We know from neuroscience that we have selective attention. All of us pay attention to some things and don’t see other things in every situation that we encounter. Intentionality is explicit, like I set a goal, and I go after a certain kind of thing. We also have internationalities that are in the background that maybe we don’t think about all the time. They guide us in one direction or another. Informal learning means that you notice things, so our attention is directed to things that we are looking at for one reason or another even though that reason might not be completely clear to us. So I think that there is a level of intentionality around informal learning.

We sometimes don’t think about how to set up long-term memory so that it works for us. One of the tricks is that we want to think about how the human brain works. The human brain is very reactive. In other words, if it sees something in a room, it may react to it. If it doesn’t see it, we’re not going to react to it. Our thoughts and actions are triggered by contextual queues. When we want to set up long-term memory, we want to make sure that the contextual queues are recorded in memory…The key is you give people real-world, realistic examples. You give them realistic practice. You put them in a real task situation. You make them make decisions like they are going to have to make on the job instead of just throwing information at people.

A job aid is a summary of issues to be considered when performing a task. Unfortunately, we are in the habit – especially in training departments – that every problem requires training. That’s not true. [Robert] Mager taught us this: You have to analyze what’s the real problem here. Maybe people don’t have the right technology. Maybe no one told them what they are expected to do. Maybe there’s peer pressure not to do a good job because maybe you are going to make everyone else work harder. If you need training, do you really need a full-time training process or just a reminder of steps?…You can build job aids to help people have a mental model of how to navigate in a scenario.

Coaching is never about giving the client the answer. It’s about supporting the client to come to their own answer. [There are] two important byproducts of coaching. One is self leadership and the other one is personal responsibility. You don’t get to that, especially the second one, if you are telling people what to do…

We have two purposes of evaluation. Demonstrate that we are doing the job that we set out to do and adding value, but the other is process improvement. You are using data to fix the bugs. That’s the whole point of it. Too often, evaluation is an afterthought, but more than that, it is just another activity. If that’s how we are going to treat [evaluation], don’t do it. You have other things to do than add another activity on top of all the other activities.

As a result of lockdown, people cannot attend physical workshops and training programs. Everybody quickly became experts in Zoom and quickly had to design how to deliver training and write in an eLearning and virtual learning mode…[eLearning] is becoming a big ask in South Africa.

When we use acronyms, for a lot of countries, it becomes a foreign language. They have to remember “What’s this acronym? What’s that acronym?” We don’t even need acronyms. Many times, we can engineer a sentence so it doesn’t need an acronym.

I try to use what I call pre-translation English. To me, it is English that can be machine translated in another language, but I don’t simplify terminology. I use the real terms and the real applications. It’s in the structure of the sentences.

The model of leadership is very different these days. It calls for self-awareness. It calls for empathy. It calls for inclusion.

Coaching is extremely potent and useful methodology for individuals to learn their own strengths, to manage some shortcomings, and how they relate to other people who they are working with. Coaching allows an individual to seek responses to their own questions. It allows them to get to know themselves much better. By doing that, they can be more alert and assertive in a way but also more aware leader for their organizations.

The purpose of strategy is (1) to create clarity but (2), very importantly, is to create a firm set of guidelines for saying no to other things. If you find yourself running in all directions trying to serve all kinds of demands, you’re at risk of becoming an order-taker…All of a sudden you are spread so thin that you are not focusing on what is really important to the business. Let’s be honest: Every learning activity is a distraction to the day-to-day work. The more learning that you produce for the organization, the more distraction that you might create. That also comes at an opportunity cost for what the organization is trying to accomplish. This is what strategic alignment means: Get clear about what the company absolutely has to accomplish, and then put your heaviest emphasis on that. Put your best talent on that so you help the organization accomplish that. Along the way, you may have to say no to other interesting projects that you want to do.

Many times, particularly when things are changing so fast that if you learn it and it would soon be out of date, it doesn’t make sense to try and put it in the head. Put it in the world. Let you look it up. That, to me, is more performance support…A mobile device is a wonderful way to bring information to people so that they can look it up, get going, and not have to remember it.