Archives.
Here's all of our writing to date.
Search by category:
Learning
To stay relevant, you need to keep learning. We interviewed Professor Bradley R. Staats, who teaches us how to do this more effectively in his book Never Stop Learning.
How do I prove the impact of my programming? This is the age-old question in training, facilitation, consulting, and coaching – how do we do it? How do we show our clients the work we’re doing in having a tangible, measurable, impact on things that matter to them? Let’s take a look at the well-known […]
How do I ensure that my participants are applying what they learned after they leave the room? This is the question we get asked. All. The. Time. From consultants, facilitators, trainers and coaches. Tell me if this feels familiar: You’re nearing the end of a great session; As a facilitator, you’re just “on”. You’ve delivered […]
The goal in the delivery of most learning programs is supposed to be “effectiveness.” Why, then, does it seem like so many programs are focused on efficiency? We try to get as many individuals in the room as we possibly can. Then, we pack as much information as possible into as short of an amount […]
Joel Bennett is the king of participant engagement. Sure, he’s a great facilitator. Joel’s funny, knowledgeable, and passionate about his work. But Joel’s magic is what happens after he delivers a training session. As he told me in a recent conversation, “If the session ends at 3pm, the work starts at 3:01. Because the training […]
Over ten years ago, Eric Ries wrote and published a book called The Lean Startup. You may have heard of it. You may have read it. It was written with software company founders in mind. Think of it as Good to Great for these founders. Even now, this book and its many great ideas are […]
How do you help participants put the ideas from your learning event, into practice? You might be surprised to find that the biggest factors that will make or break your participant’s application efforts are environmental. The experience that they have when they leave your session and they’re back to their reality, that is, their day-to-day […]
How do you determine if your training session was a “success”? Participant Feedback? Post session assessment? Or are you going deeper? The goal for most training sessions, of course is for participants to apply the content you’ve just provided, back in the workplace. We all know this. And so, most of us encourage participants to […]
How do you increase the impact of your live interventions? When you’re in front of a group they’re inspired. They want to put the ideas they’ve learned into practice when they leave the room. This is, after all, why your clients hire a professional facilitator; not just to transfer knowledge but to help participants find […]
About two years ago, while reading Jennifer Garvey Berger’s Simple Habits for Complex Times, I was introduced to the distinction between complex and complicated. This distinction, more than anything I had previously learned, helped me to understand why we often get stuck and frustrated by the challenges we face. What was most liberating for me […]
What can we do to work with our habit nature—with the parts of ourselves that are most resistant to change? How do we create the best versions of ourselves?
I have a strong belief that an L&D behavior change platform, is the way to provide professional learning experiences that enable sustained learning impact.
Learning professionals must not only evolve their delivery methods to encourage learner-led learning, but their competencies in concept and design as well.
The inner game, in this context, is how we can control our mindset and our strategy when we approach learning something new.
How do you curate learning to effectively solve challenges for your team? And more importantly, how do you apply that learning consistently?
If you want something to grow, focus on giving it the things it needs to stay alive and healthy. Be attentive. Be patient. The growth will come.
By improving nutrition in to reduce uncomplimentary stress, and managing complementary stressors with intention, it is possible to increase productivity.
Training ROI occurs when it’s relevant to the needs of the team, and the content can be evaluated and reshaped to solve challenges facing the team.
This knowledge about creativity and insight can help us to work and lead in ways that create the conditions for greater creativity and innovation.
We want to nurture a curiosity culture because it makes us more present to the journey, more creative, better at communicating alignment with each other, and more agile.
Here’s just one example of the growth that can occur though embracing a learning culture, and maintaining an expansive mindset.
I’ve seen countless organizations rely on executive education to deliver their learning and development initiatives. Here’s why that strategy can be frustratingly ineffective.
Here are my top three tips to start to build a learning culture, right now. Start today, and the results will roll in sooner than you think.
Actionable walks the talk on our values—we don’t just write about why organizations to create a learning culture, we embed these lessons in our daily work.
To keep employees engaged, and to develop the agility they need to keep up, organizations need to embrace a learning culture.
It’s time to reevaluate our perception of “soft skills”—communication, collaboration, emotional intelligence, etc., and consider them core skills essential to competitive teams.
Too often training is seen as an event. It is treated as a one-off. A gap is identified and then a training event is provided with the content that addresses that gap. Unfortunately, that’s not how learning works.
We recently started an #actionablehealth channel on Slack, as a place to talk about our health and fitness goals. As a result, many members of the team have made commitments to incorporate more regular exercise throughout the day.
We have developed a worksheet resource to help you plan to make this your best year yet. This worksheet will help you reflect, visualize, and plan for a successful year.
I don’t feel like I am working under someone, I feel like I am working with a collaborative group of equals. I am challenged and engaged, and I want to learn and contribute.
Given that millennials will make up 50% of the workforce by 2020, it’s no surprise that organizations are making millennial retention a priority.
Not all great ideas end up generating revenue. What sounds brilliant in a brainstorming session may be a total flop in the real world. If we were afraid of failure, we would get paralyzed.
Real lasting results happen when leaders invest in themselves and their teams and have regular ongoing conversations.
Finally, after many terrible interviews that left me feeling discouraged and deflated, I spoke with Chris Taylor. From our first conversation I felt that I could be myself, ask questions, and talk openly about my aspirations.
Information overload is here to stay, and you’ll never be able to entirely escape it. The key is to figure out how to manage the flow, and how to apply what you’re reading into tangible benefits for you and your team.
Stoics apply stringent control of their perceptions of the world around them to be able to manage emotions and see things as they truly are. Applying these principals to a 21st century workplace can help to minimize emotional triggers.
The learning and development landscape is changing. And as Actionable works to address these changes, we’re changing too. And that means learning, growing, stretching, changing.
As we move into the busiest time of the year, it’s important to make space for creative thinking, and to examine the direction our teams, businesses, careers, and personal projects are heading in.
Like many powerful ideas, you might be surprised by the simplicity of polarity management. At the core, it’s about the shift from “either/or” to “both/and” thinking.
When you’re going through bursts of growth, it’s important to set the heading (vision), and then schedule “annual planning” sessions for a more frequent schedule.
This webinar talks about how adopting a Coaching Mindset will help you work less hard and achieve more impact.
Most business leaders identify their people as the #1 asset in their company. Actually, it is the employees—their strengths, skills, ideas, and energy, that clearly set an organization apart from its competitors.
We were delighted to host Jenny Blake for an Actionable webinar to discuss her book Pivot. Alyssa Burkus sat down with Jenny for a live chat with members of the Actionable community.
We love finding the best tools to optimize virtual work life at Actionable. Here are three that have become integral to our communications.
I’m a teamwork consultant. What was I doing being on a stage? And then I realized that the corporate world can really benefit from lessons learned on the comedy Improv stage.