for reflection into your programs:
Build thinking time into the design and delivery of every learning program you create, no matter the delivery method (in person or virtual).Resist the temptation to add more content to your courses. Do not fall prey to the “myth of more.” More content at the expense of intentional time for reflection will not improve learner performance. It will diminish it.Remember, the goal is not to give the content. The goal is for learners to get it, which will only happen through the discipline of quiet reflection.If trainers are given the option to talk or let their learners think, many would choose to fill the silence with their own voices, but the greatest value trainers bring to a workshop is knowing when to stop speaking and give learners time to reflect.

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