My Top 5 Insights From ATD 2016

Emma Weber

I’ve spent this week at the Association for Talent Development’s (ATD) 2016 Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado (USA). It has been a fantastic event as always.

I wanted to capture some of my key learnings and insights so far, so have recorded a short video for you.

In summary- my top 5 insights were:

1. Sensational keynote session from Simon Sinek talking about trust in organisations. He believes leaders need to create a sense of safety so when “danger” arises they can step forward and protect people around them. He used brain chemistry to explain why incentive based cultures are not the way forward anymore.
2. Another fascinating keynote session from Brené Brown who did not disappoint! She spoke about trust, vulnerability, and shame – all of which she believes you need to embrace as a leader. I love how she broke her model around trust down to specific behaviours. She said that a lot of challenges in organisations between leaders and their teams are issues of trust – but the minute you raise that as an issue you create shame and further challenges. If you can break it down to the specific behaviour you want to discuss then it gives you a place to move forward from rather than just calling people out.
3. Kathy Granger & Cal Wick from Fort Hill Company spoke about 70:20 – their social learning platform. They were focusing on what it takes to get social learning happening visibly in your organisation. Cal also took us through a quick history of learning which was really insightful!
4. Great session from Elliott Masie, talking about tradition and ritual being the biggest barriers for learning. He spoke about personalisation and machine learning. He wants to see our LMS solutions doing this for us. He sees that the humble search function has a lot to offer in the future of learning. Really insightful about future trends – check out his work.
5. And of course – I can’t forget learning transfer! There have been 12 sessions on learning transfer across the conference which is fantastic. There’s been a lot of talk around what we can do to improve classroom events and lots of focus on memory. My preference however is on creating behavioural change – getting people to do things rather than just remember. It has been great to see people getting fired up about learning transfer!

Michelle Ockers from Coca Cola Amatil and I took to the stage today for our session on Learning Transfer Gold: Lessons from Down Under. For more from the ATD 2016 backchannel, check out the #ATD2016 stream on Twitter, or David Kelly’s curated ATD 2016 resources.

Having attended the CLO Symposium, the AITD National Conference and ATD 2016 in the last few months – I feel like I’m bubbling over with insights to share with you all. I’ll be running a webinar in July to bring you up to speed on the key Learning & Development trends for 2016 – so watch this space! More details to come soon.