One of the biggest trends in L&D right now is having access to technology that can measure program results.
There’s a growing movement around habit tools of all sorts—from habit trackers and stackers, to habit applications, to behavior change tools.
This makes sense. Leadership development consultants are eager to help participants establish new habits after the session.
But consider this: is what you’re really searching for simply a way to make sure that your participants are taking action?
Do you want to make your content stick with the leaders that you’re training?
We’ve come to call this impact that we’re after “guaranteed momentum.”
Guaranteed momentum is the ability to say with absolute certainty that most of the people in the room are going to take action following your session, and establish new habits as a result of your content.
As practitioners, guaranteed momentum is what we really desire.
First, here’s the news that you may not love, but that you need to hear: habit tracker apps might be great, but no one specific technology is going to deliver guaranteed momentum for you.
And now, here’s the good news: there are two major elements that influence guaranteed momentum, and we know what they are.
Let’s talk about the first element: relevance.
Relevance isn’t about any technology, and it’s not about anything that happens after the session is complete.
Rather, it’s what happens in the session, or even before the session.
Good L&D professionals are really good at transferring information to their participants.
They’re good at connecting at a cerebral level with leaders.
Great L&D professionals, the ones who have been at it for a while, are great at getting to an emotional level with participants.
These “Impact Agents” know that even though they can get their participants to understand something at a cerebral level, if the participants are not motivated enough to want to engage in the change process, no technology on the planet will help those participants stick with it.
Great practitioners engage people at the “so what” level.
They help participants realize the relevance—the “so what” surrounding what they’ve learned.
When participants get there, the practitioner has achieved audience ownership; in other words, the audience has gone from being passive consumers of content to actively engaging with the material and realizing that change is something they want to implement for their organizations and for themselves.
In our next blog post, we’ll discuss the second element of guaranteed momentum: personal motivation.
Relevance and personal motivation work in tandem to drive the needle forward with participants and incite real, habit forming change.
If the concept of guaranteed momentum interests you, let’s chat.
We’re on a mission to help impact-focused Learning Professionals guarantee impact and measure results from corporate learning programs. We’d love to show you how we can help. Book a time to talk with us.
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