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Learning

Never Stop Learning: Author Interview with Bradley R. Staats
by Chris Taylor

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 Your Programs Can Become Your Client’s Top Priority
by Chris Taylor
The Simple Way to Prove The Impact of Your Program
by Chris Taylor

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 to Guarantee Post-Session Learning Application
by Chris Taylor

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 […]

Program Efficiency vs. Effectiveness and How it Affects the Learner
by Chris Taylor

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 […]

How to Maximize Post-Session Engagement
by Chris Taylor

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 […]

How to Apply the Scientific Method for Greater Learning Application
by Chris Taylor

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 to Help Participants Create the Optimal Environment for Learning Application
by Chris Taylor

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 […]

The New Habit Formula: 4 Steps to Turn Learning into Action
by Chris Taylor

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 […]

4 Ways to Increase Participant Commitment in Your Next Session
by Chris Taylor

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 […]

New Ways To Navigate The Increasing Complexities of Work
by Ronni Hendel-Giller

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 […]

Overcoming Your Habit Nature — Embrace Your Saboteurs
by Ronni Hendel-Giller

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?

Ditch the Happy Sheets: Create Sustained Learning Impact
by Nick Burnett

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.

Serving Up Learner-Led Learning
by Morgan Toane

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 Of Learning
by Peter Nakamura

The inner game, in this context, is how we can control our mindset and our strategy when we approach learning something new.

Leaders: How Do You Curate Learning?
by Sara Saddington

How do you curate learning to effectively solve challenges for your team? And more importantly, how do you apply that learning consistently?

Growth Lessons from a Gardener
by Sara Saddington

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.

Nutrition & Stress — Managing Workplace Productivity
by Alysha DeMarsh

By improving nutrition in to reduce uncomplimentary stress, and managing complementary stressors with intention, it is possible to increase productivity.

High Impact Learning: Uncovering Your Training ROI
by Alyssa Burkus

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.

Creating Insight — Exploring the Aha Moment
by Ronni Hendel-Giller

This knowledge about creativity and insight can help us to work and lead in ways that create the conditions for greater creativity and innovation.

Building a Curiosity Culture
by Morgan Toane

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.

The Effects of Learning: Getting out of the Fishbowl and Into the Ocean
by Sara Saddington

Here’s just one example of the growth that can occur though embracing a learning culture, and maintaining an expansive mindset.

Why Executive Education Can’t Create a Learning Culture
by Ken Kesslin

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.

Does Your Company Really Want to Build a Learning Culture?
by Shawn Shepheard

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’s Learning Culture: How Learning Has Helped Expand My Role
by Alysha DeMarsh

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.

How to Create a Learning Culture
by Sara Saddington

To keep employees engaged, and to develop the agility they need to keep up, organizations need to embrace a learning culture.

Infographic: The Hard Truth About Soft Skills
by Sara Saddington

It’s time to reevaluate our perception of “soft skills”—communication, collaboration, emotional intelligence, etc., and consider them core skills essential to competitive teams.

Stop Treating Training as a One-Time Event
by Aileen Armstrong

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.

How We’re Making Health A Priority In 2017
by Sara Saddington

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.

An Actionable Blueprint for Year End Planning
by Sara Saddington

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.

Taking the Leap to Live Outside Of My Comfort Zone
by Gina Meret-Dybenko

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.

Focus on Learning and Development to Retain your Millennial Workforce
by Alyssa Burkus

Given that millennials will make up 50% of the workforce by 2020, it’s no surprise that organizations are making millennial retention a priority.

Getting Comfortable with Failure
by Sara Saddington

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.

Avoiding Supply Teacher Syndrome
by Shawn Shepheard

Real lasting results happen when leaders invest in themselves and their teams and have regular ongoing conversations.

Finding My Dream Job — Why Interviews Need to Be Honest Conversations
by Alysha DeMarsh

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.

Stop Just Reading, Start Really Learning
by Alyssa Burkus

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.

Stoicism, Self-Control, and the 21st Century Workplace
by Peter Nakamura

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.

Messy Scary Change
by Anna Schmohe

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.

Podcast Replay: Two Episodes to Expand your Thinking
by Sara Saddington

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.

Managing Polarities And The Power of “Yes, And”
by Ronni Hendel-Giller

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.

How Long is Your Year?
by Chris Taylor

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.

The Coaching Mindset: Webinar Replay
by Sara Saddington

This webinar talks about how adopting a Coaching Mindset will help you work less hard and achieve more impact.

What Do You Value?
by Bonnie Sussman-Versace

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.

Pivot Webinar Replay
by Sara Saddington

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.

Our Favorite Tools for a Virtual Workplace
by Peter Nakamura

We love finding the best tools to optimize virtual work life at Actionable. Here are three that have become integral to our communications.

Lessons in Teamwork From an Amateur Improviser
by Todd Attridge

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.

A Team So Smart, I Constantly Feel Dumb
by Brian Rhea

Working with smart team members simply pushes you to do better. It’s great to feel like the dumbest person in the room.