Winning stories from ASTD ICE in Denver….

Emma Weber

I returned yesterday from my US trip to the American Society of Training and Development, International Conference and Exposition in Denver Colorado. It was a great conference. 9000 attendees, many of whom were from outside of the US.

I’ll be sharing on my blog learnings, insights and favourite speakers from the conference but firstly I’m excited to share with you a new service from our partners, Fort Hill Company, that was launched at the conference. Many of you will know Fort Hill Company as the Online Learning Transfer specialists – they are committed to helping people get better results from their learning. One of the key steps in learning is sharing your wins and they have create a very cool online tool that helps collect these success stories and through crowd sourcing from the group gets the best story selected. Once the wins and achievements are captured then it becomes easier to demonstrate the value of your initiatives.

They launched ‘We Achieve’ at the conference and created quite a buzz! Well done to Michael, Kathy, David and the team. Awesome work. The online tool was designed to help you showcase results from your initiatives by identifying your participants’ greatest achievements.

I love that with We Achieve you can:

  • Ask participants to share their stories of achievement after an initiative
  • Use wisdom of the group to identify the most compelling examples
  • Have participants see and learn from each others’ achievements
  • Demonstrate the value created by your programs and initiatives

Using the tool at the conference they asked attendees to share their greatest insight or learning from the conference, and then we were asked to vote on the most popular – The winning insight was:

“Our value as L&D professionals is to improve performance. If we are not achieving business outcomes we are not adding value.’

Wow – this was voted as the most powerful insight from the conference and how poignant is it? As Learning and Development professionals we want to be adding value and achieving business outcomes. It’s not about learning, programs, change, growth – the bottom line is achieving business outcomes. I love it!

Great work to the Fort Hill team for uncovering this gem and for creating a tool that can capture the stories and outcomes in a very easy fashion. I’m going to introducing the tool to my clients immediately. You can sign up for a free trial account now here –

Let’s get on board with ‘We Achieve’ and achieve and share those business outcomes –

 

 

 

 

Emma Weber is a recognized authority on the transfer of learning. As CEO of Lever–Transfer of Learning, she has helped companies such as Telstra, Oracle and BMW deliver and measure tangible business results from learning. She has also been a guest speaker at learning effectiveness conferences worldwide and authored the hugely successful book “Turning Learning into Action“. Much more detail around the issues and solutions examined in this article are available in the book – please feel free to download a free chapter. Emma and her team also developed Coach M, a coaching chatbot that delivers fully scaleable learning transfer. She is also a co-author of the books Making Change Work, and Designing Virtual Learning for Application and Impact. Her work and approach is also featured in Data and Analytics for Instructional Designers by Megan Torrance (Author), Foundations of People Metrics and Analytics – by Renjini Joseph and an ATD 10-minute case study series – Chatbot Coaching for Learning Transfer.