How Thought Leadership Can Create Lasting Change

So we were going to talk about today sort of microlearning, action learning, etc. And I want to just set this up as more like a fireside chat with Chris and I, but I want to, you know, anybody has anything, pop in, raise your hand. It's not like obviously an audience of thousands, and we'll try to make this interactive and fun. So I've known Chris, who's currently the founder and CEO at Actionable, for A while. Like how long? Like a long time, right? Twelve years.

Yeah, I was gonna say we're we're right around that decade mark. So you and my wife, I think, have been in my life for about the same amount of time, Peter.

So I'm not touching you.

No comments.

Yeah, there you go. I'm the one with the beard.

Oh, all these years.

Confusion.

We just couldn't finish the confusion.

So.

I've always admired Chris because he's always been on the action side of learning. So I've done a lot of work over my career with authors, thought leaders, speakers, similar folks to Chris, and always helping folks take it into the actionable. And Chris's companies have always been about that. So why don't we start with sort of maybe just a quick overview of sort of the evolution of actionable? And I got a bunch of things we can play with.

Hey, yeah, happy to. So I'll give you the nickel tour, as opposed to, as my dad would say, the 3-beer story. I think so. I came into the world of L&D, learning application training and development, sort of through the side door. I grew up in sales and sales management. I became really interested, borderline obsessed with intrinsic motivation. I didn't know to call it that at the time. But basically, aside from the money, What is it that drives people at work? That business went very well, then it went very poorly. Then I was trying to figure out what had happened to make this sort of empire fall apart. And I started reading a lot, like a lot, a lot, 3, 4 books a week, which I think, Peter, is around the time that you and I connected.

Mm-hmm.

And found that absolutely nothing was changing in my life and became really interested in that, right? There's this huge influx of knowledge and ideas and insight and nothing changing. And then of course the obvious light bulb that I have to do something with this information. And so when I started Actionable back in 2008, it was around this, this again sort of obsession with— there's a trend here— this obsession with turning ideas into action. How do you bridge the gap between new information and inspiration and actually creating change, not temporarily but lasting? How do you level up through that information? And so we started with something called Actionable Books, which is basically to Peter's point where we started working with authors around how do you take your, your message that's been written at 100,000 feet on, you know, by design and actually put it into practical— give people the tools to practically put those ideas into action. Then we started working with consultants around how they do that with their content beyond books, and then we got really focused on the measurement of the behavior change. How do you actually shine a light on that typically invisible process? You know, we're typically— organizations are usually pretty good at measuring outcomes and sometimes measuring actions, but there's a gap between I learned something and I want to apply it and it showed up in my actions report. And that for us is around behavior change. And so for the last 6 years now, we've been focused on basically shining a light on that process. giving consultants and thought leaders the tools to actually demonstrate the behavior change that their material is driving so that it can be linked to the actions and the business impact.

So my first takeaway from that is, at first glance, you look at my background, yours, and Bill's and say, wow, these guys must be smart, they have a lot of books. But based on what you said, absolutely no correlation between books on your bookshelf and a— so this is really about the applied. And I think in the, in the I don't know if we're in the post-COVID world, but in the world we're in today, clearly accelerated as a result of COVID this thought leadership as entertainment, this edutainment piece is going away. I mean, the place for it, there's still places for it, but it's not really paid. So you can go listen to someone's TED Talk, et cetera, et cetera. Where companies are willing to make investments is in things that drive behavior change, that lead to business outcomes that are not only observable, as sort of a level 1, but measurable. And then, so I think that's one wave of this perfect storm. The other wave is now we're blessed with all this really slick and cool technology. And sometimes that makes things noisy, because it's not about the technology. It's about what you said, Chris, about the apply. The technology just gets it there.

That's right.

But I think we do need to tip our hats and say, wow, but the technology is really pretty cool and slick and easy. I mean, I think most of us are old enough to recall sort of the The first wave of e-learning, which was fancy for, you know, down, you know, 2-hour download on a dial-up internet for basically a PowerPoint that swirled.

Oh, I go earlier than that. I've got Jim Rohn audio cassettes, right? That's a stack of them. Right.

Oh, you go— yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you got the CDs and the DVDs and all that stuff.

So it was 4 at the time, but it's still—

Exactly.

Right.

We weren't playing hockey. So yeah, that was what you were doing. So give me a sense of the process, because as thought leaders, part of what I think drives thought leaders is their desire to change people, right? Not necessarily from a judgmental standpoint, but like, don't just read my book, but do what I'm suggesting, model it and try it and all that. And we know, you know, the theoretical is lovely, but until it gets to the applied, it doesn't really have any value. So tell me sort of—

Yeah.

How, how you guys go about that?

Sure.

Yeah, I think, and you know how we go about it is leveraging all the great behavior science and research that's, that's come before. So we're just sort of following the guidebooks that exist, and turns out it works pretty well. So the few things that we know are fairly key, right? I need the new idea. I need that sort of content spark that kicks off. I think, you know, all thought leaders that are building a business, that have built a business around that, they're great at that. There's a good percentage of them that are also really good, particularly when they're able to speak to their audiences because of their passion for the space. They drive motivation, right? They have people waking up to the fact that, yeah, I really do want that, you know, sort of to be realized outcome. And now I have the information and I have the motivation. And that's fabulous, right? Those are the 2 key pieces to get someone off their butt to actually want to move forward with engaging in the difficult work of behavior change. Because it is, right? I mean, you know, it's the first law of thermodynamics or something, right? You know, things that are inert stay inert until enough force is applied. I butchered that, but that idea won't change until there's a strong enough reason to do so. So the strong enough reason is the motivation, but it also requires the idea. So those 2 pieces. But then what so often happens is that there's a gap around how I start to engage with that change. Because, and I think this is the trap with thought leaders, is that the thought leader's job in my mind the first piece is to paint the picture of that hoped-for future, right? With as much clarity as possible so people are drawn towards it. But what I think sometimes gets missed is that that hoped-for future is the culmination of a whole lot of changes, right, that need to happen in order to get there. And so when I try to go from couch potato to running the Boston Marathon, right, that's not a binary switch that I flip where suddenly I'm a Boston Marathon runner, right? I need to I need to buy some shoes and then I need to actually stretch and then I need to go out my door more than once and not just to the corner store, right? Like there's a whole bunch of habits that I need to stack on top of each other. And so for us, we borrow a lot from BJ Fogg out of Stanford. He wrote Tiny Habits recently.

Yep.

Which was a blessing and a curse because his work is brilliant and everyone needs to know about it and not a lot of people knew about it before. So he was like our secret weapon and now he's out there in the universe. But BJ Fogg talks about laughably small commitments. And there's a, there's a friction point here around the hoped-for future is big. The first step is as tiny as possible, like laughably small. The language that we've put around it is that the commitment someone's making to a behavior change needs to be something that's easier to do than it is to justify not doing.

And that's— So stay there for a minute, because oftentimes you take on an area that you're intrigued with— innovation, creativity, resilience, negotiation— it doesn't matter what it is. And the thought leader does a great idea of painting what great looks like because they're great at it, right? Like, or they shouldn't or wouldn't be writing the book about it. And you go, okay, I buy into that. That's interesting. I get what great is. But I love what you said. What's like the least, the tiniest little thing that I could do that— I forgot how you said it. You know, it's like, it's easier to do that than not do it. And I think—

Yeah.

The brilliance there is, wow, so you just closed the gap from, holy cow, this is going to take me a year and there's 73 steps I need to do and it's overwhelming, close the book, put it back on the shelf and go read the next thing. So 2 thoughts on that. How quickly do you sort of need to apply that to when the intrinsic motivation or the motivation, the excitement is there? And then how do you build on that?

Yeah, so you need to bottle the motivation and remind yourself of it. You need to capture that, right, with as much clarity as you can around what you're feeling in that particular time. Where's the motivation coming from, right? And reminders, like, you know, as simple as a sticky note up. It's like, this is why. It's interesting if you put down the motivation that you feel into, you know, a 3 by 3 inch square, It's not going to be a lot of words. Those words will lose meaning over the course of a week, right? You'll look at it a week later and be like, that used to mean a lot to me and now it's just words. I don't really understand the driver of that.

So is that a fortune cookie or what did that mean?

Exactly.

So, so piece number 1 is we need to keep reminding ourselves of the— if the motivation is gone or diminished, we're not going to take action, right? It's one of the— it's the key driver for us in that. I need clarity. I need motivation. So to address the question directly, start now. Right. And if it's laughably small, it shouldn't require 3 weeks of planning.

So I want to stay there for a minute because the way a lot of organizations approach this, it's transactional, which doesn't work. Let's bring in a speaker. Let's do a workshop. Let's, let's do something, some intervention. It's one-off, one-time. It's a Zoom call. You know, back in the good old days, pre-COVID, we might've actually been in the same room. And I'm going to turn on the fire hose, bring in an expert, and in 3 hours you will now be better at whatever. And then good luck, be well, go back into the universe. Like, that's the part that never works, right?

Well, it would if we were all Neo in The Matrix and we could just like jack in and download it, right? Now I know kung fu, but that's not how we learn, right? We learn in increments and we need to practice it. I mean, this is the classic 10-20-70 of learning and development from—

Right. But I think what's important here is oftentimes thought leaders think because they've got so much of this knowledge in their head that if they just let some of it out, we'll absorb it and be more like them. But there's— it's not the way it goes, right? You have to think in terms of a learning journey. And I think the world is moving away from transaction-based interventions, right?

Absolutely.

So, and to your point, it's smaller doses. But what would you say, because I want to touch on something, a point you made earlier is that, you know, thought leaders know how to go from speaking to teaching. And I would say some of them sometimes, not all of them all of the time, because that's a different skill. Being a domain expertise in X doesn't mean you really have any understanding of human behavior change, adult learning theory, etc., etc. So it's okay if you don't know that. And I think what happens in the absence of that knowledge, speakers will often, or, you know, thought leaders will often think, well, you know, A workshop's kind of like a long keynote. So I'll just talk for 3 hours instead of an hour because that must be what the client asked for, a half day. So I can talk for a half day. So tell me a little bit about understanding what we know about how humans actually learn.

Less content, more context. Like if it's summed up in a single sentence, you could share one idea out of your 16 ideas from your book, right? Like really great books are just these treasure troves, as everyone on this call knows, these treasure troves that you can go back to and back to and back to and back to. Some books are, you know, one idea scraped over 200 pages. And that's okay too. Understanding what the one thing is that you want to hit on first. The most effective learning environments, learning programs that we've seen go incredibly light on content. It's a single concept and then a lot of like an 8 to 1 ratio of content to discussion around relevance and application.

So I can hear the thought leaders cringing, right? When they hear that because they spend their lives developing the content. And going deeper and deeper and research and data and deeper and deeper. And you're just telling me, no, no, no, a little bit will do. Just, you know, it's like humans, not too much.

It cycles though, right? Like it's because, yeah, in a particular session, we're not capable of taking on 16 ideas and applying them all at once. Someone used the example and I don't know if it's appropriate or not, but mentally it works really well, is that 9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month.

Right?

It's not about like jamming it all in to get more speed on things. It's about, you know, you need— there's the proper time to apply these ideas. So I mean, I love my whole world as thought leaders.

Wait, just for the complaints, just give them your email for the complaints if there are any on that one. I wanna make sure that—

Please send them. Yeah, I'm Canadian, so I apologize in advance for anything and everything. But the beautiful thing about being in the thought leader space where you are going deeper and deeper and you're going, you know, and really nesting into it is that It gives you all of those are individual topics that need an appropriate level of contextualization. So it's my favorite place to be is in the thought leader space where you've got probably 5 years worth of content. They could consume something of yours every month for 5 years and continue to find value in it, more value than if you tried to jam it all into one session. So what becomes beautiful about that is that it can become modular for you, right? Like think about decision trees and paths. if you give them a piece of content, if they find relevance and take action on it, if you have a feedback mechanism where you can see what's happening for them through that process, what resonated and how they're taking action, then you can use your decision tree to feed up the next piece of content that's going to advance the journey for them. Right. So I think—

Can you give me an example or maybe talk about your process? So if I think of you as a machine, Right. And I give you, here's the input, here's a book. Jim Kouzes' new book.

Boom.

This is Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership. Just happens to be on my desk. Right? And Kouzes and Posner have written great stuff on leadership over, you know, Leadership Challenge, et cetera, et cetera. So I give this to you and give you— oh, you probably got it there too.

Not that one, but I have his last book up there.

We're getting competitive. Bill, you're not playing like nerd poker here with like, we get 3 of a kind of Posner?

Well, when I was talking to Jim yesterday, Jim told me that Actually, it was last week.

I had him on my podcast. That's why I have the book. But my point is, so we give this to you and I'm assuming I say, okay, here's my stuff and you have some access to the thought leader. Walk me through the process or the methodology. How do you break it into Lego pieces, if you will?

Sure. I'd start with the thesis behind the book. What's the key concepts and what are the sort of 4 or 5 supporting pillars or whatever the number of supporting pillars are? That almost like executive summary of the book becomes a pre-read for a conversation that a team or a group of teams is going to have. They're going to understand the— they're going to align around the concept. Do we all get this right? Do we understand what this is and what this means? Yeah, I get it.

Great.

Here's the 12 pillars. Interesting. So what? The meat of the conversation, the contextualization is really around so what of that content, not the author or thought leader or CEO or even manager. Sharing their so what, although that can help. It's around giving the team base, the employees, the opportunity to identify for themselves the so what for me as an X-year-old in marketing, and I've been here for 6 months, and it's a Tuesday, and I work in Tulsa, and our head office is in New York. Like that level of hyper-contextualization that no external party could possibly tell you why it matters. We need to invite people to find their own reason why.

So how do you help people hyper-contextualize? Because I think that's it. Because every, you know, when we talk to clients, when Bill and I are talking to clients, oh, this would be great for every first, every frontline manager. I'm like, no, it wouldn't, you know. Or this would be great for, you know, whatever, all people in marketing, right? And, and I love the way you, I mean, you just came up with the Tulsa with the office in Europe or whatever. And that seems funny, but it's actually true because I have a much clearer picture of that person, their struggles, their issues, their concerns, than, oh, it's a 36-year-old marketing person. That really doesn't mean much to me. Right.

I think it's, you know, and I apologize if I'm offending anyone on this call. I see it all the time in books where at the end of the book, they give you a— or at the end of the chapter, they give you a prescriptive, here's things that you can try to put this into practice, right? Great intention. I would love to find the 6 people that follow that and that's the thing that's the breakthrough for them, right? Like, how could we? We can't, as the author of the that book. We can't tell them what to do, right, in order to apply these concepts because we don't know their circumstance. We don't know their context. So honestly, there's no answer to that question.

So let me push on that then. So if I said to you, Chris, it is now illegal, Random House, Wiley, they're all going to get together and say none of these, you know, things that you can do at the end of the chapter, but Chris gets a page, would you put questions? Like what would you put in that space? Because they do it with good intent. It's just not effective, right? It's not like they're doing this because they're bad people or they want to mislead people.

Yeah, it goes back to your earlier point. We want to help people apply the concepts, right? So, I get that. I think there's 2 things. There's— yeah, it's questions as opposed to statements is number one. But the second thing is we need to— for most human beings, we need to say it out loud with another human being or several in order to A, digest it for ourselves and B, get stimulation from the people that are most like us, right? This is why—

So, that might be a call to action of an inventory of here's 8 things to ask yourself about this chapter and grab a cup of coffee with your friend, colleague, whatever. And here's a conversation. So I'm just making this up. Like, here's 3 things to start a conversation around X, whatever that is. That would be more effective than the useless page.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, when I said most like us too, I think it's really important to lean into that because the most like us in the sense that we all work in marketing in Tulsa when head office is in New York. But you've been here for 32 years, right? You have a different background. You're not even from marketing. What are you doing in this meeting, Steve? Whatever it is. But, but those, those nuances, right? We have enough commonality that we're speaking in the same shorthand. We're using the same, you know, remember when finance did this? But we have our own contextual background that brings such richness to that discussion around understanding not just how I would apply this, but oh shit, this actually matters to us. applying this thing. Now, the advantage is that not only have I contextualized it for the moment so that my motivation is higher to move forward, but there's a shared understanding within my colleague pod around moving this concept forward, right?

So, it matters as a driver to motivation, right?

And application.

And application. Interesting. So, what— any other sort of under the hood of how you break apart a big body of work into doables, you know?

Yeah, treat it— so it's treating it programmatically, right? It's appreciating that habits stack, right? It's a lot easier to build a series of habits over time than it is to try to do it— the data is amazing. So the tiny bit of context, so on Actionable, we— people put their commitments to behavior change into the system, and then the system supports them in the journey of applying they're shifting that new habit in a way that the thought leader can see what's happening, which provides this great feedback loop. The reason I'm doing that not-so-veiled plug for Actionable right there is that we have these ridiculous datasets around what works and what doesn't, right, from a volume standpoint. And what's been staggering to me is that going from one commitment to 2 commitments running at the same time drops the adoption rate, as in my follow-through on the commitment, from 78% down to 11%.

So this is the New Year's resolution problem. I'm going to get fit, eat better, sleep better. Here's like all the crap habits. I'm going to make a list. And on January 1st, I'm not even going to recognize me. Therefore, nothing gets done. So you said it went from 78% to 12% by just making those 2 changes?

78% to 11%.

Okay. And how many programs have we all been in where they say, okay, here's the 5 things we're all going to commit to doing? Right? Why? Now, if they said to you at the end, and this is where I think it's counterintuitive, if I just sat in, you know, whatever, some all-day program back in the Flintstone days, and at the end they said, here's one tiny little thing I might want you to consider trying. You'd be like, that's it? That's it? You know?

Well, and so the 5 things is valid, right? I'm sure the thought leader is that these are the components. Fabulous. Let's just tip them on their side. Let's just not try to do them all tomorrow. Let's do one for 10 days and then do another one for another 10 days.

Because we might not even have to tell you what all those 5 are up front because that might jam up the brain. Think about this one little thing over the next 10 days or something.

Yeah, it depends on the nature of the conversation, right? Because, you know, I may— if I had that conversation around the 12 things in Jim and Barry's book, and we as a group are saying, here's the 3 that are most important to us, let's action those over the next 3 months, there's value potentially in the autonomy, the buy-in of choosing. But Peter, to your point, if we can reduce the cognitive load by giving them something to focus on now that they have taken ownership for, one thing, then great. What doesn't work nearly as well is us being prescriptive. We got to move away from being prescriptive, right? It's got to be, here's the data, here's all the use cases. You guys have a discussion about it to find your own relevance and priority so that you can—

That scares a lot of people because that means I have to trust that you and Bill are smart enough to figure it out, which you are. But old school way of thinking is I have to tell you literally, and you see some of these old school facilitator models at, you know, minute 10 of hour 2, you should be on page 17. Talking about bananas or whatever it is, right? And it's like, okay. And that's how we judge good facilitators. Uh-oh, it's, you know, hour 2, minute 12, are they telling the banana story? Oh, they're not. Oh, they veered off the path. This won't be effective, right? That's interesting.

So on that note, we created— so part of what the actual system is, is guides for managers to have these discussions, not facilitators, managers. And I've watched over the last 8 years, these guides go for an average paid length. This is an hour-long session, average page length of 12 pages. Down to now it's about 2.5 pages because that prescriptive doesn't work, right? The more we can give them the signposts, the place where if I get lost, I know where to go back to. But other than that, I'm having a conversation and I'm a functioning human being. So I can have a conversation. I just need a little bit of structure to guide me towards a certain outcome, right?

So how do you manage the fear if somebody— if you were to say, okay, you're a manager, or you 5 are going to get together And work on X for an hour and there's only 2 pages, I'm gonna be like, oh my God, what am I gonna do for the other 48 minutes? Like, I can get through that really quick, right? Versus give it the space to breathe and it's not a race. How do you manage that?

So, it's usually that. It's usually having that conversation upfront, right? That this is a conversation with space to breathe. It's set for an hour, but if it takes you 14 minutes, it takes you 14 minutes. If it takes you 2 hours, maybe you got off topic, but, you know, try to stay focused. But what we find is that there's a lot of fear, both from the client sponsor and from the managers that are supposed to be hosting these conversations for the first conversation. And then after the first conversation, the manager is almost euphoric because of the, you know, this is a different— they've been running meetings for 25 years. This was different. This felt different. I'm actually connected with you, who I've worked with for 12 years, on a deeper level. There's, there's, there's this like tangible sense of alignment. And for the sponsor, they go, oh shit, right? 90% of our managers ran this. Kevin didn't, but we didn't think he would because Kevin doesn't do anything. And they can see that now, right? And so they have insight into what's actually happening. And then, and then you get this great flywheel happening because everyone's on this new high around the data that they didn't have and the conversations that they weren't having that are both actually pretty easy.

Well, and also recalibrating, but we've always done it this way. We've always done it this way. We've always done it this way. Right.

It's been the, it's been the silver lining of COVID is that it has forced organizations globally to challenge how they have learning happen, how they have meetings happen, the level of autonomy.

How business happens, how everything happens. Yeah. So let me, let me, let me pause this for a moment and see if anybody's got thoughts, questions. Play stump Chris, anything you'd like to throw at us? Or not, or maybe. Ben?

Who's your—

who's Chris? Who's your client? Who pays for this? The thought leader or the company or both or neither? Or yeah, who's your client?

So we work on a wholesale-retail model. So the thought leaders buy from Actionable, sell to their client. So it becomes a profit center for the, for the thought leader. Yeah, yeah.

Cool.

Anybody else?

Anything there?

So, Chris, how does this work if the enterprise has those 5 priorities and they're communicating to whoever they're bringing in, you know, this is the enterprise priorities, and so you're meeting with various teams within the group and you're trying to get them to scale down to something that is going to be more manageable. And more, you know, successful by the end of, you know, a year or whatever it is. How does that work, that transfer from, okay, we got 5 primary goals here we need to reach, guys, but now you're telling me focus on one? How does that kind of work in real life?

Yeah, it's— I really appreciate the year framing, because where it doesn't work is when a client says, here's the 5 things that we need to achieve in the next 30 days around, and we need all of these behaviors to shift for everybody in the organization. And no, we're not letting go of any of the current workload. How does that happen? It doesn't happen. Yeah, but how does it happen? Like, it doesn't happen.

It's the—

and so point one is that it needs the appropriate timeframe. It also— I don't think I finished my sort of flow, which, which maybe help here in regards to the book that Peter was sharing, is that the first conversation is usually that overarching connection to where we're going, and these are the 5 pillars, and let's talk about them. Then the next 5 conversations would be around each of those pillars in more detail. And usually there's some reference back to the large-scale frame. We can't lose sight of the hoped-for future. That needs to be constantly woven throughout. It's just that the theme of the conversation for today is around a deeper point. We've all been in those meetings, right, where it's an hour-long meeting and there's 15 things on the agenda. And it's, there's no depth on any of it. It's a check-in, if anything, right? We can have, but when we have a working session around, here's this gnarly problem that we're trying to address, right? It can get into a really rich creative space. And that's, that's more of where we're leaning towards is Peter's language was spot on. Let's give it the breathing room. And then next month or next week, we'll talk about the next thing in regards to that. I think also, Angela, it's the fact that it doesn't, you know, the change process that, that we subscribe to, and that we've built the business around, is not in a vacuum, obviously, right? So the standing meetings around the tactical components, the KPIs, the measurement on lagging indicators all still happen throughout. This is around advancing the most important things across. And there's a level of forced prioritization to it in order to make that happen, right? Like it, it forces executive teams in some cases to say, What are, you know, yeah, we got these 5 priorities. Is there something in here that's more of a priority out of the 5, or are they all equal priorities? Right. I don't know, is that enough? I can get into specific examples if you'd like, but does that help?

Well, I have a question on that, but let's see if anybody else has something on that. So you jumped into, again, talking about Jim and Barry's book. Well, they have, you know, they have the pillars and the frameworks, whatever. Talk about the importance of a model, because Bill and I struggle with this a lot with clients, earlier clients, where, hey, they've got something to say. And it's like, okay, that's a great narrative. That's a great story. But in order for something to be teachable, in order for your thought leadership to stand on its own and not just be entertainment or charisma or whatever, you've got to have frameworks, models, processes, methodologies. And a lot of people have them, but they live here. They've never been articulated or documented in a way that makes sense to others. And Bill spends far more time than I do sort of, you know, extracting that from the minds and brains and hearts and souls of thought leaders. But from your perspective, I would imagine we can't come to you without that to say, hey, hey, Chris, you know, Company X wants to teach 5,000 people how to do what I kind of sort of think about well on stage.

Mm-hmm. You know, I love models. I also think they get horribly bastardized. I think about, like, I talk about the golden circle paradox. So Simon Sinek, right, sort of synonymous with these concentric circles. And yet, if you ask sort of 10 people who know the model to explain it, you'll get variations of stuff around what it actually means. They put the words in the right spot sometimes, but, you know, So, Steve Shapiro, I think you're—

yeah!

So, Steve's a good buddy. So, Steve is a big thinker. He's a guy in the innovation space for those who don't know Steve's work. But Steve's— my view would be that Steve's is mostly narrative-based, right? He's got— he has some but his stuff is deep and complex and he writes good books.

He has a lot of tools. He has a lot of tools that support the narrative, yeah!

Yeah! I'm okay with that. Like, the narrative Particularly if we're thin slicing the narrative, let's do the overview, 5 minutes on what it's about, no depth, but that high level. And then when we get into talking about a specific component of it, the benefit of a model is that it gets us to a place of alignment faster.

Great.

But so does conversation around a soundbite or a smaller unit of material. And so models are great. I think they're really, really effective from a marketing standpoint. And I think they're really effective as a shorthand for organizations to reference later. I think they're really hard to create. Like, I love Pat Lencioni's stuff. The 5 dysfunctions, I don't know what they all are. Right? I've read the book 3 times. I've been involved in a bunch of things. I've interviewed him twice. But I know trust is in there. There's 5 layers. I don't know what they are.

Right.

But it might be the first one or the third one.

All right. It's somewhere in there. Exactly. And so I think models are great as a shorthand. But I think that what I'm describing here of focusing on contextualization You just need to give them a succinct unit of content, whatever format's going to make sense within that.

So, Bill, I know you've got an opinion or 7 on this.

Yeah, a couple things on that.

Bill and I aren't friends anymore based on this.

No, I'm going to go— It's like point-counterpoint now.

Models are great as consulting tools. You can go in and you can measure, you can analyze, you can create a dashboard, you can say what's going on. But when you're trying to change behavior and when you're trying to influence behavior, you have to remember that the most important time of influence behavior is under cognitive load, when they're busy with other stuff during the day. And if you give them a complex framework that has 12 steps, 3 different dimensions and everything, guess what? It just rolls out of their head. They can't grab it in the moment. And so where I want to tie back is that ridiculously small ask or that ridiculously small task. It's not that we're treating people like 3-year-olds, but research shows when people are under cognitive load, their IQ function goes down, right? You can stress people out by saying— you can give them— and one of my favorite tests, they give a group of people A math test with just basic addition and subtraction questions, and then they do a second test with a prompt which says, oh, by the way, you know, you're gonna— what would you do if you had a $1,000 car repair bill come up? People stress over that, and their performance on an IQ test or even an addition and subtraction test goes down. And guess what? Every day we're dealing with that at work. So if you're asking them to change behaviors, you got to keep it simple.

Interesting. Well, and I think part of what Chris's response to that is, well, just give them a little bit of time, right? Because the cognitive load— yeah, I can find 5 or 10 minutes to be thoughtful throughout the day, most days, more or less. Can I find 2 hours to go deep all the time? No, probably not. You know, and that's the issue.

You know, Bill, listening to your description there, I wholeheartedly agree. I think going back to the, the 2 things that are going to need to be there for us to engage in behavior change being around clarity and motivation, right? Content clarity and personal intrinsic motivation. I think the model can help with both, right? And so I think it's useful in that regard, the clarity of, oh yeah, I remember based on what I learned about that thing by looking at it. And I think that This may be a stretch, but I think there can be some emotion infused in the model. If we remember how we felt when we discovered that clarity, looking at it again makes us feel smart, connected, like reconnected to the hoped-for future.

Well, there's a reveal. There's a reveal.

Yeah, I've seen this happen. So people will take models and they'll put them on their lanyards at work, right? And it's something there with their badge that they use to badge in and out of the organization. It's something— it's a visible reminder. Of the goal, I think that's where it's good.

Yep, yeah, wholeheartedly agreed.

Cool. What did we finish your your process? I'm trying to I'm trying to mentally rewind.

I think any feedback loops. So they we so we think about this in four stages.

Feedback. Yeah, okay. That's what we do.

People are exposed to the content, then they need to contextualize it themselves. Which I'm gonna come back to in a second, but they need to contextualize it themselves. They can't be told why it matters. They need to come up with why it matters. Then they take action on it. In order to take action on it, we need the structure of the commitment to be sound, right? That process of trigger, current habit, new habit, reward. This is BJ Fogg. I mean, anyone who's written about habits in the last 10 years, this is the framework that they use based on some really good science. And there's great— we can get into, if you want, we can get into the some of the specific tactics in there, but one of the things we already hit on was laughably small, right? Easier to do than it is to justify not doing. But then we also need social systems around us. So it becomes a heck of a lot easier if we have social systems around us. It's the old gym buddy adage, right? You know that someone's waiting for you, you're more likely to go. And so social systems become important. Shared alignment. Is our manager being coach-like to us? Do we have an accountability partner? Do we have a coach that's aware of our— what we're working on? None of which by themselves are essential. But again, the data is very clear when we look inside the platform. When you have—

Let me pause you there because I want to clarify a piece. I think all of those things, what they really are about moving from an awareness to myself, I think I might sort of kind of want to, to once you make that awareness public to others, it increases your commitment because we'll disappoint ourselves. 10 times more often than we'll disappoint another. So if I said to you, hey, I'm going to— we'll meet to go for a run, you know, at 6 o'clock today. Geez, I'm not going to let you down. If I just kind of thought to myself, maybe I'll go for a run at 6, flip a coin, maybe, you know, whatever.

But the other piece that's built into that, right, is that there's— when you communicate your objective or your behavior change intent with someone else, there's forced clarity.

Right?

Because you may have said, maybe I'll go for a run at 6, but what you probably said is I'll go for a run later.

Right?

Yeah.

But when you're communicating with, and then it's, you know, we lose the ability to, or it becomes less likely we'll follow through. But when you're communicating with someone else, it has more granularity, more specificity just built into it. Right? So that, that becomes key. So then we take action on it. We need some sort of feedback loop built in. And we, we call that 4th area insight, right? We need a reflection process. As the person engaging in change, as the person sort of catalyzing that change, right? Thought leaders are the change catalysts. And so we need to be able to see, we benefit greatly from being able to see what people have attempted to put into practice, where they got stuck, where they exceeded expectations. One, so we can recognize that if appropriate, but 2, 3 actually. So one, so we can recognize that. 2, so that we have feedback on how our content is landing in the market and other things we wanna tweak from our positioning.

Yep.

And 3, so that if we're on a journey, that the next leg of that journey has context itself, right? Knowing where people succeeded or fell short helps inform what the next round of content looks like for them.

Got it. So any places where this works better, or maybe conversely, any type of work where, yeah, this, this system just really isn't all that effective?

In regards to our, like, our system, you mean?

Like, highly, you know, is this a great way to teach someone, you know, something highly technical? Is it more the traditional, quote, soft skill? Like, ideal and sort of continuum of, yeah, works really great here, pretty good here, not so good over here.

Yeah.

So content-wise, there needs to be an immediacy for the learners. So what I mean by that is, We've had— there was one program that fell flat last year where they were teaching, I think they were teaching facilitators. It's very meta, but they were teaching facilitators how to improve their facilitation game. But their audience was people that were just getting started in their facilitation practice. And so many of them didn't have a chance to practice anything.

The skills. Yeah.

And so it was like 3 months later that they were trying to recall this stuff. So there needs to be an immediacy. I need to be able to do something meaningful immediately following each sort of learning burst. So that, that's, that's an important part. The other place is that it doesn't die completely, but it's all sort of gradations. If it's an exceptionally low-trust work environment, then the conversation approach of actually getting to the meat of why this matters to me doesn't happen to nearly the same degree that it might in even sort of a normal So that's not specific to the thought leadership, but the environment, right?

So if this is a whatever, there's been a lot of change, an organization that doesn't communicate transparently or whatever, whatever. So those conversations aren't going to be authentic or rich or real or whatever.

Yep, yep, exactly.

Is there a litmus test that you could use to see this is an okay trust organization, a low trust, a high trust? Because I would think most clients, when you say to them, is this a high-trust organization, most will say, oh yeah, we're, you know, yeah, yeah, well, people trust each other here except for Bill. Nobody trusts Bill, right?

Beta test everything, right? Like, what's the pilot group? Okay, you could run it with— and can you go cross-functional on a pilot as opposed to just, just Sally's team? Um, so that, that's a piece. I think from a content standpoint, I don't think it's— it's not necessary in a compliance-based Space, right? If it's just the information, if the extrinsic motivation is like, I have to do this, otherwise I get fired or suspended or whatever, that's usually motivation enough to make the habit change established. It's not a— it's sort of a painful reason to change the habit. It's not driven from intrinsic motivation. But it's, you know, it's fascinating. We're constantly surprised. We had, you know, we were working with a client that had a high commission-based sales team. And most of their comp was in commission. And the expectation was that they don't need this. They've got, they've got clear motivators. And we put into practice and it was extremely effective in that environment, mostly because it was the second why. I was like, why do this? Well, because I'll make a lot more money.

Great.

Why does that matter?

Huh?

And then just getting into discussion around what do you do with your money?

What do I do with my— and having actually a chat in this, like, you know, financially minded So I had a thought that came to mind in that a year ago, maybe a little more, a little less or something, diversity inclusion training was largely compliance, check the box, regulatory. Most organizations really didn't care. They did it so they can say, well, Bill went through a class and Chris went through a class on D&I, so they shouldn't have done the thing that they did that was horrible. Right?

Right.

It's not our fault.

Right.

Right. Their fault.

Right.

We prophylactically, you know, don't sue us. Like we did what we needed to do. And thankfully, that conversation is being elevated, and the old-school D&I framing of compliance to really moving it to understanding and behavior change. So it's interesting. I don't— have you done any D&I work here? Because it seems like that would be a body of work that the market used to value it here, like, yeah, kind of sort of have to do that sexual harassment training, D&I, it's in that bucket. We don't— it's not cutting edge. What's the cheapest provider to This is really important.

Yeah, it's been the fastest growing area for us over the last 8 months.

So for context, we didn't set that up, I just guessed that. There you go.

Yeah, so we work— so for context, we work with— to Benjamin's question, we work exclusively with consulting firms, but that's thought leaders, trainers, coaches, facilitators. We work with about 100 of them. We work with about 500 to 600 end client organizations each year. And, you know, sort of tens of thousands of employees through that. Everything though, from, you know, 50-person companies right through to all the big names that you read about every day. And across the board, that's been one of the largest growing areas is DEI. So diversity, inclusion, leadership, sort of at all within the leadership space. And then interestingly, strategy and culture activation, where this is actually internal thought leadership, where we're attempting to restructure or redefine how we operate as an entity. And that's been a really interesting approach because it's, it's not dissimilar to a keynote where you've got the CEO town hall video, right, where everyone listens for 2 hours, cue the confetti cannons, this is where we're going over the next 12 months. And then this game of broken telephone through the organization where managers are expected to engage their team around this 100,000-foot vision on what that means on a localized level in March, right, for us. And so there's, there's that contextualization work again that's so often missing there. And so that's where we're seeing Actual's ability to provide value. Anyway.

I love it. Now, this is, this is great. And it wasn't intended to be an infomercial for Actual per se, but it's really about the power of where it's changing and Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's great because I think that many of us grew up in an age where it was firehose learning. Oh, here's everything that you need to know potentially in this role that you have on being a frontline manager and having a difficult conversation. Turn on the firehose, stick it in your head, blah, blah, blah. And then there's no recall. Right? So talk to me a little bit about push versus pull and how that plays in.

Okay, cool. So I want to talk about that in context to microlearning because this term—

And actionable, just to stay on track. No, I'm kidding. Yeah.

In general, so microlearning, I think brilliant, right? We were— it's the first step moving from the fire hose to take exactly the soundbite that you need. And we just subscribed us to lynda.com and there's 40,000 literally pieces that you can go consume there. And then most L&D groups look at their stats at the end of the year and go, Oh, right. Yeah, it only costs $6 a person, except it didn't because only 9% of our employee base actually—

So it costs, right, $1,600 per actual used person, right?

Yeah.

Well, and I think what's really— what's, what's I think most saddening about that is not the percentage usage, but rather that that means on average that the person that actually did take the proactive work to go in, find the content, consume it, learn it, figure out what they're going to do, they're the only person on their team that did that. And so when they come back and try to put it into practice, they're the one that's different. They're the one that's trying to do something weird, right? And so they start getting ground down to return to the status quo. So the push versus pull is interesting to me because if you can have a group of people, ideally colleagues that work together daily, talking about a concept, that act— go consume the content first, then come together. there's so much nuance within that because based on what we see, you're gonna get 60, 65% of people are actually gonna consume the thing beforehand because you've created an urgency around it, right? I'm gonna talk about it with my colleagues, but there's still like 35 to 40% of people that show up and you're like, what do we— what? And they pretend they—

yeah, I read it.

Yeah, it was great. Yeah, very insightful. Or they don't. And then you've— so you've got now those people that are at least in sync on the general concepts around that thing because People were just talking about it in front of me, right? Whether I was a part of it or not. But then when it comes to the act of sort of finding my internal motivation to do something with this information, you'll have, you'll have your engagement spectrum where you've got people that were already totally in, they didn't care what it was, they were going to do it because that's who they are. And then you've got the people that it doesn't matter what it is and how exceptional to make their life, they're not doing it because they're not doing it.

Right.

The whole point of the conversation with prep material ahead of time is to let people— now I'm losing push-pull in my head, but it's basically giving people the autonomy to lean in themselves. And if we take the— I mean, there's lots of research on this, but, you know, if you believe in humanity, most people want to be contributing members of their team, organization, family, etc., right? And so if given the opportunity to pause and find their own reason why, they will lean into it. And so you don't have to push them, right? You don't even have to pull them. If you give them the space to find their own, they take action on it. That's what we do as human beings.

So people want the autonomy and the control, right? So that's part of the appeal or what makes it effective. is I'm an adult, treat me like an adult. Don't tell me, you know, the prescriptive 17 things. Give me the boundaries and the tools and trust that I will figure it out. And when I do that, particularly with some of the other things that you said, and I get a partner and whatever, it's going to be much more relevant because I'm taking ownership of that. If I just followed the, you know, you do a Betty Crocker cake mix, nobody's ever proud of that. It looks like it did on the box and I just did what everybody else did, right? Like, that's not, you know, an accomplishment. But if I figured out sort of kind of myself and thrown a little bit of extra chips and a little bit more vanilla, that's my thumbprint on it, my fingerprints on it.

Yeah, I think, you know, this is, this is, uh, Dan Pink in a, in a box. Um, like, this is Drive. Uh, Drive was one of the most influential books on me 10 years ago. Um, for those who haven't read it, right, autonomy, mastery, and purpose being the 3 key drivers that motivate us to move forward. And so what we're attempting to do in this seemingly simplistic hour is giving them autonomy to choose whether they engage in the conversation, how much they read the content beforehand or not. They choose what they commit to. There's a sense of control, mastery, right? If I can see my progress over time, I'm— it's right there. I get a text message that shows. Reinforces it.

Yeah.

And then purpose is, is again connecting in that group discussion. It's going to the deeper why. Right? Like that's that's the whole point of it, and that's it's not more complicated than that. And again, I appreciate that this has become truly an unintentional infomercial. You can take the same concepts without actionable as a system, right? Like it's it's just thinking through that lens of how do you give them the ability to choose how they apply your information with enough structure that they can make an intelligent choice that puts them into a habit. position where they're actually working on something small and stacking it.

Great. So as we start to get to the end of the unintended infomercial, is there a ShamWow that we're throwing in here?

I think so.

Yeah.

Sign now, 3 easy payments.

No, this has been great because it wasn't— again, it's not the infomercial, it's the informative piece of it, the educational piece. So it's been pretty interesting. Let me just open up. Anybody, thoughts, questions, limericks? We don't get enough limericks these days.

Or underrepresented.

Anything?

Haikus.

Haiku? Oh, there you go. Sort of the—

It's the anti-limerick. The anti-limerick.

There you go.

Cool.

Nobody? Cool. Well, this has been great. Oh, you got— Leona, you got a question?

Cool technologies and stuff. In the beginning, we were talking about cool technologies and things like that. And you mentioned then, you know, group people making commitments and setting out their plan and then feedback, and that the thought leader follows the progression through the plan and all that sort of stuff. I mean, this can be done on paper, email. Do you have a specific software for that? It could be done in— You know, sorry, Microsoft Teams. I mean, there's lots of different Yeah, there would be lots of different medium for this kind of communication process, you know, recording and then checking off where I'm going. Is there anything particular? I mean, this could even be whatever, you know, project management software for, you know, steps to be followed and things like that. Is there anything in particular you use? So you'll find people writing things is more important than if they type it. Anything like that?

Well, I'm biased, Benjamin, because this is my whole business is the software that does that. So, so I like Actionable as the vehicle for it. But we see people use things as—

explain that.

Well, it wasn't, that wasn't a pitch. This just sort of happened.

Come on, this was not upfront. This was not.

If anyone wants to learn more about Actionable, you can email me afterwards. I'm happy to have a chat, learn more about your business. The— I think short of actionable, I guess that's what we do. Short of actionable, I've seen people use, you know, basic Google Docs, like I basically say, like a shared spreadsheet where people can go drop in their information. Coaches use automated text reminders to people and solicit feedback that way. Use SurveyMonkey, right? Once a week if you want around like just providing feedback. It's that idea of really simply said, can you condense it down to a single concept for that discussion? Can you have it as a discussion where they contextualize? Can you give them a structure for making a commitment that follows good behavior practice and have a system to check in with them around their progress on that such that everyone can learn from the insight and repeat? Those are the pieces. We saw a gap in the market. There's lots of those pieces and we said, let's stitch them all together. And so that's, that's what we've done with Actionable. Leona, I'm dying to know.

Yeah, Leona, you had something. Yeah.

Hi, thank you. Um, question, as I'm kind of— I'm, I'm doing some leadership training with an organization, and obviously I'm designing my content and taking it to them. And what I'm finding as the customer, they're asking me for like 100% content.

Yep.

Um, because that's what they feel their people need. And even as I've started doing work with people, as I try to pull back from the content and initiate that space to have a conversation, as difficult as that can be with Zoom these days, but I get these questions around, well, what should I do? Tell me exactly how to have, you know, say, this difficult conversation, if that's the topic we're covering. And there's this real want for content that they can apply right away and very, like, very specific content. How do you— how do you— do you have a response for that? How do we get people to shift out of their comfort zone from just giving Give me all the tips and strategies so that I can know exactly what to do versus let's actually discover here so that there's the, as you said, the intrinsic motivation and the desire to actually apply this and have it stick. Yep.

Beautiful. So this was, this is ongoing, probably the most popular topic of discussion within our consultant community is how to elevate the conversation from that transaction where they want, they feel like the value is in how many units of content can I get in that time for those dollars, right? Yeah, exactly right. It's like when, you know, that thing about buying books by the pound for your bookshelf or by the foot. So I think, Leona, there's a— it's nuanced, but there's a couple things. It depends on the level of seniority you're selling into HR or L&D.

Yeah, well, to the organization, yeah, and HR, but I'm delivering to their middle managers.

Sure. It's for the buyer, right? That every business, nonprofit, for-profit, government entity, every organization, if they're fiscally responsible, should be making investments, not taking on expenses. I think that's— we'd all agree with that, right? They are investing in training to achieve a different outcome, but tons of them lose sight of that. And particularly as you get further down in the organization, Those are disconnected units. Their focus is on, I have a fixed budget and I'm supposed to be selling training or supposed to be finding training. So I'll find the best—

My KPIs are deliver X workshops a year to this mid-level, whatever. That's right. Nobody's getting to the why of it.

Right, right.

The first step is to attempt to elevate the conversation back to a place of why are you buying a leadership program in the first place? I know we're running out of time, so I'll give you the sort of 20-second Example, consultant we worked with in Baltimore was asked to do a leadership training for a facility. Facility people that are interacting with the public.

That's all I can tell you.

They had a budget of 100 grand for this program. The consultant Doug Doug Doug Doug Doug found out that they have 60% turnover, voluntary turnover. It's costing like 8 million bucks a year. Right? It's a major problem that when the consultant was able to connect to that and say, so the point of the leadership program is to improve retention. And if we can reduce that by X dollars already, so 2 things happened. One, budget expanded, because the problem is much bigger than they had identified the budget for on this. And secondly, the focus became on how do we achieve that outcome on improving retention? Well, we do that by developing leaders' behaviors that look like This. Great. What's the fastest, most effective way to develop those behaviors? Because we're bleeding money every month over here. The value proposition completely shifts from how much content can I get in these days that I have budget for to how quickly and effectively can I solve the problem that's costing us a lot of money?

Mm-hmm.

I, again, you know, I appreciate that that's easy for me to say outside of the context. In many cases, if you're depending on the level of seniority you're talking to, They're you ask them sort of what's the business reason behind the program? Like we're to Peter's point, I'm supposed to book training for them. Okay, but if the more you can nudge that forward back to a place of you're trying to shift behavior, you're trying to shift business impact. We need new behaviors to achieve that. Let's focus on the behaviors and the fastest way to do that. And here is are my most effective training at shifting the behaviors that are going to show up. for you on business metrics you care about. Does that help?

Yes, that's great. Thank you very much, Chris.

Great pleasure.

Well, this has been great. Thanks everybody for showing up. Chris, thanks for all of your insight.

This was super fun. Great.

Thanks everybody. Thanks, Peter.

Thanks, Bill. Bye-bye.

Ciao.

Thank you guys. Thanks, Peter.