Many learning businesses struggle with decisions about what to create, improve, and retire. With input coming from committees, volunteers, subject matter experts, and staff across the organization, it’s easy for the learning portfolio to become fragmented, duplicative, and difficult to manage in a coherent, sane way.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb explore what happens when responsibility for the learning portfolio is too dispersed and why that’s a business problem, not just an organizational nuisance. They discuss the difference between input and decision rights, outline the four steps in portfolio management, and share questions organizations can use to bring greater clarity—and sanity—to portfolio decision-making.

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Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] In many learning businesses, decisions about what to offer don’t come consistently from one clearly defined place. Instead, decisions about what to offer are shaped by committees, volunteers, subject matter experts, executives, and staff across the organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] Having a lot of people involved is not necessarily a problem. But it is a problem when it’s not clear who owns the portfolio and who has the authority to make key decisions about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] That lack of clarity has consequences. You can end up with scattered offerings, duplication, inconsistent pricing, weak prioritization, and very little discipline around what should be improved, rethought, or retired.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:58] In this episode, we want to talk about what happens when responsibility for the learning portfolio is too dispersed, why that’s more than a low-grade nuisance, and what it takes to bring greater coherence to how decisions get made.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:13] We’ll look at what this problem tends to look like in practice, why input is not the same thing as decision rights, and why intentional portfolio management starts with being clear about who decides what.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:25] Because decisions about your learning portfolio are being made one way or another, the question is whether they’re being made consciously, coherently, and by the right people.

A Common Pattern—and Pain Point

Celisa Steele: [00:01:36] We’ll start by explaining, a little bit more, a pattern that we tend to see repeatedly in organizations that we work with on the consulting side of things, especially association learning businesses—in brief, that many people have a hand in the learning portfolio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:55] Your average association in particular—though this can apply to many types of learning businesses—is going to have committees, volunteers involved, subject matter experts (usually a subset of those volunteers), often executives weighing in (not necessarily executives who have any responsibility for the learning function), and different staff groups who have different needs related to education that are charged with delivering that may or may not fall under whoever is in charge specifically of learning at the organization.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:27] As you already pointed out, Jeff, we don’t see having a lot of people involved necessarily as a problem. In fact, when a lot of people care about education and learning, that can be a good thing. But a problem arises when too few people have clear responsibility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:45] Clear responsibility and clear accountability around the decisions that get made. And the result of that, which we see so often, is an incoherent portfolio. You get scattered offerings, duplication (of effort, of content), inconsistent pricing, weak prioritization, and little discipline around sunsetting. Basically, we see catalogs and the portfolio of offerings essentially accumulate over time in a scattered fashion.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:15] That’s the pain point that led us to want to have this conversation today. What this looks like in practice—to go a little bit deeper—is that very often you might have one committee making decisions around Webinar topics, but then you might have an entirely different committee that is looking at conference session submissions, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:38] In fact, in both of those areas, you might have multiple committees doing those things. You’re lucky if it’s just one committee. You might have one department that handles the annual conference and other events, and then another one that’s handling things like online courses or seminars that the organization offers.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:56] And these committees/departments/groups are not necessarily talking to one another. Even when everything technically sits under the umbrella of an education department, it’s still possible that no one is truly seeing the whole portfolio. And, as you said, not just having a responsibility for that but also having accountability around that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:19] Yes, and this is especially true in organizations where there are a lot of committees or multiple departments across the organization that either have a need to or are charged with creating some form of educational content to serve their particular constituents, which is all legitimate, but it gets hard to know what’s going on where. And, again, those things we’ve already talked about—duplication and that sort of stuff—are occurring all the time. And what can often happen in those sorts of organizations is that education staff get treated as service providers or implementers rather than business stewards, people who are strategically leading a learning business forward and have a coherent and cohesive vision of what’s happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:07] When you’re saying that they get treated as service providers, other groups might come to them with essentially an order, saying, “We need….”

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:14] “Make this Webinar for us.”

Celisa Steele: [00:05:15] Exactly. And then the education staff aren’t necessarily empowered or expected to push back and say, “Well, hey, is a Webinar actually the right format for that?” Or, “How do you know that this is the right topic?” Or any of that sort of vetting. It’s more that they say, “Okay,” and then they head off and do their job to produce that Webinar. So what ends up happening is—because of all this fragmentation and different folks involved, and if there is no clear accountability and responsibility—you have the proverbial one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing, and the portfolio then reflects that.

More Than Org Chart Issue

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:51] All of this is more than just an org chart issue. It’s more than just an annoyance. I imagine we’ve probably already got some heads nodding out there, and listeners probably recognize that this is a real business problem. This is fundamentally an issue with running a learning business effectively. It impacts revenue, it impacts resource allocation, and it has significant opportunity costs that go with it.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:18] That’s right. If staff are producing a large number of offerings and doing that primarily because various groups are requesting them, that’s going to keep them busy, which means they’re going to have less time for what might be more important, more strategic work. That speaks to that opportunity cost that you just mentioned, Jeff.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:38] In this situation we’re talking about, decisions about things like modality, for example, will often get bundled into content requests without being examined. You get the request for “a Webinar on X,” and that may identify a real and legitimate topic need. Often, you’re going to be getting that from a volunteer, committee, or something like that, and they know the field or industry they’re serving. They know it’s a legitimate topic. But that may not be the right format or product response. They don’t have the understanding of what formats are going to align with what learning objectives and what business objectives.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:17] It could be that, instead of a Webinar on X, you need a journal article or a deep-dive course on X. What’s happening in all these situations is accidental governance. Rather than having deliberate, conscious, and well-informed decision-making, you’re running on “the way we’ve done things” and a more ad-hoc, hodgepodge approach to governing what goes into your portfolio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:46] What we’re arguing for is not necessarily more (or less) bureaucracy. It’s getting at the heart of how real decisions about the business are being made and how you get a clear process around that.

Input ≠ Decision Rights

Celisa Steele: [00:08:06] One of the key distinctions that we want to touch on is that input is not the same as decision rights.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:16] Committees and subject matter experts can provide valuable input on topics, on needs, on realities from the field/industry/profession. But that input should be a point of departure, not the final answer—not, like we just talked about, where “It’s going to be a Webinar on X; go make it.”

Celisa Steele: [00:08:37] Like you said, that input can be very valid, but it’s not necessarily the final determination. It’s not the final determination about content, modality, or even that anything needs to be done. Because, again, there needs to be some level of professionalization around how these decisions are being made, and usually it’s going to be education staff who, for example, understand better which modalities can serve which purposes or instructional designers who understand which types of activities might support the specified or desired learning outcomes. You want to work in collaboration with your volunteers and subject matter experts, but ultimately decision-making needs to reside at a higher level.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:23] In addition to modality, design, those sorts of things, there is the business side of this. How do you price things? That certainly should not be coming out of a committee. That, again, should be left to professionals, which may be the education staff or the education staff in collaboration with marketing, with finance. But you want the people who have the expertise and the experience and are looking at the learning business as a business to be making those sorts of decisions.

The Hidden Problem Underneath the Problem

Celisa Steele: [00:09:51] There’s a hidden or shadow problem underneath the problem that we’ve been talking about. The issue often gets interpreted as, “We have too many cooks in the kitchen.” “There are too many people involved in these decisions.” “The committees are making things messy.” That’s the interpretation because it’s easy to see those aspects of it. It’s very visible when you have a lot of committees. It’s very visible when you have a lot of people contributing input, but, underneath, there’s a more fundamental breakdown—the organization hasn’t been clear about how portfolio management is supposed to work.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:30] It’s a process issue in the sense that there’s not a common understanding of how that decision process is supposed to flow, which should be, to start with, someone has to coordinate the information needed to make good decisions and be responsible for there being good information and that information being available to people. Then someone has to turn that information into possible offerings or moves that you’re going to make with your portfolio.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:59] Then somebody has to look at those ideas of possible offerings, portfolio moves, and say, “Okay, this is what’s going to need to be created. This is what we’re going to need to update. This is what we’re going to need to get out of our portfolio entirely and sunset it.” Of course, once those decisions are made about what’s being created, maintained, or sunset, someone has to make sure that those decisions are enacted, that creation gets done, that the item gets removed from the online catalog, and so on.

Four Necessary Steps

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:34] In many organizations, that whole process is diffuse. All of those stages are fragmented. There may be somebody nominally in charge, but it’s not clear who truly has responsibility/accountability for the decisions. And the four steps of the process are not being tightly coordinated and accounted for in the way they should be. So, if you start with, one, gathering and synthesizing input/data, someone has to be ultimately accountable for and responsible for that happening. It doesn’t mean that they’re doing all of it. There’s probably going to be multiple people involved in giving that input and looking at that data. Somebody has to be responsible, though, for that happening on an ongoing basis for the organization. From our perspective, that’s probably the learning business leader, who’s making that decision. Certainly, it is a staff person. That should not be allocated to a committee or a board. And, if it’s not the learning business leader, then it needs to be somebody who’s been clearly deputized within the learning business to say, “This is your role. This is what you’re accountable for.”

Celisa Steele: [00:12:40] You said probably not a board, probably not a committee. Again, to be really clear, a committee may be providing some of that input.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:48] Probably will be, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:49] The board is probably providing some of that input, but again you have to have someone who is responsible for making sure that the appropriate input and data is gathered and synthesized.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:01] And that the process is working and is achieving what it is supposed to be achieving. That’s for step one. Step two is generating and testing ideas. Again, you might have many people involved with that, but there needs to be a person who is responsible and accountable for that. Again, our view is that person should be on staff in the learning business, probably the learning business leader or somebody who’s been deputized to play that particular role.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:25] At this stage, you might be doing things like, “Okay, we’re going to develop a minimum viable product,” for example. This is the level of piloting and testing ideas or sending out an A/B e-mail test. This is what’s happening at that step. Again, you are probably pulling from a variety of sources, but somebody is ultimately responsible for generating and testing those ideas.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:49] The person who’s ultimately responsible and accountable doesn’t mean that they are doing this work, hands-on. We’re talking about leadership and management here. There needs to be clear leadership, management, and the responsibility and accountability that come with it for each step in this process. We’ve talked about gathering and synthesizing input and data, step one. Step two is generating and testing ideas. Step three is going to be making those explicit portfolio decisions. Certainly, learning business leaders should be responsible and accountable there. And then fourth is executing. Generally, it’s not going to be the learning business leader who’s designing and developing programs and that sort of thing, but that person needs to be accountable and responsible or have a clear deputy who is responsible for that aspect of the process.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:30] Again, management, oversight, leadership—not the hands-on work of it. But, still, somebody has to be responsible and make sure that execution is happening.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:39] And this all needs to be clearly defined, communicated, and followed as a process.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:45] For the sake of the podcast, we’re saying “somebody”—that somebody would be named in your organization. You would know who it is there. The other point to make about these four steps that you were talking through, Jeff, is that it’s a loop. These are not linear steps—you start at one, and you end at four. This is a loop because, after you get to that step four, execution, there’s going to be new data, and there’s going to be more input, and you want to learn from those results. This flow from information to ideas to decisions to action is a cycle, and it repeats, and it’s going to repeat, hopefully, ad infinitum, as long as you, as a learning business, are in business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:25] Right. That’s a theme that runs through all of our tools and all of our work—all of this is cyclical. It repeats over time and improves over time.

What Better Portfolio Management Looks Like in Practice

Celisa Steele: [00:15:34] Let’s talk a little bit about what this might look like in practice. We’ve been saying “someone,” “somebody,” but, as I just mentioned, you would ideally know in your organization who that somebody is. Not even ideally—you need to know who that somebody is. However, the reason we’re using somewhat generic terms like “somebody” and “someone’ is because we don’t believe that there’s a single best practice or a universal model for this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:58] So much of this comes down to just communicating very clearly, making sure people know what the process is, know what their role in the process is, know what the desired outcomes are, and who’s going to be responsible and accountable for those outcomes. Better does not necessarily mean changes to your existing committee structure or to departments or units in your organization. But it does mean establishing clearer responsibilities, clearer accountability, and clearer decision rights throughout the process for the roles within the process.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:33] Part of that will be that the people giving input know what kind of input they’re giving. Are they giving input around modality? Are they giving input more around what are the hot topics needed in the profession? You’re really clear with them, and they’re really clear with what you’re going to do with the input that they’re giving. A better approach to governance and decision-making means that there’s going to be a visible party or parties who are responsible for overseeing the whole portfolio. Everyone’s going to know who that person or who that small group is who is shepherding those four steps that we were talking about and who is ultimately responsible for what happens at each of those steps.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:15] We find it is a smaller group of people than is often the case in many organizations right now. If you are a member organization, for example, you typically are going to have key committee members or key volunteers involved, but staff are really going to be guiding that. They’re going to have the charge for making sure that it’s operating correctly. And staff need to have the authority to make the business and product decisions that come out of whatever those groups are that are looking at the input and generating the ideas.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:48] Part of the reason why having that authority reside with staff is that, one, the staff are usually going to have some domain expertise around things like modality, or they’re going to have better visibility into the business view of what to offer. And then, two, they’re going to also have that view of the whole portfolio. So often a committee—like we were saying—is only hands-on around the development of content for the annual conference, and they might not really understand what you have in terms of self-paced online learning, for example. Both because of domain expertise and expertise of how the learning business is running as a learning business, it makes sense for staff to have the authority for decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:38] The bottom line goal here is that better amounts to being sure that someone, usually a small set of someones are seeing the whole portfolio, everything that you’re trying to do from a learning perspective as an organization, and are making coherent decisions about it that somebody is ultimately responsible and accountable for.

Strategy’s Role in Guiding Portfolio Decisions

Celisa Steele: [00:19:01] You said “coherent,” and coherent decisions recall coherent actions, which call to mind strategy. Buried in what you were saying there, Jeff, is the fact that you cannot make sane portfolio decisions if you aren’t clear on who you’re serving and what role learning is playing in that service to those people.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:24] It’s very true, but we see organizations do it all the time. They start reworking the portfolio, assuming that adjustments here and there in the portfolio are the answer to everything, but they haven’t understood or gotten to that underlying strategy as the touchstone that keeps all of the different input that you’re going to get around portfolio decisions from just being noise and putting you in this place where action is hard to achieve, putting new things in is hard to achieve, and certainly getting rid of things is hard to achieve.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:55] Yes. Without that touchstone of strategy, every request can sound reasonable and even equally important. It gets hard to prioritize. But when you are referring back to the strategy, when you have that strategy in place, when everyone’s using it as that touchstone, then decisions get easier. It becomes clearer to everyone involved why one idea gets the go-ahead, and another one gets sidelined.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:22] This is the foundational part of everything we said about communication earlier—the strategy has to be clear, and it has to be clearly communicated to the people who are participating in the thinking and the decisions around your portfolio. If that’s not there, then you’re operating on shifting sands from the get-go.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:46] To say that again—because it’s an obvious but such an important observation—before you can be clear about any of your portfolio decisions, you need to have clarity around what your learning business is trying to do.

Reflection Questions

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:02] As we wrap up our discussion around portfolio management, portfolio governance, we want to offer some questions that can assist you in getting clarity around the right approach to the governance of education for your learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:20] We have a handful of questions to suggest. If you answer these questions, it’s going to give you the lay of the land. It’s going to help you understand how things are currently operating in your learning business. Who is currently seeing the full learning portfolio?

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:36] It may be nobody. You need to make sure somebody is. If they aren’t, then obviously you need to address that right away. The second one is who is responsible for gathering and synthesizing the relevant information, the data that you need to make good portfolio decisions?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:54] Where are ideas generated, and how are those ideas validated?

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:58] Who has the authority to decide what gets created, maintained, or sunset?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:05] Which decisions belong to staff, and which belong to volunteers or committees? Answering those questions is going to give you the current lay of the land. Then you want to re-ask those questions with a future orientation, with an eye to what would result in stronger offerings, a stronger learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:28] The first would be who should see the full learning portfolio? Hopefully, you have somebody who currently does, but is that the right person? Is that the right set of people going forward?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:41] Who should be responsible for gathering and synthesizing the relevant information, input, and data?

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:49] Where should ideas be generated, and how should they be validated?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:54] Who should have the authority to decide what gets created, maintained, or sunset?

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:00] And then which decisions should belong to staff, and which inputs belong to volunteers or committees?

Celisa Steele: [00:23:06] Again, back to a point that we opened with—decisions about your education portfolio are being made.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:12] Obviously.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:14] The question is whether they’re being made consciously, coherently, and by the right people. That’s what we’re encouraging you to assess and to evaluate.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:23:31] When the roles, responsibilities, and decision rights are fuzzy, your education portfolio usually falters.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:39] Addressing governance issues around your portfolio should not shut out useful input from volunteers, committees, or subject matter experts. Cleaning up your governance should ensure that input is connected to a clear process for turning information into ideas, ideas into decisions, and decisions into action.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:58] And it should ensure someone is seeing the whole portfolio and making coherent decisions about what gets created, maintained, improved, or removed.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:16] And, if you find the Leading Learning Podcast valuable, please consider sharing this episode with a colleague or co-worker who’s wrestling with portfolio decisions or education governance issues.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:26] Thanks for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• The Mission-Margin Matrix: A Framework for Strengthening Learning Portfolios
• 5 Cs to Power Up Your Portfolio

The post Who Decides? Bringing Sanity to Managing Your Learning Portfolio appeared first on Leading Learning.

Many associations struggle with pricing their education offerings. Should education be bundled into membership? Sold à la carte? Packaged as a subscription? And how can learning businesses set prices in a way that reflects the value they provide and supports financial sustainability?

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti, founder and CEO of Pricing for Associations. They discuss value-based pricing, the growing use of bundling and subscription models, and why to test pricing before building products. The conversation also explores governance around pricing decisions and how associations can balance mission, market realities, and revenue when pricing education.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Pricing is one of the most powerful levers a learning business has for revenue. Yet many organizations still rely on tradition, guesswork, or incremental adjustments when setting prices.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] Our guest in this episode, number 475, is Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti, founder and CEO of Pricing for Associations and author of the book Pricing for Associations. Michael specializes in helping associations develop pricing strategies grounded in data, value perception, and long-term sustainability.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:47] In our conversation, Michael shares his approach to value-based pricing and explains how associations can use data, value analysis, and testing to make better pricing decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:58] You and Michael also talk about whether and how to bundle learning offerings with membership or create subscription-style offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:05] Yes, and Michael and I get into opportunities and risk—from protecting pricing power to making sure education’s contribution to the organization’s revenue and mission remains visible.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:17] If you want practical insight into pricing strategy, subscriptions, and how education fits into a sustainable association business model, then stick around for this conversation with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti.

Michael’s Approach to Pricing

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:35] You’ve been on the Leading Learning Podcast before, and we will most definitely link to that in the show notes and encourage folks to go listen to that. But, for those who may not have listened to that episode or have listened to it recently, tell us a bit about your general perspective on pricing, your approach to pricing. When you’re working with these organizations, what’s front of mind for you? What are you bringing to the table?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:01:58] For me, I usually say, instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall of what’s always been done, take a separate look at it. The big thing for us is value-based pricing—what is the perception of your product or positioning in the market, and what is the willingness to pay of your audience for that value and perceived value? It’s not about greed for us. It’s not about “Oh, they’re willing to pay 3x more; let’s charge 3x more.” It’s more of “Are you already at the top of the market? Can you go up? If so, what’s the strategic decision balancing mission and money?” That’s our high level—let’s get some data behind it, be a little bit methodical, look at the whole portfolio, and make sure it’s making financial and business sense for the association.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:46] Without asking you to give away your secret sauce, so to speak, how do you go about doing that? Because I’m sure listeners will be sitting here saying, “Well, that sounds great, but I don’t know how our members and customers value us. I would love to know that.”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:03:01] Yes, and I’ll give it away. I don’t care. There are three big buckets at high level. The first one’s data. Usually what I like to look at there is satisfaction metrics, surveys, all that. Second thing I look at in data is sales and what have they purchased. Third is engagement or user behavior. What I typically find is they’ll say in a survey they want one thing, but, when we look at what they buy and what they utilize the most within what they buy, it might look different, and so we synthesize that together. The second big bucket is value analysis. Associations already do that with all of their products. They’re already doing member surveys, all that, post-event, etc. It’s asking some key questions. Usually what we’re bringing to the table is a set of questions that you can embed into what you’re already doing to start benchmarking value and pricing, year over year. And then the third one is, once you’ve done that benchmarking and seen where they want to go and looked at the data for what are they even doing, then it’s figuring out, if we reimagine this in one of these few ways, what’s the willingness to pay? How does that adjust? And, therefore, what’s the best win-win for members in our audience, the business, and financial sustainability? So those are the three: data, value, and then price is our methodology.

The Impact of Competition on Association Education

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:18] Where our worlds intersect is in education, in learning. We do a lot of advising around pricing with our clients. You do a lot of advising to associations around how to price their education portfolios. I’d love to hear what you’re seeing there. From our perspective, one thing I’ve started hearing in the last year—and this is the first time I’m hearing it, and it’s coming from CEOs—is some are wondering whether they should or can even be in the education business anymore because it’s feeling so competitive out there. Pricing isn’t the only issue, but pricing is an issue, definitely. They’ve got competitors who are underpricing them or putting free stuff into the marketplace, and they feel helpless in a way. Are you seeing any of that? Or what are you seeing in terms of pricing of education in the association world?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:05:13] That’s fascinating. I’m seeing something similar, but what I haven’t heard—and what strikes me in what you just said—was asking, “Should we tap out of education?” Because, inside, when you said that, my first response was, “No, you shouldn’t. You should be in the education business.” But what I am seeing alongside you is that market saturation of free or low cost (because that’s what a lot of for-profits are doing) and then, with AI and all the things, so there is heavy competition. But what I’m seeing is education is typically the best product as far as profitability goes. Events, as we know, are very thin margins or at a loss. I don’t know many associations that still have a real cost to serve down for membership to even know profitability. But education—specifically digital and even some in-person workshops—is the one area where I do see profitability. When you look at the whole portfolio, they need that lift to help with offsetting events. That’s crazy to me that they’re like, “Should we step out?”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:06:20] No. But it might be a matter of how does that look? And that’s what we talked about before our recording today too. “Do we bundle it into membership, or how do we imagine education?” I would say, “Don’t stop education,” but, for some associations, it’s how do we look at it? How are we delivering it? What’s the packaging around it? More than ever—and then I’m going to shut up on this one—associations are, in a way, a gatekeeper of integrity for information and education. Even though others are doing it and cutting in at low cost, they’re not always doing education with the same level of integrity. It’s like Wikipedia back in the day; we couldn’t use it as a source when I was in college because it wasn’t always good information. You still had to go to the library and quote from a book or a published article (peer-reviewed). That’s how I look at associations. I don’t think they should back out, but we do have to respond to the market. We don’t live in a bubble.

The Role of Integrity, Trust, and Credibility in Association Education

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:21] As you can imagine, that’s our response too. Not only is there an opportunity, there’s a responsibility, I think, on the part of associations to be those educators with integrity in their marketplaces. I want to come back to what you said about potentially bundling education and membership, but, before we get there, your comments raised a couple of other questions for me. One is around that question of integrity and, along with it, trust, credibility, authority—all the things that an association wants to represent in their marketplace. How much does your work with associations intersect with that? You talked about value before, and part of the value perception of an association is going to be are they seen as having that integrity, having that trust, having that authority? How does that factor into your work? What are you seeing associations do to try to bolster that when they need to?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:08:11] A lot of it. The maturity for that value prop is low. The only strong thing that I see right now is saying something to the effect of “We are the authority/gold standard,” something like that. That’s a good starting place. I’m not knocking that. There’s also—what I see from clients—a lack of willingness to go there competitively and make a clear statement. One local bar was like, “We know the state bar is not doing this.” Even association to association, they didn’t want to say, “Oh, we’re including this as well, and they don’t.” But I’m like, “There could be a way to say, ‘We’re the only local to the state or area or tri-state area that offers this,’” without saying they don’t. Associations have always been a little bit afraid to act like a business, but we have to; otherwise, we’re not going to exist, period. We need to get a little bit more emboldened. There’s a way to do it without disrespecting or comparing, but making statements of who we are, that’s important. And, at some point, that will also go away. Value props change over years and decades, but, right now, leaning into being peer-reviewed, having a body of ethics, a body of work that’s over decades. Some of the value is I can go to associations I’m a member of and search, historically, archives from the last 30 years.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:09:43] It’s not right now, quick, hot content that’s getting pushed out. I can look and see trends and benchmark, and there’s value in that. Capturing those stories is important. But the last thing, with value props, two types: quantitative and qualitative. That’s more of the qualitative. Quantitative is how many articles, or what does the repository look like? The qualitative is, “I know I can go to this association, and, when my boss has a question on my area of expertise, I can find the answer, and it’s the right answer.” That’s the story we need to tell, not just “We’re the best” or “We are the standard” but telling those stories of “We’re the trusted source, and here’s what that looks like; here’s a story about us being the trusted source” over and over again. That’s way better than going to Claude or ChatGPT or a for-profit partner who we love but is just pumping stuff out as a marketing thing, not education. They’re not looking at outcomes. They’re looking at lead generation. And that is different.

Looking at Education’s Profitability

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:48] Yes, we’ve gotten increasingly focused on how do you tie your education back into that trust, that credibility, that authority because that stands you out in the marketplace if your education is seen as deeply tied to that. You’d mentioned that education is often what’s profitable in the associations’ portfolios when you look at it. Something we found—and I’m wondering if you find this too—is, in many cases, organizations don’t actually have a good understanding of their education’s profitability because they don’t know the whole underlying cost structure. Staff may not be accounted for properly across products and that sort of thing. So there’s an exercise to go through around “What is the profitability here? What might it be if we really look at the data and get at what is possible here?” How much are you seeing that kind of thing?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:11:36] I’m seeing that quite a bit and also deeper conversations, getting a bit more technical in a good way, such as looking at the cost of subject matter experts, these one-time high costs. If it’s something deeper, like a course—not just a quick learning—what are the costs of that spread out over the years and recouping and all that? That’s something I’m seeing as well. The other interesting thing—this goes more to the comparative against the competitive landscape that’s moved beyond just associations—is the cost to serve, I think, for a for-profit is way cheaper because they’ve got in-house SMEs, in-house production, video, all that. For them, there is a cost, but they’ve already got it set up in a way, and it’s cheaper. It’s a bit quicker. One thing that I would encourage associations to think through is instructional design one million percent matters. I think back to doing my doctorate—one of the phrases that we used a lot in the dissertation phase was “Done is better than perfect.”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:12:40] Some are also like, “Oh, we have to be flashy, like we need…,” and I know we don’t want talking heads with a deck, but sometimes we get too focused on the glamorization of education. And it’s like, “Listen—is it right? Is it current? And are we keeping it updated?” To me, that matters a little bit more in outcomes. Maybe I’m a direct person. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter at all, but we could also focus a little bit more on…again, it goes back to integrity of the product. That matters a lot more than trying to do too much too quickly. We almost have to be agile because, education, there’s always new topics…. We’ve been through a global pandemic, recession, so much in the last few years. We’re always having to pump out information. Let’s get it out in a good, clean way. Write information that they trust. Get them sticky with us—to trust us to keep doing that and keep it moving. The shelf life is not going to be ten years, so let’s keep it moving a little bit. But that’s the long answer—my two cents.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:43] We agree. We continuously see organizations get themselves wrapped around the wheel a little bit too much around design and bells and whistles and things like that. And you’re right that you don’t want just a talking head with a deck. But the fact is, even a talking head with a deck can be done better. There are good versions of that.

Bundling Education and Membership

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:01] You’d mentioned it, and we’d had some e-mail about this beforehand—I definitely want to make sure we focus in, somewhat, in this conversation on the idea of potentially rolling education—particularly digital education, as it can be a little more complicated with face-to-face, though I have seen it done—into membership, potentially to justify or to bolster membership value and/or potentially creating what you’ve called an “education pass.” I’ve heard organizations call it that, where it’s a bundle or your subscription that you’re going to upsell to your members or sell it to non-members, if that is, in fact, a part of membership. Can you talk a little bit more about what you’re seeing there? What’s driving those kinds of decisions for organizations you’re working with?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:14:47] Yes, absolutely. I’ve seen it done many ways. We’ve literally done this at least five to ten times in the last year or two with clients, probably ten times in the last two years easily, and it all looks different. Every time it’s a slightly different outcome. Some of them are saying, “Okay, we’re going to pick certain digital education, not everything.” It might be quicker things that are under an hour. But, if it’s a multi-session, that’s not included. Or in-person, not included. Some of them are rolling that in a membership and then upping the cost. They’re doing what I call the “peanut butter spread,” where, let’s say, ten percent of members were taking that education, and average spend was only $100 across each of them. If we up membership by $10 and give it to everyone, it’s the same profitability, and that’s a no-brainer for members. Usually, we can raise it by $20, and now we’ve doubled revenue and probably quadrupled profitability, and it’s still a win-win to members. So that’s a way. But, in that case, we’re looking holistically at education and membership.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:15:48] Other times I’ve seen it, one client—the one that was competing with the state—included digital plus any in-person that was up to three credits, meaning more like a lunch-and-learn, but not a full day. More like quarterly little things. They included those as well because it made sense, but, for others, it doesn’t. And then, for other orgs, we’ve done it as an upsell, sometimes to members, sometimes non-members only, sometimes both, where we, again, pick what’s included. It’s usually not everything, but it’s a good chunk, maybe some basics, and we say, “Okay, when you renew your membership, for an extra $99, you can buy and get access for the year.” With others, maybe it’s already included in membership. But, for non-members, it’s a way to get that annual recurring revenue through a subscription model, without them becoming members. Maybe they don’t want to spend $500 a year on membership, but they’ll spend $100 or $150 a year, even for ancillary. We’ve done this with medical organizations as well, for a physician organization, for example.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:16:48] Maybe PAs, nurse practitioners, they can’t be members according to the bylaws. They’re already buying à la carte CMEs, but now we create this bundle where they get access to some basics to help them in practice. We’ve done it a lot of ways. It works well. One of the big things, though, is, operationally, you still need to line item those wins for education—and this is something we talked about a little bit in our change e-mail. I don’t think that means that the portfolio gets absorbed into membership because, all of a sudden, it’s like, “Well, membership’s doing great, but education doesn’t really have revenue. Why do we have an education staff?” Because the bolster in revenue is because of them, not because of membership! It’s important to figure out—and it can look a few different ways—okay, education is still a standalone department, and usually they still have a lot of products to sell and in-person to do and all that, but knowing this percentage of membership is allocated back to education’s win and to that staff.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:17:54] When you’re doing KPIs, metrics, and evaluations, you’re not getting lost, and then, five years later, someone feels like, “Well, we can cut the education staff.” And it’s like, “No, you can’t.” The other thing too is products change. It’s like an accordion. For a few years, you might bundle; then you might de-bundle or come up with new premium education offerings. Again, they can still be non-dues revenue. It’s not always the right answer for everyone. But, for a lot of organizations, sometimes it’s been really successful because, again, what I mostly see is them coming to associations for education, not membership; events, if they can go, but there are so many budget restrictions, all that. Digital education is the win-win right now for associations, and it will be for this decade, for some years to come. So those are some of the things we’re doing. Are you all seeing that, or is it still more à la carte? Not to flip it back on you, but I’m curious to hear what you guys are seeing as experts as well in the space. Are you seeing anything with that?

Moving Beyond a B2C A La Carte Model

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:55] Yes, we talk about this constantly—not that a la carte can’t be viable anymore, but it’s a much harder game, so to speak, to do things purely a la carte. We’re seeing subscriptions much more, particularly in that business-to-consumer model. If you’re selling to individual members, subscriptions can work very well. For example, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association—Jack Coursen has talked about that, at our events and on the podcast before. He’s even taking that now into the business-to-business model, and health systems are buying. And then, in that business-to-business model, David Upbin from the Mortgage Bankers Association spoke at one of our recent events, and they package their education up into bundles. They call it “Education Advantage”—if I’m remembering the name of his program—and it’s tiered.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:46] I want to ask you about this too—how you approach the pricing—but tier one is on-demand digital. Tier two is on-demand plus live digital, and maybe at that point they start to insert one or two face-to-face seminars. Tier three gives more of the face-to-face. And then they have a custom level for their big customers—they’re selling to banks. They have this whole structure for how to price it as a really compelling offer to the banks for why to buy into education in this way rather than on a more ad hoc model. We’re seeing a lot of success with that, definitely.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:20:25] That’s good. And that ties in because one other thing that I’m noticing, especially when we talk B2B—whether it’s trade versus individual society or if it’s still some kind of organizational purchase—with purse strings tightening, in a lot of organizations, it’s getting harder to get ad hoc purchases approved. You’ll get membership approved, but then throughout the year, when you want to go to something outside of one big conference, it’s hard. When you bundle it and can sell it at the same time, one touchpoint a year, they can more easily budget, buy it, set and forget. It’s also helping with customer experience. It’s making it easier on the member, but it’s also, again, helping to get more revenue in.

Addressing the Potential Downsides of Bundling

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:13] I’m wondering what you see as potential dangers or areas where organizations have to be cautious about this. You already raised one around making sure that the role of education isn’t discounted in this whole process, that there needs to be accounting for what education is contributing to the overall business model for the organization. I worry about the potential erosion of pricing power with more ad hoc offerings. If you’ve got all this stuff packaged up in a subscription that people can get access to, and they’re not necessarily equating the price with the content they’re getting, but you still want to sell some ad hoc stuff, does that have a downward pressure on that? How do you communicate effectively to members and customers to make sure they’re seeing the value of what they’re getting in these different packages and pricing scenarios?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:22:04] This is where the accordion mindset comes in. It can cannibalize, yes, but I don’t think it’s as easy to cannibalize as some people think. There was one scenario with a client two years ago where we tested this, and the answer was no—stay a la carte. That was one out of 40, 50 projects in the last few years, and probably a third of them looked at this type of model. Again, it’s rare, but there can be cases. But here’s the thing—because associations only have so much money and research in the business area, look to for-profit. For-profit is moving to subscription models and more one-time, one-and-done. I’m looking at buying a new car right now. I was looking at the 2027 Highlander, which I’ve written off my list now because I don’t like the third row, but I noticed that they have a subscription model for so much of the tech in the car. Car dealerships tried with prepaid for your oil changes, all your service for the first three years. A lot of organizations are moving to that model, which means that, in general, across the landscape, we as human beings are being conditioned to subscribe, either at smaller incremental amounts or once a year. I pay for my car insurance twice a year. I don’t do monthly. I just like to know it’s done. We’re getting conditioned to that in the world, not just in the association space.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:23:33] Again, we’re much pickier with ad hoc purchases. Could it cannibalize? It could if you never create anything beyond that. If you put everything in, and that’s it, and you leave it that way for 20 years, then, yes, you probably have screwed up. The way that you don’t is by, number one, defining clearly what is included because it’s usually not all of your education; it’s some of it. You make a name for that; you bundle that in. You still sell non-dues pieces, but now it’s more premium. Then, maybe after three years, you start to introduce, like, “Oh, here’s a three-hour ‘How to Prompt Engineer Better’”—I’m sure in three years, AI, it’ll be a different topic. And then that’s a lower cost, like a $100 or $300 online thing. You still sell other things, but we’re trying to bolster…. It’s like we’re lifting the legs of the table—there’s education, membership, events, sponsorship, publications, all these legs. We’re trying to bolster all of them and lift the financial viability of the organization. Right now, the easiest lever is working with education in some way. Membership’s only going to go up so much in price. Events are only going to go up so much in price. Again, margins are slim on all those. Publications? Forget it. Events? Forget it.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:24:55] Digital education is where we can really pull some levers and get the lift that we need while serving our members well. They want that from us. How do we do that? That’s where the strategy comes in. And the answer is not one-size-fits-all, but the only way that you cannibalize is if you’re also the type of organization that doesn’t raise membership dues for 20 years. If you’re asking this question…it’s like parenting. Those of us who are like, “Am I being a good parent?” Therapists will say, “If you’re asking that question, you’re probably a good parent.” It’s the same thing. If you’re asking, “How do we not cannibalize?,” you’re probably not going to let it cannibalize. It’s not as if your head’s in the sand. I think they’ll be okay, but still offer non-dues education products. I’m not saying don’t. I’m saying it might be a way, whether it’s subscription outside of membership, embedding it, or whatever that looks like. Even in upselling events, it might not be membership; it might be “Come to the event,” and then there’s an upsell pass for the digital. And then you get to see the breakouts that you missed when there are concurrent sessions. That’s a way to do a subscription and think about it and then sell it for a higher price to those that didn’t even come to the conference. There are many ways you can slice the pie.

When Should Pricing Be Addressed, and Who Should Address It?

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:05] You referenced all the different types of products and opportunities that an association might represent. And something that’s become more and more a part of our work lately is looking at governance around education product decisions. Because, in associations, a lot of times it’s dispersed out through different committees. There’s no coordination. There’s a significant governance issue at many organizations. Part of that discussion, though, is pricing. Who should own pricing decisions in an organization, particularly when education is there with a bunch of other products that are in the organization’s portfolio? Who makes those decisions? And a related question is when should those decisions be made? Because a lot of times we see an organization build a product, and then they’re like, “How should we price it?”

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:26:50] Yes! I love you for these two questions. I’m going to answer the second one first because it’s quicker; then I’ll go to the first. For when you should decide on pricing, the best practice is to test pricing when you’re at the conception stage, before you’ve built the product. As a consultant, if I say, “I’m going to consult on pricing for associations” but then find out that the associations are only willing to give us $1,000 but expect a six-month engagement, that’s not financially feasible. It’s not a business. You should, to a degree, be testing new products before you build them—with education, with anything. But education’s the main area where this exists because that’s where we’re pumping new products right now. You should be testing the concept in advance. If you do it after—I’ve had clients do this. They’ve built a product, hired us to price it, and I’m like, “I have a gut feeling here.” And they’re like, “No, just see what they say,” and then they don’t even….

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:27:50] One client built it in the wrong platform. They built it as a Word doc plugin, and then their users were like, “We don’t have Office-enabled devices. We use PDF. We would like it if it were a PDF extension. But this we would never buy.” The willingness to pay is zero. And I told them that. When that happened, they were sitting in on the focus groups, and I’m like…. So, before you build the product, you should price. The other thing, though, as far as governance, decision-making…. I don’t care who it fits with because associations are all nimble and different and have different organizational setups. I do think there should be best practices—a pricing governance committee where it’s department heads, especially with education. To your point, Jeff, because sometimes there’ll be the digital education team that works with SMEs and all that. Then there are the events, which is still education. Then there’s in-person workshops. I’ve worked with that, with medical orgs, and there’s a triangulation that’s happening. And they’re like, “Well, we can’t charge this because they’re only charging this.” I’m like, “We’ve got to get on the same page. The customer doesn’t give a damn what your departments are. They’re buying products from the organization. You’ve got to be cohesive here.” The leaders of departments should be meeting, talking.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:29:17] We have a governance template, for free, in our book. You can get it for free on the Web site. It’s on Amazon. But there is, at the end, a governance template. Or, if anyone wants to message me, I’ll send them the Google Doc of it for free. It basically outlines these decisions where, every year, the committee should meet and discuss, “What are our plans for the next year? Who’s going up in price?” All that. It should be data-backed. You should be looking at data, value, and pricing. And you’re not making big changes every year. Usually, it’s cost of living-ish. But every three to five years there might be that accordion—like it’s time for membership, or it’s time for events, or it’s time for sponsorship to do an accordion stretch or tie back in; we’re going to repackage a little bit, adjust pricing more substantially, test some new things out. But you don’t do it all in one year across everything, or you’re going to give whiplash.

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:30:09] One year might be membership, the next year might be sponsorship, the next year might be events, the next year might be digital education, whatever, and you cycle through. But every year you should be meeting and saying, “Here’s what we’re doing. How does that impact the customer journey? And how are we working together?” Again, maybe education isn’t rolled in, but there is an upsell option direct on the membership renewal, a pass, or whatever. How do we document? What’s the process? How are we making this easy for people to say yes and spend money with us because we’re the right solution? That’s my two cents. It shouldn’t just sit with one person like a CFO. It should be the heads of products coming together and saying, “Here’s what we want to do. Here’s what you want to do. How do we all want to proceed?” And the CEO should be heavily involved in that; CFO too. But it should be more of an internal staffing committee wherever the bylaws don’t require the board to vote, which is usually only membership if they do. Outside of that, usually staff is empowered to make all pricing decisions.

Michael’s Approach to His Own Learning and Recommended Resources

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:11] One last thing I’ll ask about, and I’ll start with the observation that pricing is a very dynamic field. People who don’t deal with it a lot may think, “Well, it’s just some set of rules I need to follow” and that sort of thing. But, no, particularly with AI coming along, it’s thrown a huge wrinkle into pricing. This is a little bit of a double-barreled question, though—you personally and what you would recommend to others. How do you stay on top of how pricing is evolving? How do you educate yourself and keep learning? And, for somebody who’s listening, who does not understand pricing all that well and wants to educate themselves as much as possible?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:31:53] Two thought leaders that I really love personally are Ron Baker and Ed Kless. They are both accountants by trade, and they focus on value-based pricing for accountants as a service. And so, same thing, instead of hourly, project-based, value-based. I love them. I’ve met them through getting the CPP, and they’re literally great. They have simple examples, not specific to the association space but good general knowledge. Another book that I love is called Value as a Service. I’ve read many pricing books. I have over 800 books, and at least 10 or 20 are on pricing. There’s a lot, but that’s a good one as well. There’s another one. I can’t remember the exact name, so I’ll find it and send it to you for the show notes, but it’s something like The Psychology of Price—that’s another good one. Most of pricing is not math. People can think, “Oh, it’s just the number.” I would say 80 percent of pricing is psychology and marketing, and then 20 percent is finance. It’s what will you pay, but it’s what will you pay based on…?

Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti: [00:33:05] The reason I pay $8 for a Starbucks coffee is because it makes me feel a certain way. It’s the qualitative value and the quantitative. But I can buy a coffee for two bucks at the gas station or a dollar. What’s the difference? I don’t give a damn about the beans. I feel some kind of way—status symbol—holding a Starbucks coffee cup, and you’re part of a club in a way. That’s where being a member, being a part of a community—it’s the psychology. My best advice is study psychology on consumer behavior, decision-making, behavioral economics. Florian Bauer is really good at that as well—behavioral economics. He’s over in Europe. I know him as well. Fantastic guy. Super smart. So those are some people, some books, some resources that I love, that I follow, that I learn from. Otherwise, I like to read anything on pricing on LinkedIn, honestly. Like when Wendy’s was doing the dynamic thing with their boards. I like seeing those B2B and B2C examples and then figuring out how does that play into associations? I look at it more like I’m a translator.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:34:17] That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti, founder and CEO of Pricing for Associations, but stay with us another minute to catch our recap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:27] You can get a free copy of his book Pricing for Associations, as well as access to hundreds of articles on pricing.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:48] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it. That helps more people find the show and benefit from the conversation, and it supports the work we do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:56] In our conversation, Michael emphasized that effective pricing starts with understanding value and looking at data on engagement, purchasing behavior, and customer perceptions to guide decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:09] He also talked about the growing shift toward bundling and subscription-style models for education and how those approaches can strengthen both the customer experience and the financial sustainability of the organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:21] At the same time, organizations need to be thoughtful about governance and timing—testing pricing concepts before building new products and making sure education’s role in overall revenue remains visible.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:34] Lots to think about if you’re responsible for pricing, packaging, or positioning learning products in your organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:41] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

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Related Resources

• Value-Based Pricing with Dr. Michael Tatonetti
• 3 Principles of Pricing
• Learning Subscriptions: Where Lifelong Learning (and Long-Term Revenue) Is Actually Possible
• Cert Prep, Pricing, and Impact with Letty Kluttz
• Right Price Right Now
• How to Price Educational Products – 10 Tips from 20 Years of Experience
• Effective Pricing Practices for Your Educational Products

The post Pricing Association Education with Dr. Michael Carr-Tatonetti appeared first on Leading Learning.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb wrap up their three-part look at reach, revenue, and impact by focusing on impact—often the least clearly defined and measured of the three pillars.

Celisa and Jeff explore how impact looks different depending on whose perspective you consider—that of learners, employers, and the learning business itself—and why measuring impact doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. When learning businesses treat impact data as strategic intelligence, it can inform key decisions about what to offer, what to improve, and what to retire.

They also discuss how evidence of impact strengthens marketing, improves learning design, supports smarter portfolio decisions, and deepens business development conversations.

When reach, revenue, and impact reinforce one another, learning businesses are better positioned not just to grow but to thrive.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Learning businesses need to consistently perform in three areas: reach, revenue, and impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:23] In the last two episodes, we’ve revisited reach and revenue as part of that larger interconnected system. In this episode, we turn to impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:32] Impact is what ultimately tells you whether your reach and revenue will be sustainable—it’s where your assumptions get tested.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:40] Reach tells you who you’re getting in front of, revenue tells you what the market is willing to pay for, and impact tells you whether your work is making a meaningful difference—for learners, for their organizations, and for the field or industry you serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:55] Impact is often the least clearly defined of our triumvirate—reach, revenue, and impact. Learning businesses tend to value impact, but they can still struggle to articulate or measure it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:08] Today we want to unpack impact—what it means, whose perspective matters, and how it connects to reach and revenue.

Impact for Whom? Clarifying the Perspective

Celisa Steele: [00:01:17] When we talk about impact, there is an immediate question: impact for whom? Because there are a variety of perspectives on impact. Impact is not one thing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:29] We’re going to look at those multiple perspectives: the learner; the employers who are hiring those learners in the field or industry you’re serving; the learning business itself; and then, ultimately, that profession, field, or industry that you are serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:45] From the learner’s perspective, impact is going to tie into things like increased confidence or new knowledge and skills and the ability to apply the new knowledge and new skills on the job.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:58] And it factors into career mobility. Is the learning that you’re delivering helping that learner to get a job, to get promoted, to expand the responsibilities that they have in their job? And is it reinforcing or helping to establish and then reinforce their professional identity?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:18] Impact, from the learner’s perspective, is going to very often be largely self-reported—but we think that’s entirely legitimate.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:29] Definitely. Confidence and perceived usefulness matter. You want the learner to feel confident. You want them to feel the perceived usefulness from learning experiences. Those are things that will drive continuing engagement, which is so important to learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:46] A big part of how you’re going to be able to get at the learner’s perspective on the impact will be through asking them to self-report on various measures around the learning experience. One of our go-to thinkers around measurement is Will Thalheimer. He has a great way of rethinking the smile sheet so that you’re trying to get at more than just “Did you like the food at the conference?” and get to “Are you actually applying what you’re learning?,” for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:17] And this goes to that confidence question. Are you more confident in doing your job? Are you confident that you learned things that are going to help you do your job? We won’t go into detail around Will’s thinking here because we’ve talked to him a number of times, and we can point to some of those episodes for folks to take advantage of. But he does have an approach to evaluation, to feedback you get from learners that is much more structured and much more targeted than what you get through those typical smile sheets that you were referencing, Celisa. Another approach that we think has great value is the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:54] Yes, and I got to speak with Rob Brinkerhoff, so we can link to that episode in the show notes for this episode. That’s where you look at who are the learners who are truly benefiting from what you offer. And then you begin to look at what contributes to that success so that, then, hopefully, you can deliver that same success to other learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:15] Those are some great resources around that reporting by the learners and how you can capture that reporting effectively, whether it’s through a strong evaluation like what Will Thalheimer advocates for and provides the guidance for doing or whether it’s something like the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method. That’s the learner perspective on impact. We also want to take into account the employers’ perspective—the people who are giving jobs to those learners and are hoping that their performance is going to improve through learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:47] Impact from the employers’ perspective very often is taking into account the capability of the workforce. They’re looking for is this learning experience helping the workforce be more capable? Is it helping to reduce any errors that might happen on the job? Or is it helping to improve the performance of employees?

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:09] This is a big one. We hear this a lot in the news today around employers, their perception of the readiness, the capability level of the workforce, particularly the entering workforce, the early-stage workforce coming into a profession. But, all along, how is your learning contributing to raising the bar at the employers where your learners are working? Is it helping to speed up onboarding? Is it helping to increase performance? Is it helping with retention? That’s a big one. We know, particularly if you buy into the generational perspective on workers/on employees, younger generations in particular seem to highly value having education and training experiences as part of what they’re provided in their working environments.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:54] You want to be getting the employers’ perspective on the impact. Are you asking employers what changed? What are the managers noticing once the learners are back on the job? Is that something you’re actively trying to gather data around?

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:11] We find most organizations are not. It is something that needs to be instituted. It can certainly factor in if, for example, you’re trying to do business-to-business selling—selling directly to employers. You want some impact data to be able to help make those kinds of deals possible. But, even if you’re selling to individuals, if an individual learner is able to demonstrate, if the employer can see that the impact has been there for the individual learner, it’s going to make it much more possible for them to make the budget arguments that they often have to make to be able to participate in professional development and continuing education experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:48] The third perspective on impact is the view from your learning business. What does impact look like for you?

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:56] A big one here is do people keep coming back? We talked about smile sheets (perhaps with a hint of disdain in our voices) earlier, but, if people feel like they are enjoying/benefiting from the experience, if you’re seeing that show up in those smile sheets, hopefully you’re seeing that the follow-through from that is that those people who gave you good evaluations show up again and again. And that’s probably because your learning is having some impact on those learners. They do feel like you’re helping them with their performance, with their advancement in their career, whatever their personal measure is of impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:36] If you’re getting those learners to come back, then any individual learner is spending more of their time, more of their money with your organization. That contributes to the lifetime value of learners to your learning business. It often too is going to result in referrals. If people are seeing the impact from a particular course or class, whatever the experience is, that word of mouth will help you find future learners, other learners to engage with.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:06] Yes, that’s very, very powerful stuff in getting customers and building your brand. It can help too if you are doing more business-to-business-type selling of your education. It’s going to help with those institutional renewals, keeping those business customers coming back. And, of course, if you are able to demonstrate impact consistently—have your learners, have your employers feel that impact, have those learners returning over time—then you’re going to be much more likely to have that sustainable net revenue that learning businesses seek.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:40] Revenue, particularly if a product has strong positive net revenue, can signal something that’s having impact, and that’s likely why you’re able to bring in those revenue dollars. But revenue alone is not necessarily proof of impact, so you want to make sure that you are actively looking at ways to measure the impact that you’re having, documenting that so you can use it in marketing and business-to-business sales situations. You want to have that kind of data because it’s really to help you as you serve other learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:15] We’ve talked about it before, and we will talk about it again: how revenue feeds into impact; impact feeds into revenue. It’s a virtuous cycle that exists among these three components of reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:27] The fourth and last perspective that we’ll touch on is the impact on the field, the profession, or the industry, whatever it is you target with your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:41] That could be things ranging from raising standards in the field or industry you serve. For us, this is a big part of leading learning. Are you leading the learning that’s happening in your field or profession and helping to raise the bar within that profession? It can contribute to shared language across the profession. A lot of language gets conveyed, transferred, shared through learning experiences (formal and informal) and can really have an influence on the direction of the field or industry you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:13] That shared language can also feed into identity—and we touched on identity earlier. When you have a group of learners who really feel like they’re part of a community, that can help elevate the mission of whatever that profession, field, or industry is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:29] This is definitely a case where the whole can be a lot greater than the sum of the parts. When you’re having all of those incremental impacts on individual learners, that obviously adds up and amplifies over time, and you begin advancing the entire field, raising the bar in the entire field, as we were talking about at the beginning of this, through collective growth and knowledge and skills and even the identity across your profession or field.

The Myth: “Impact Is Too Hard to Measure”

Celisa Steele: [00:11:00] We’ve talked about four perspectives on impact. Next, we should talk about what we essentially see as a myth. The myth is that impact is too hard to measure.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:14] Out of the gate, it feels harder than, say, reach metrics. You can tell how many people you have on your e-mail list or how many people enrolled in your courses. That’s pretty easy. It feels harder than revenue because you can run the numbers on your latest event and see how much you sold and how much it cost, and you’ve got a pretty good view into revenue.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:34] It can be a little bit harder than those reach and revenue metrics. It also can be hard as a learning business to feel like you can get direct access to impact data. If you take, for example, corporate L&D, where they have that captive audience, where they’re telling employees, “Go through this training,” and then they’re able to see on-the-job performance and track that very, or relatively, easily because they have access to the relevant managers, to the relevant data, and all of that. We understand that there is a legitimate difficulty for learning businesses in getting some of that access. But we don’t think that difficulty excuses inaction. You need to be looking at trying to get at some of that impact data. Because you still can.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:24] Hard is not the same as impossible. This is one of those great places to remind everyone that you don’t need perfection. You need progress. You need to get some data that you can work with, making it a regular habit to do some form of longitudinal follow-up with your learners to get some idea of what impact particular learning experiences may have had on them. If you’re not getting input from employers, set up some mechanisms for periodically getting the impact from employers, using some of the methods that we referenced earlier, like the Brinkerhoff Success Case Method, to get qualitative feedback in a way that helps to inform your decisions going forward. There are methods that may not be as precise as having a spreadsheet with revenue and cost figures in it, but you can get at data that does point directionally to whether your learning is having impact or not.

Practical Ways to Think About Measuring Impact

Celisa Steele: [00:13:24] Let’s segue into some practical ways to think about measuring impact. We have mentioned some as we’ve been going along, but we can talk about a few ways. We said at the beginning that a lot of the learner perspective on impact is likely to come through self-reporting, and we think that is entirely legitimate. Part of what you want to try to get in those self-reports from learners is data around application. Are they taking anything that they learned and applying it in their daily, weekly, monthly job duties?

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:04] And what has the impact of that application been? You can ask the extent to which your learners feel like the learning that they are experiencing with you is helping them to advance in their careers. And this is qualitative. This is self-reporting again, but it’s very helpful to have a sense of whether it is helping them advance or not. And, from employers, are they considering participation in your educational activities and, related, any credentials that come out of those activities, are they considering those in hiring? Are they considering those in promoting? You want feedback over time that that is in fact happening out in the field or industry that you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:43] You want to be asking about application. You want to be asking about any changed behavior. You want to be asking about changes in confidence and also asking about the learner’s intent to continue learning with you—a net promoter score, whether or not you use that methodology. Will people come back? Will they continue to learn with you because they saw some impact?

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:08] You can do these through interviews. These are things that can also be factored into the evaluations that you’re running after learning experiences. We do simple things like ask people to rate the return on investment that they feel that they got out of a learning experience. Or you can ask them at the point of exiting an event, “Will you apply this?” or “How will you apply this in the coming weeks/months ahead?” to collect some data through standard forms that you’re probably already using for evaluations after a learning experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:42] We find that immediately after a learning experience, that type of surveying tends to happen fairly regularly and consistently across learning businesses. What is often not quite as consistently enshrined is more of a longitudinal approach. If you’re only asking immediately after an experience, you don’t necessarily have the ability to really see the impact because it may take a while for someone to begin to apply their new knowledge or skills, and you want to be able to see how that impact is accumulating over time. And so we would encourage you, if you’re not already, to be thinking about, are there moments where you can naturally follow up again? Maybe you do it immediately after the event, maybe three months out, six months out, a year out, where you’re trying to, again, ask some of those questions and see what changes. Is there even greater confidence six months out? Is there greater behavior change? Any of those types of things that you were asking about, is it shifting over time?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:47] A couple things here. You can prime for this. Make learners aware that this is going to happen so that they are aware of this and being somewhat conscious of what they’re doing with the learning experiences that you’ve provided them. The other thing is this is the type of thing that can be automated at this point. You can put into your e-mail system, possibly even within your learning management system, communication system, the triggers—whether it’s one month, three months, six months, whatever it is—to automatically send that out with standard questions that you’re going to ask of learners. You’ve got to get that set up and get it running.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:21] You can automate it. You can also take a more manual/human approach and reach out and do more of a one-on-one communication. We know that Todd Slater at NIGP: The Institute for Public Procurement is doing some of this longitudinal assessment of learning. Those are through e-mails and interactions coming from him. He feels like he gets a higher response rate sometimes because people see, “Oh, this is a particular individual really interested in my perspective.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:50] The fact is you should be doing both. You should be doing some more automated quantitative—or quantitative-ish—collection of data along with this much more manual qualitative approach. You can balance those out according to your resources and what’s practical for you to do. But, with all of it, you’re looking for those signals of application, of actual behavior change on the part of the learner, of changes in the confidence level of learners, and of their intent to continue engagement with you. Putting that plan in place and putting the mechanisms in place to follow through on the plan over time, you can collect significant impact data that, in the aggregate, is going to give you a strong picture of how much impact you are having on the individual learner; how much impact it might be having within the employers; how much impact it’s having for your learning business, which may be the most straightforward in some ways; and, while it may never be crystal clear, at least some indication of the impact you might be having on the broader field or industry you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:56] In all of these lines of questioning around impact, part of what you’re getting is that deeper picture of the learner and what matters to them, what matters to their employers. All of this can be part of relationship-building with the individual learners, with the employers and businesses that you serve. This genuine curiosity and this follow-up can convey your sincere interest, and that can help then for the learner/the employer to trust you more, for there to be more of a give-and-take relationship, and all of that can strengthen your business development opportunities because you’re going to have a lot of conversation, a lot of background to draw on when you’re talking with anyone.

How Impact Interacts with Reach and Revenue

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:45] This is the third element of our triumvirate of reach, revenue, and impact. We certainly need to talk about how this third element, impact, interacts with the other two.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:59] If you’re having strong impact, that’s going to fuel your ability to reach learners. It’s going to help with word of mouth. It’s going to help with spontaneous peer recommendations. It’s going to help with the social proof. It’s going to give you that organic visibility. It’s going to help with trust. If you have that impact, that’s really going to help ease the way to reaching more learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:25] Those are impact signals that draw people to you. If those signals are strong, if impact is strong, then your marketing is going to get much easier. You’re going to know much more about your market. You’re going to be more visible in your market. It’s going to be much easier to get people’s attention, so attention becomes easier to earn. Trust deepens significantly. Conversion becomes much easier. On the flip side, weak impact is going to increase your marketing friction. If that impact is not visible, if it’s not felt out there in the marketplace, you’re going to have to work harder to get people to you.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:02] In terms of impact and revenue, if we look at how those two fit together (we touched on this a little bit earlier in the episode), if you’re having strong impact, that is going to support your ability to bring in revenue because you’re going to have higher retention; you’re going to have repeat enrollments. If you have those institutional sales, those B2B relationships, the likelihood of that renewal will be stronger if you can show impact. And, if you’re showing impact, individuals are likely to be more willing to pay and maybe even to pay at a premium price because they can see the results, the impact of what coming and learning with you might mean.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:44] Weak impact can increase your churn. People come, but they don’t stay. They don’t keep coming back. It can increase price sensitivity. Basically, it can work against you from a revenue standpoint.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:56] This takes us back to what we started this three-part miniseries out with—that reach, revenue, and impact are very tightly intertwined. Because, if you have reach without impact, you might get that activity, you might get people there for that conference or course or whatever it is, but there’s not going to be any value there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:16] So you’re going to have a hard time getting them to come back. And that points to the next one—revenue without impact is fragility. It makes your revenue streams fragile because they show up that one time. The value is not there. They’re not coming back. They’re not spreading that good word of mouth to get others to you.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:37] Now, if you do have impact, if you are able to show results, but you’re not reaching all of the learners that you could or should be, then you’re going to be a best-kept secret because you’re delivering well, but not enough of the people that you could be serving are able to experience that impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:54] And then the final system-view aspect we’ll mention is impact without revenue—as too many organizations experience—is unsustainable. You have to have the revenue to fuel what you’re creating, what you’re delivering in terms of learning experiences in order to have that impact. If you don’t have both parts of that equation going, it’s going to be unsustainable.

Impact Data as Strategic Intelligence for a Learning Business

Celisa Steele: [00:23:22] We see impact data as strategic intelligence for your learning business. Because our view of learning businesses is that you’re much more than a course provider. You are working in an environment, an ecosystem that is made up of learning, trust, and value. When you have impact data, when you’ve been measuring impact, that provides you with strategic intelligence to make good decisions about what to offer, what not to offer, when to stop offering it, what to start—all of those myriad decisions that go into running a learning business. Impact data is going to help inform and help you make those decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:04] If you’re getting good data about the impact that you’re having, it’s going to help you improve your marketing messaging, getting the right message out there to reach people and convert them; it’s going to help you refine your products, your learning experiences; it’s going to help you prioritize what goes into your portfolio; and it’s going to help inform business development conversations, all of which keep feeding back into this cycle of being able to reach more of the right people, being able to generate the revenue that comes from connecting with and converting those people, and then ultimately having that impact that keeps the cycle going.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:40] You want to collect impact data, but you also want to make sure that you’re thinking about it not just as data—that you’re taking action based on what you’re learning about the impact, that you’re using that data to strengthen what you offer. And you can do that because you have an evidence-based view of the real-world impact of what you’re offering.

Reflection and Invitation

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:02] We’ll offer up some reflection questions here before we close out this episode, starting with this: Whose definition of impact are you using? Whose perspective does that definition prioritize, and is it right for your learning business?

Celisa Steele: [00:25:21] It gets back to the different perspectives that we talked about—the learner’s, the employers’, your learning business’s perspective, and that of the broader field, profession, or industry. Are you taking into account all of those perspectives on impact, or are you only prioritizing one or two of those views? And, if you are prioritizing a few of them, is it the “right” choice, or is it more of just that’s what you’re doing, but you haven’t necessarily been thoughtful about why you’re prioritizing that view of impact?

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:51] A related question in my mind is where is impact assumed rather than demonstrated in your learning business? You may be assuming you’re having a certain level of impact on the learners directly. Do you have evidence for that, or is that just an assumption? And, for these other perspectives we’re talking about—the employers, your business itself, the broader field or industry—to what extent are you just assuming that you’re achieving the impact that you want to? Or to what extent do you have some of that data we’ve been talking about that helps make the case for, yes, we really are having that impact?

Celisa Steele: [00:26:27] Because we are believers in the interrelatedness of reach, revenue, and impact, think about your approaches to reaching learners and to generating revenue, and what do those approaches reflect in terms of what you believe about impact? This point is around making sure that you are being thoughtful about reach, revenue, and impact and how they relate to one another.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:53] The proverbial bottom line on all of this is, when reach, revenue, and impact reinforce one another, learning businesses don’t just grow—they thrive.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:27:09] In this episode and two others, we’ve revisited reach, revenue, and impact as interdependent pillars of a learning business’s success.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:17] None of them stands alone, and each is strengthened when aligned with the others.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:29] If you found this episode or the three-episode miniseries helpful, please share with a colleague.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:36] Thanks again for listening, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast!

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

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Related Resources

• Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer
• Evidence-Based Evaluation with Rob Brinkerhoff and Daniela Schroeter
• Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Starting with Reach
• Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Continuing with Revenue
• Rethinking a Dangerous Art Form with Dr. Will Thalheimer
• Reach, Revenue, and Impact

The post Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Ending with Impact appeared first on Leading Learning.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb focus on revenue and why it—along with reach and impact—is fundamental to the success of any learning business.

If you’re unsure which offerings are truly pulling their weight, whether you’re leaving money on the table, or how to decide what to keep, cut, or redesign, this conversation can help. Celisa and Jeff explore why clarity about net revenue on a product-by-product basis is essential—not just for financial health but for strategic focus. Revenue data can reveal which offerings the market genuinely values, where your reach is strongest, and where impact is most likely being felt.

They also discuss how pricing, prioritization, and portfolio structure influence both performance and perception and why investing more intentionally in business development and relationship-building can unlock new growth opportunities.

If you want greater confidence in your revenue decisions and a clearer path to strengthening your learning portfolio, this episode offers practical strategic insight.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Learning businesses need to consistently perform on three fronts: reaching the right people, generating revenue to sustain their work, and demonstrating real impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] In our last episode, we began the process of revisiting reach, revenue, and impact, starting with reach. In this episode, we continue with revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:36] For learning businesses, even nonprofit ones, revenue is essential—without revenue, no learning business can do its fundamental work of helping individuals improve through education and learning, thereby benefiting society at large.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:49] Although we’re focusing on revenue in this episode, we can’t leave reach and impact completely out of the discussion. Without sufficient reach, revenue has a cap, and, without sufficient impact, revenue is unlikely to be sustainable.

Revenue Is Top of Mind

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:04] So maybe we should turn to why right now revenue is, we feel, clearly top of mind for organizations in the Leading Learning audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:15] One clear indicator is our annual survey data. We conducted a survey in the last quarter of 2025, and, in that data, increasing revenue was a top strategic goal—either the number one or number two strategic goal for the majority of respondents.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:35] Put together number one and number two, and more than half said that increasing revenue was their top strategic priority. And then we heard about related issues as well. Capacity constraints stood out in the data. Capacity is often tied to revenue—if there isn’t sufficient revenue, then you aren’t able to have the capacity. You can’t hire the people you need whether as staff, contractor, or consultant. The revenue just isn’t there to support it.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:04] If the revenue is not there, you also can’t necessarily invest in developing the staff that you do have. Another reason that we know that revenue is clearly top of mind is because of increased competition, and that increased competition is not only from learning providers. There are even more learning providers now than a decade ago, but there’s also the competition for attention and time. We talked about this a little bit in our last episode, the fact that you have to compete not just with other learning offerings but with everything that any individual has to get done. You have to compete for their attention and time if they’re going to come and learn with your organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:49] A big result of this is that many organizations are seeing their revenue flatline or even decrease as a result of the environment that they’re working in now. We’ve noted before, 2025 was the first year we heard seriously from CEOs, particularly of trade and professional associations, the question of whether they should be in the education business because they were finding revenue to be such a challenging issue for them.

Revenue Is Needed for Sustainability

Celisa Steele: [00:03:17] Clearly, top of mind is this need for revenue. We also want to say up front that this really is a need for revenue. Revenue is how learning businesses become and remain sustainable. This is not necessarily about being profit-hungry or greedy. This is about making sure that you are bringing in the revenue you need to do the good work that you’re doing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:42] That’s right. We’re not trying to be Gordon Gekko here (for those who are old enough to get that reference). Organizations in the learning business need to normalize revenue as mission-enabling, not mission-corrupting. That goes even for for-profit organizations. Presumably, any type of learning business is going to have an element of being mission-driven. “No margin, no mission” is the way this often gets stated.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:10] Revenue is what allows learning businesses to continue. We’ve talked about revenue as the lifeblood of learning businesses in other contexts. And, of course, revenue is also the avenue towards potentially scaling impact. If you’re really trying to improve the individuals in whatever field, profession, or domain you serve, and you’re doing good work, and you’re making them more effective in what they do, and you’re having an impact, then you want to have that revenue there to help you scale and help you take those good offerings out to even more people.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:45] Revenue is going to have that scale. It’s going to help you produce better learning and help you to have that broader reach (if you’re in an organization that does more than learning) in supporting other activities that are non-revenue- or less-revenue-generating—say, advocacy if you’re in an association.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:02] Erin Pressley of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) was on the podcast about a year ago, and she said, “I love to make money for my association.” She has embraced this idea that to bring in money, as a learning business, is really good because it enables NRECA to do more, to deliver on its mission. That view is one that can be very healthy and perhaps empowering and freeing for organizations to embrace—that you want to make money because it allows you to do more good.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:40] And that can be a culture shift. That’s something Erin talked about as well, shifting the culture within her organization. We hear that frequently. When we talk about revenue—we’ve already alluded to this with the competition question—there’s a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth around the amount of free that is out there. There are so many free offerings, and it can feel impossible to be a thriving, revenue-generating learning business when people can just go to YouTube or any number of other places and get free learning resources.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:14] This is a place where you have to accept reality—there are free offerings. You’re not going to change that. So acknowledge that, yes, you are competing with free. But free is not necessarily the enemy. Free can be potentially leveraged in your own learning business, and it can also help you potentially take a hard look at what you’re offering. If something that you’re offering is competing against free alternatives, and it’s not succeeding, then that tells you something. It means you need to either get rid of that offering, or you need to think about how you can add value to it so that it will be more appealing and be valued by learners compared to the free offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:59] We have a tool for thinking through that—as we have so many tools for so many things—the Product Value Profile. We’ve had full episodes on that before, and we’ll be sure to reference that in the show notes. But that enables you to take a methodical look at products in your portfolio and determine what is producing the value in those products that could be the reason that people are willing to pay for them. If you’re not seeing enough of those value factors in a product, then you need to do some work on getting those value factors into the product.

Numbers: The Foundation for Revenue Decisions

Celisa Steele: [00:07:32] A key part of revenue is knowing your numbers because that’s going to help you make a lot of decisions. It’s going to be a critical factor in many choices that you have to make if you’re grounded in an accurate view of what’s happening revenue-wise with your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:51] This gets from talking about revenue in the abstract to getting down to concrete, operational-level discipline. We see again and again—because we consult with so many organizations and have conversations with so many organizations—that they all know their gross revenue, but they may not truly know their net revenue, factoring in staff time and indirect costs that you have to have visibility into if you want to know how products in your portfolio are performing.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:24] If you don’t really know how they’re performing, that can be very dangerous because you might be continuing to invest in something that’s losing you money, for example. You need to get that clarity at the portfolio level of what’s working and what’s not. There’s the overall portfolio view, but we think it’s beneficial too to get down at that product-by-product level or certainly product-line-by-product-line level understanding of, “Which of these are making money for us? Which of these are losing money? Which of these are breaking even?” Because you need that clarity to then be able to better assess, “What does it potentially make sense to continue to offer, even though it’s only breaking even, or even if it’s potentially losing some money?” You need to have that clarity so that you can make informed decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:20] Because this isn’t to say that everything in your portfolio needs to be profitable, needs to be generating a net positive margin, but, to the extent that something isn’t, you need to be intentional. You need to be conscious of it in the first place. You need to know that’s the case. And then, if you are going to subsidize it, you need to be doing that intentionally and looking at the trade-offs that you’re weighing in keeping that product in your portfolio. We’ve talked about this a lot in the context of the Mission-Margin Matrix, which is something that is in our executive briefing on conversations we had with association CEOs. How do you weigh how something’s performing at the mission level and how something’s performing at the profitability level, the revenue level? Ideally, you want it to do both—you want any product to be both serving your mission and producing a significant margin. But there may be situations where it’s not producing the revenue you want, but it is serving the mission very well, and you’re going to consciously keep it in your portfolio for that reason.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:20] We’ll make sure in the show notes to link to that executive briefing that draws conclusions from and shares insights from conversations that we had with a range of association CEOs about the role that education and learning play in their businesses, and that Mission-Margin Matrix is included in that executive briefing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:39] Tied up in this is the idea that revenue is data. Negative revenue is not necessarily a failure; it’s a signal. It’s a piece of data, and you take that data and make it useful to have discussions and to make decisions about what you do with the products in your portfolio going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:58] That view of revenue numbers as data and not inherently good or bad can be valuable because there’s a lot of pressure sometimes to hit specific targets. And, yes, it would be great if you set and hit targets, but there’s also no benefit in hiding from the fact if you’re not hitting goals. Be aware of that, and then let that inform your decisions, and try to then dig into “Why aren’t we hitting our numbers? Is it about the product? Is it more about the promotion of the product?” and assess more specifically.

Pricing: A Fundamental Revenue Lever

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:36] As we considered this discussion about revenue, we realized that we probably could not have this discussion without also talking about pricing since pricing is a fundamental lever in the level of revenue that you’re going to be able to generate from your portfolio.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:52] There are different approaches to setting prices. You can look at what competitors are charging and peg your offerings to those prices. You can evaluate your cost—if you know what it really costs you to create a product—and then look at marking that up with a bit of margin on top of it. Back to an earlier point, do you really understand your costs, and are you factoring in things like staff time and other sunk costs that might be part of what that product costs? Both of those are approaches—the competitor approach and the cost-plus. But I’d say that our favorite approach to setting prices is value-based pricing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:36] You always have to be aware of what competitors are charging. You want to be making a margin over your cost. You don’t stop paying attention to those things. But, in every instance, you ought to be forming a very strong and evidence-based theory of what the value you are providing with any particular learning experience is and what that is worth to the learners who are receiving it. If you’re helping your learners in a significant way with the experiences that you’re delivering, if it’s helping them get a valuable credential, if it’s helping them prepare for a valuable career shift or job change, that should be captured in what you’re charging for that product.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:19] Once you embrace value-based pricing, there’s also the need then to make sure that the products in your portfolio tell a logical story when it comes to pricing. This is a place where we have another tool that can help with that: the Value Ramp. Again, we have an episode dedicated to that tool, so we’ll link to that in the show notes. It’s a simple curve, and the idea is that there is a relationship between price and value—the higher the price, the more value you should be delivering; the higher the price, the higher the value. There’s this very clear connection there. Now, it’s a ramp because we do also account for the idea of needing to create some momentum, and so there is a place even for free, or at least low-cost, on the Value Ramp.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:13] Yes, it’s an important point. The exercise you go through with the Value Ramp—and usually you’ll do this not just as a single person—is, if you have any sort of team within your learning business, look at that together, and plot out either your portfolio or a product line within the portfolio along that ramp. And, as you were saying, Celisa, are you telling a logical story? Are the things that you’re offering for free or very low cost providing lower value than the things that you’re putting towards the middle or the top of your curve, where presumably you’re delivering very, very high value. And hopefully you got something up at the top of that curve that is really valued by your audience. You plot things along the Value Ramp in a way that, even if you don’t show it (because you’ll rarely show this to your end users), when they look at your catalog, when they look at your portfolio on your Web site or wherever, they get a sense of a logical value story and a logical pricing story to go along with it.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:11] Another aspect of pricing is changing prices, specifically raising prices. That’s usually the direction that you, as a learning business, want to be moving prices—upward rather than downwards. But, for the most part, be intentional in periodically reviewing pricing and making sure that the pricing still reflects the value that you’re delivering. Very often, you’re going to need to be incremental, periodically raising prices rather than going a decade without any price increase and then potentially being in the position of needing to radically increase the price to make it continue to make sense economically for you to offer that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:51] Yes, at a very minimum, build in inflationary increase in your prices over time because your underlying costs are going to be increasing as a result of inflation. Oftentimes your LMS and other services are going to have those costs built into them. You need them built into your pricing as well.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:09] Another aspect of pricing is you have the individual products, then you have the portfolio, as described, perhaps, along your Value Ramp, if you do that work to plot it out. You have the products, and then the products within the context of the portfolio, and that needs to tell a logical story. But then there’s also pricing for things like bundles, packages, or subscriptions—thinking about not just discrete units, but are there ways that you can create attractive groupings of your offerings that help incentivize deeper use of your products by those learners that you serve?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:52] That points to making use of what’s typically called choice architecture around your pricing, around your products. Different members of your audience, your different segments in your audience, want to take advantage of/consume your products, your learning experiences in different ways at different times. How are you making deliberate design choices in display of those options to your users in a way that makes sense to them and that’s going to appeal to those different types of behaviors that you’re seeing in your audience? Some people are going to want to buy the subscription. Some people are going to want to buy things that are bundled up, that make sense bundled together. Some are just going to want to be able to buy one by one when they have the need.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:34] Some other things to think about as you’re thinking about pricing and how you present pricing are psychological levers that you can make use of. There’s the concept of reference pricing. We’ve all seen this out in the real world. This is where you see a higher original price, and then you see that crossed out with the lower price, the sale price there. I’m a bit of a sucker of this at the grocery store. I’ll scan the shelves, and, when I see the thing that’s on sale, I’ll at least tune into that. That can help to create a sense of urgency. It can also help to create this sense of “I’m getting a bargain; I’m getting a deal here.” Your standard early-bird pricing for our conference is an example of this kind of reference pricing because you’re going to show them what the full cost for that conference is, but you’re going to say, hey, you sign up now, you get the early-bird rate, and that’s $200 cheaper—or whatever it is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:31] That also relates to the concept of anchoring, that the first price a buyer sees is going to set a mental benchmark for them. Higher anchor prices can make even moderately priced offerings feel cheaper by comparison. We often talk about the concept of putting a magnet in your market, and this goes back to the Value Ramp idea. If you’ve got something very high-priced at the top of your Value Ramp—in the world of learning, that might be highly consultative, customized, on-site, you-can-add-features-to-it learning experience or designed for that particular learner or even an organization—put that up there at a very high price tag, and, well, suddenly your annual conference—conferences are getting more and more expensive—maybe doesn’t seem so expensive in comparison to that because you’ve got that anchor there.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:25] Clearly there are a lot of ins and outs to pricing. We’ve just touched on some of the psychological plays and levers that you can make use of, but there’s clearly a lot more out there—asymmetric dominance effect, for example. If you want to Google that phrase, feel free. But, again, be thinking the role pricing plays in revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:49] We’re just scratching the surface here. Pricing is a very, very rich area. We’ve written a lot about it. We’ve held Webinars on it. We’ve done conference sessions on it. It factors into almost all of our consulting work, where we look at how pricing is happening and do some surveying, assessment, running tools like the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter to help clients get a real grip on pricing. Probably the last word on it is we believe pricing is very strategic. It’s a strategic lever to pull, so you’ve got to understand it. Back to our overarching topic here, it’s obviously a huge driver of revenue. If you’re able to raise price even a little bit, if you’ve got a decent volume going with what you’re offering, your gross revenue is going to go up, and your net revenue is going to go up.

Targets, Not Only Historical Data

Celisa Steele: [00:20:37] We’ve been talking about numbers and making sure that you’re clear on things like your net revenue and not just gross revenue, making sure that you understand which specific products are contributing strongly to your bottom line and which perhaps are a bit of a drag on your bottom line. We’ve talked about pricing. All of those are numbers. And a lot of what you’re doing, in what we’ve been talking about, is looking at what you’ve done—it’s a backward-facing, historical look at what you’ve done. That’s important because we do believe those numbers are essential to helping make informed decisions. But we don’t think looking back is enough.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:19] You want to look back as sort of a launchpad for looking forward, and go back to what we were saying earlier about discipline and looking at how products or product lines are performing. Once you’ve got a good view of what they’re generating with revenue, then you can also look at, if you’re in the learning world, enrollments and registrations. How many people are you bringing to those products? For example, an exercise to go through (we did this with a client recently) is to look at what are your enrollments on some of your key learning products, and then to be thoughtful about what should they be? If we were really performing at the level that we’d feel, for good reason, based on data, should be achievable in our market, what should we be hitting? Do a low end on that, and do a high end on that, and see how that compares to your current numbers. We did this with a client recently, where the numbers they were hitting were well below even the low end of what they thought they should be hitting, and they were a lot below the high end of what they could be hitting. And, just out of that set of products, they were leaving anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 a year on the table because they hadn’t been focused on and discipline about what those targets were and what levers they might then start pulling to actually hit those targets for each of those products.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:37] That is an interesting example because it is a use of data, and it’s a use of data to essentially form a hypothesis that you’re going then to test: “We think we should be able to hit these numbers, and we think, by pulling these levers, we will be able to hit these numbers.” So that does help you look forward. It helps you set some of those realistic targets and test those hypotheses that you are developing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:03] Doing that can, for example, clarify your discussions with marketing, assuming you’ve got a separate marketing team you’re working with. It can also start to open up how you think about business model opportunities/possibilities—what patterns you’re seeing. If you’re looking at those enrollment numbers, you’re looking at what sells but also who buys. And it may not just be individuals who are buying; it may be businesses are buying, or it may be the same individual is buying multiple products across your catalog, and you’re seeing a lot of individuals doing that, so that might be pointing to a subscription model, for example. Really paying attention to the numbers can start to open that up for you.

Business Models

Celisa Steele: [00:23:46] When you’re looking at who’s buying, it could also be that, sure, it’s ten different people, but six of them are all from the same organization, which is then going to perhaps point you towards an institutional-level sale, a B2B-type relationship, where you’re approaching that organization and saying, “Hey, a lot of your learners are coming to us anyway. Let’s see if we can come up with a B2B approach that makes sense for us, for you, and for your learners.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:13] In doing that, you may find out that your marketing team needs to be doing something different in terms of how it’s positioning and communicating about your offerings, or you may need to be looking more seriously at direct sales roles, somebody who can pick up the phone and call people, maybe an inside salesperson or more general business development. We’re big fans of business development anyway because business development is not just about selling; it’s about building relationships, typically with employers and other large buyers and influencers in your marketplace. And, as you’re looking at where the revenue is coming from, you may see a clear path to we really need somebody thinking much more actively and doing much more on a day-to-day business around business development.

Business Development Brings Reach, Revenue, and Impact Together

Celisa Steele: [00:24:58] In our mind, business development can serve the role of bringing together reach, revenue, and impact. Often people think about revenue when it comes to business development, but, as you were just saying, Jeff, it’s about relationship building. It’s about listening to the market. It’s about doing those things that can help you then expand your reach and expand the impact that you’re able to have. And so that role of business development—if you aren’t in a well-heeled organization that is able to have a dedicated business development position—is going to need to be someone, the learning business leader, who plays that role essentially and is thinking about how reach, revenue, and impact fit together, thinking about those relationships, thinking about “How are we listening to the market, and how are we translating what we’re hearing into product ideas that will deliver value?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:52] This isn’t just a nice idea on our part. We consistently see some of the most successful learning businesses we work with doing this. The learning business leaders may have a business development person on their team or have access to one through their organization, but they are also very focused on business development. We mentioned Erin Pressley earlier. She does this. This is something she thinks about. David Upbin at the Mortgage Bankers Association, who’s been on multiple events and spoken to the Leading Learning audience many times, definitely does this in his role at the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:32] Revenue is deeply connected to a learning business’s reach and impact. Clarity on net revenue on a product-by-product basis can provide essential data to help inform decisions about what to continue to offer, what to retire, and what to revamp.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:46] Revenue numbers can also serve as a proxy for value perception—your top performers are likely offerings that are valued by the market and are likely the products that will have the most impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:57] Top revenue performers are also likely to be the ones where you’re reaching a large swathe of your audience.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:02] So learning businesses need to think—and periodically rethink—about how they price and prioritize offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:09] And they should consider investing more intentionally in the relationships and business development work that help connect learning to real needs in the market.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:18] If this conversation sparked ideas or raised questions, we hope you’ll keep exploring them and discuss them with your team.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:31] And, if you find the Leading Learning Podcast valuable, please consider sharing this episode with a colleague or co-worker who’s wrestling with revenue challenges.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:40] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d be grateful if you’d rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Reviews and ratings help the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

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Related Resources

• Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Starting with Reach
• Culture, Mindset, and Money with Erin Pressley
• Tool Talk: The Product Value Profile
• Tool Talk: The Value Ramp
• The Mission-Margin Matrix: A Framework for Strengthening Learning Portfolios
• Value-Based Pricing with Dr. Michael Tatonetti
• 3 Principles of Pricing
• Five Ways to Increase Your Education Revenue Right Now

The post Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Continuing with Revenue appeared first on Leading Learning.

Learning businesses rarely falter because they offer too little. More often, they struggle because their portfolios have grown in ways no one intentionally designed. Some offerings clearly advance the organization’s purpose. Others clearly generate revenue. Some do both. And some, if examined honestly, do neither.

For associations, the tension is often framed as mission versus money. For commercial learning providers, it may appear as impact versus profitability or brand promise versus short-term revenue. Whatever the language, the underlying challenge is the same: how to balance advancing your purpose and sustaining your organization financially.

Too often, this conversation happens informally—or not at all. Leaders rely on instinct, tradition, or isolated financial snapshots. Boards see high-level revenue numbers but lack visibility into which offerings truly pull their weight. Staff know some programs feel important and others feel profitable, but rarely is there a shared evaluation along both dimensions.

The Mission-Margin Matrix™ can help. It provides a way to evaluate your learning offerings along two essential dimensions: how strongly they contribute to your purpose and how sustainably they support your financial health. By making tradeoffs visible, the matrix turns fuzzy logic into a structured, strategic conversation and helps leaders focus limited resources where they matter most.

Introducing the Mission-Margin Matrix

The Mission-Margin Matrix is a strategic portfolio tool that helps learning businesses evaluate offerings based on two essential dimensions: contribution to mission and ability to generate sustainable net revenue.

While associations tend to use the language of mission, every learning business has a purpose—an articulated or implicit reason it exists. That purpose may be advancing a profession, improving workforce capability, preparing learners for certification or licensure, or supporting career progression in a defined field. The mission dimension of the matrix asks how strongly an offering contributes to that purpose.

The second dimension, margin, examines financial sustainability—not gross revenue but sustainable net revenue. After accounting for direct and indirect costs, staff time, marketing investment, and ongoing support, does this offering meaningfully contribute to the organization’s financial health?

These two dimensions create a four-quadrant view of a learning portfolio. Each offering can be placed somewhere on this matrix. In an ideal portfolio, every product would sit in the upper right quadrant. In reality, few portfolios are so tightly clustered.

The goal is not to idealize your portfolio but to understand it as it operates now. The Mission-Margin Matrix is a diagnostic tool that helps you visualize how your portfolio truly performs.

Before examining the four quadrants, let’s look more closely at the two dimensions themselves.

Understanding the Two Dimensions

Contribution to Mission

For associations, mission is usually explicit: advancing a profession, improving workforce capability, strengthening professional standards, or serving a defined community. For commercial learning businesses, the language may differ, but the underlying question remains the same: How strongly does this offering advance the organization’s core purpose?

Contribution to mission is not measured solely by enrollments or popularity. An offering may attract large numbers of learners yet contribute only marginally to long-term strategic goals. Conversely, a niche program may serve a smaller audience while playing a critical role in advancing the field or reinforcing professional standards.

Assessing mission contribution requires clarity about what the organization exists to accomplish. Without that clarity, strong financial performance can overshadow weak mission alignment, and important mission work can be undervalued if it does not generate sufficient revenue.

Sustainable Net Revenue

The second dimension focuses on financial contribution, but the relevant question is not simply whether an offering generates revenue. It is whether it generates sustainable net revenue.

That means accounting for direct and indirect costs, staff time, marketing investment, technology infrastructure, and ongoing support. An offering that appears profitable at first glance may look very different once full costs are considered. Likewise, an offering that currently operates at a loss may have a credible path to sustainability with adjustments to pricing, positioning, or cost structure.

Financial contribution is not about maximizing short-term profit. It is about ensuring that the portfolio supports the organization’s long-term health.

Judgment Is Required

Neither dimension is binary. Mission contribution and financial sustainability both exist on a spectrum. Even with financial data and clearly articulated strategic priorities, leaders must make informed judgments about how each offering truly performs on both dimensions.

Those judgments become far more valuable when shared.

The Four Quadrants

The Sweet Spot: High Mission, High Margin

The upper right quadrant represents offerings that strongly advance the organization’s purpose and generate sustainable net revenue. These are the offerings leaders hope to cultivate: programs that reinforce strategic priorities while contributing materially to financial health.

In many portfolios, flagship certifications, high-demand conferences, or well-established courses land here. They attract sufficient enrollment to cover full costs, generate surplus, and reinforce the organization’s credibility and mission.

Offerings in this quadrant deserve protection and continued investment. They can also serve as models. What makes them successful? Is it pricing strategy, positioning, market demand, delivery format, or alignment with core competencies? Understanding why these offerings thrive can inform the development or redesign of other products.

That said, even sweet-spot offerings should not be taken for granted. Markets evolve. Costs shift. Learner expectations change. Sustained success requires ongoing attention.

Offerings to Retire or Redesign: Low Mission, Low Margin

The lower left quadrant contains offerings that neither strongly advance the organization’s purpose nor generate sustainable net revenue.

In theory, decisions about this quadrant should be straightforward. In practice, they often are not.

Legacy programs, long-standing partnerships, or offerings launched under different strategic priorities can persist long after their relevance has faded. Enrollment may be modest. Financial contribution may be minimal or negative. Mission alignment may be tenuous.

The risk lies in allowing offerings in this quadrant to remain unexamined. When a product does not meaningfully contribute to mission and does not support financial health, the two rational options are redesign or retire. Redesign may involve clarifying audience, revising content, adjusting pricing, or rethinking delivery. If meaningful improvement is unlikely, retirement may be the more responsible choice.

Removing offerings from this quadrant is not about shrinking the portfolio. It is about creating capacity—freeing time, attention, and resources to invest where impact and sustainability are stronger.

Mission Subsidy: High Mission, Low Margin

The upper left quadrant includes offerings that strongly advance the organization’s purpose but do not generate sustainable net revenue. These programs may break even or operate at a loss.

Offerings in this quadrant can feel essential. They may serve strategically important audiences, address emerging issues, or reinforce the organization’s identity and credibility. Their mission value is often clear even if their financial contribution is limited.

The presence of mission-subsidy offerings is not inherently an issue. In many portfolios, stronger-performing offerings support ones that are mission-critical but less financially self-sustaining. The critical question is whether that subsidy is explicit and strategic.

Leaders should be able to articulate why an offering remains in this quadrant and what level of financial support is appropriate. In some cases, the subsidy may be time-bound, as newer offerings build awareness and scale. In others, the organization may decide that long-term subsidy is justified.

Even so, it is worth examining whether improvement is possible. Adjustments to pricing, delivery, partnerships, cost structure, or positioning may move an offering closer to sustainability even if it does not fully transition into the sweet spot.

Existential Subsidy: Low Mission, High Margin

The lower right quadrant includes offerings that generate strong net revenue but do not meaningfully advance the organization’s core purpose.

These products often emerge in response to market demand or revenue opportunity. They may serve adjacent audiences, cover topics outside the organization’s primary focus, or prioritize financial return over mission alignment.

These offerings are not necessarily problematic. In many portfolios, revenue-generating programs provide critical financial support that enables mission-critical work elsewhere. When managed intentionally, such offerings can strengthen overall sustainability.

The risk arises when financial success begins to distort strategic focus. If disproportionate attention, staffing, or brand identity shifts toward offerings that are only loosely aligned with mission, the organization may drift from its purpose.

Examine this quadrant carefully. Is the financial contribution worth the strategic tradeoff? Could the offering be better aligned with mission? Would divesting free up capacity for higher-impact work? In some cases, selling or licensing such programs may generate capital while allowing leadership and staff to refocus attention.

As with the mission subsidy quadrant, clarity and intentionality about what stays is essential.

How to Use the Mission-Margin Matrix

The Mission-Margin Matrix is most powerful when used as a social learning object and shared portfolio exercise rather than a tool used by a single individual.

Ideally, this exercise includes not only the education team but also representatives from finance, marketing, product development, and executive leadership. Each group brings a different perspective: financial data, market insight, mission priorities, operational realities. When those perspectives are surfaced together, placement becomes more accurate, and the conversation becomes more strategic. Involving board members in a later review can further strengthen alignment and transparency.

Start by listing your major offerings. (If you offer many products and feel you won’t lose important nuance, you may plot product lines rather than individual products.) Plot each offering on the matrix based on current performance, not aspiration. Again, the goal is diagnostic clarity.

If there is disagreement about where an offering fits, discuss enough to understand why. Perhaps you lack accurate or up-to-date financials. Perhaps there’s not shared clarity around strategic, mission-aligned priorities.

Once the portfolio is mapped, patterns often emerge:

• Clusters in one quadrant
• A concentration of legacy offerings in the lower left
• Heavy reliance on one or two revenue-generating programs
• Mission-critical initiatives that consistently require subsidy
• Few offerings in the sweet spot

These observations provide a foundation for strategic conversation.

• Portfolio review
  Are we allocating time and attention proportionally to impact and sustainability?
• Pricing strategy
  Could adjustments move mission-subsidy offerings closer to sustainability?
• Budget prioritization
  Where should we invest?
• Portfolio clarity
  Can we clearly articulate how each offering contributes to mission, margin, or both?
• Product lifecycle decisions
  Which offerings should be redesigned, scaled, or retired?

Importantly, the matrix does not prescribe uniformity. A healthy portfolio may include offerings in multiple quadrants. What matters is that their placement is intentional and understood.

When used in this way, the matrix becomes more than a diagram. It becomes a shared language for discussing tradeoffs, investments, and strategic focus.

Connecting Mission and Margin to Reach, Revenue, and Impact

The Mission-Margin Matrix clarifies how each offering contributes to purpose and sustainability and helps leaders assess the structural health of their portfolio—where offerings advance mission, generate margin, and require tradeoffs.

Seen through this broader lens, the matrix complements a focus on reach, revenue, and impact. Revenue and margin are closely related. Mission and impact overlap. Reach amplifies mission and margin.

An offering that strongly advances mission but reaches only a handful of learners delivers limited realized impact. An offering that generates healthy margin but serves a very small audience constrains its contribution to overall revenue. Growth in reach expands the influence of both mission and margin.

Together, these perspectives support more disciplined strategy. Leaders can pursue growth without sacrificing purpose. They can protect mission without ignoring sustainability. And they can make tradeoffs explicitly rather than reflexively.

Balancing mission and margin isn’t a one-time exercise. Portfolios evolve. Markets shift. Organizational priorities change. The value of the matrix lies not in a perfectly plotted diagram, but in the clarity and conversation it enables.

Used consistently, it becomes more than a tool. It becomes part of how you lead learning.

About the Author

Celisa Steele is a co-founder of Leading Learning and a co-founder and managing director of Tagoras, the company behind Leading Learning. Celisa has spent the last 25+ years working in the market for adult lifelong learning. She co-hosts the Leading Learning Podcast and co-authored the executive briefing “Where Mission and Margin Meet: How Association CEOs Think About Learning and Education,” where the Mission-Margin Matrix was first introduced.

The post The Mission-Margin Matrix: A Framework for Strengthening Learning Portfolios appeared first on Leading Learning.

Reach, revenue, and impact are familiar concepts to long-time listeners of the Leading Learning Podcast. But they’re often treated as separate challenges. In this episode, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb revisit these three pillars and explore why they need to be approached as a connected system rather than isolated priorities.

Drawing on recent research, client experience, and conversations with learning leaders, Celisa and Jeff discuss why earning attention has become harder, why revenue pressures are intensifying, and why impact remains difficult for many organizations to measure and articulate. They examine common missteps and highlight how clearer portfolio decisions, better use of data, and stronger business development practices can help learning businesses move forward.

If you’re thinking about how to grow reach, sustain revenue, and demonstrate meaningful impact—without treating them as competing goals—this episode offers a strategic lens.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Learning businesses need to consistently perform on three fronts: reaching the right people, generating revenue to sustain their work, and demonstrating real impact. None of those challenges are new—reach, revenue, and impact have, in fact, been central to how we think about learning businesses for a long time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:36] They have indeed. They’re even part of the Tagoras tagline. But, while reach, revenue, and impact are familiar concepts, they’re not always treated as connected—and that disconnect is where a lot of frustration shows up.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:49] Marketing feels harder than it used to, revenue goals feel more urgent, and impact is still challenging to measure in meaningful ways and for learning businesses to articulate clearly.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:03] In this episode, we want to start a process of taking a renewed look at reach, revenue, and impact and why learning businesses so often struggle with them, and how those struggles tend to reinforce one another. We’re going to break them down in detail, not just in this episode but in future episodes as well. But, today, we’ll tee up the concepts and start digging deeply into reach and its relationship to the others.

Why Revisit Reach, Revenue, and Impact Now?

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] Let’s reinforce why we think revisiting these themes of reach, revenue, and impact makes sense now. The main reason is that we see them as foundational. We see them as these pillars on which successful learning businesses are built.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:49] Yes, they’re in the Tagoras tagline for a reason. In fact, they were not the original Tagoras tagline. We came to use them as a tagline because we saw them being an issue so often. They are perennial challenges. When we step back and try to name what it is we see learning businesses wrestle with again and again, year over year, it’s reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:13] These are not trends. These are, as you said, perennial challenges. That’s why we want to revisit them. They’re also especially top of mind because of some recent data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:26] That’s right. This is clearly stuff that people are continuing to think about. In our 2026 strategic outlook survey data, revenue was a top strategic goal—more than half of respondents indicated that increasing revenue was either their number one strategic goal or their number two strategic goal.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:46] In that same survey data, we also saw support for the idea that capacity is often constrained, that often learning businesses feel like they don’t have enough resources to do what they need or want to do, and that capacity constraints exist, especially around marketing and not having enough marketing resources, which ties very directly to the reach pillar.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:11] We saw it some in the survey data, but we continually see this in working with clients and in our conversations with organizations: a weakness in measuring and, just as importantly, articulating and communicating the impact that’s being made by the learning experiences that organizations are offering.

The Interdependence of Reach, Revenue, and Impact

Celisa Steele: [00:03:33] Part of why we want to bring reach, revenue, and impact up again is because we’re hearing about each of them, but we want to bring them up together because, not only are these perennial challenges, they are perennial interrelated challenges. We don’t think that you can meaningfully address any one of these without also addressing the other two.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:56] That said, we do think it’s well worthwhile to go deep on each one of them and make sure you fully understand each of these pillars as we then start to draw the connections between them and how they function as a system and how learning businesses should approach their markets.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:15] We’re going to dig in deeply on reach in the remainder of this episode. But, again, keep in mind that everything we’re saying about reach has to be put into the frame with revenue and impact as well. We will revisit revenue and impact in a future episode.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:32] And we’ll probably keep repeating that throughout this episode anyway—we’ll sound like a broken record. You will not forget that these concepts are interrelated, we promise.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:40] Maybe we should briefly recap what we mean by these words: reach, revenue, and impact. We throw them around a lot. There is a lot that is immediately understandable in them, but they also benefit from a little bit more explaining. Reach is about being able to connect with the right learners. And by “right,” we mean not necessarily all possible learners—we mean having a certain clarity around who it is that can benefit from what you have to offer, who is it that you are trying to reach, and then how can you manage to connect with them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:20] Revenue is one result of that. If you’re able to connect the right learners with the right offerings and charge appropriately, you are going to generate revenue. For most organizations, you’re going to want that to be net positive revenue, even if you’re a nonprofit, because you want your business to be sustainable. You want to be able to invest back into the business and/or, if you’re part of a larger organization like an association, for example, to invest back into other parts of the business.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:47] Reaching those right learners also speaks to your ability to have the impact that you desire. You may have a stellar course or conference or whatever experience it is that you’re marketing to that learner, but, if they’re not really the right learner, then they may not see that impact. They may not be able to improve in the way that you’re hoping for. So, again, reach, revenue, and impact are tightly interrelated.

The Scarcest Resource: Attention

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:13] Now let’s dive in more deeply with reach, the first one we always name, and talk about some of the challenges that we see around reach right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:26] For us, the key issue right now is attention.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:31] This isn’t just true for learning businesses; this is true in the world in general. Right now attention is one of our scarcest resources. We have so many demands on our attention. There are people who want to push information at us, people who want to extract data from us and be able to use that data in various ways. It can be difficult to navigate. It’s become true that the competition for learning businesses is very often other learning providers. But often they’re not the main competition. It’s everything else that’s competing for your learners’ attention, which is going to influence whether they’re even going to decide that they want to learn anything with you. They have too many other demands on their time and attention, and you may never be able to get them to engage with your learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:25] This competition for attention has ratcheted up increasingly over recent years. It gets to why reach can feel harder today because some of the things that worked successfully for learning businesses even five years ago, certainly a decade ago, aren’t as effective anymore. You take something like e-mail marketing that used to be pretty effective, pretty reliable, and now we have…. My inbox has become more and more stuffed. And so what used to work is maybe not working as well because of all those competing demands for attention that we all face.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:09] You think about it, and five, ten years ago, doing Webinars for lead generation was standard stuff. Putting up a lead magnet for somebody to sign up for and then downloading, standard stuff. Obviously, people still do that, but none of that works anywhere near as well as it used to because everybody and their mother has a lead magnet these days. That said, attention is still your top-of-the-funnel territory. You have to get attention if you want anything to happen, so you can’t ignore it.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:34] Because attention is what can lead to interest. This is getting into the AIDA model that we’ve talked about before. So you have attention (A), interest (I). D is desire—do they want what you’re offering? And then A—hopefully you get to action. Are they going to register for that course? Are they going to download the research report that you have, whatever it is? But, if you don’t have that first A (attention), you can’t hope to move them through and get them to the point of action.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:10] You need that first A before you’ll get that fourth A. We’ll talk about conversion some here in a little bit as well, but, as far as attention goes, the major prerequisite for attention at this point is trust. We hear this a lot: “You’ve got to build trust. You’ve got to be trusted. You’ve got to be the authority in your niche.” It’s true. Trust is the currency that allows attention to happen at all. So you have to step back, as any sort of business and certainly as a learning business, and think about “Are we building the trust that’s going to earn us the attention of the learners who we want to serve?”

Celisa Steele: [00:09:47] You could get lucky with a super clever subject line or something like that. Maybe you get someone’s attention for a split second.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:57] There’s so much cynicism around that stuff now.

Trust: A Prerequisite for Attention

Celisa Steele: [00:09:59] But, if you don’t have something that’s trustworthy, once they do tune in and decide to pay attention, then, boy, you’ve just squandered a lot there. What you need to make sure is that you do have trust when you’re communicating. And to have that trust, you’ve got to think about, like you’re saying, Jeff, what do people want to listen to us on? Why should they listen to us on particular topics? Where do we have deep expertise or authority? Make sure that you’re communicating that and that knowledge, expertise, and credibility underlie how you’re communicating.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:34] It’s a long-term project. It takes commitment. It takes intentionality. It takes persistence and investment. You’ve got to be willing to put in the time to build trust. It may take 472 podcast episodes to build trust with somebody for all we know.

Credibility Capital and Respect

Celisa Steele: [00:10:51] And so this idea of trust, the importance of trust, we coined a term in the report that we put out that goes along with some of that survey data we were quoting at the beginning: Credibility Capital^TM. These are the assets that you have that establish your trust.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:12] It’s a nice little turn of phrase, Credibility Capital. Every organization has this in one way or another. It is your value proposition, your unique selling proposition. For learning businesses, you may have standards; you may have credentials. If you’re, say, a membership organization of some sort, possibly it’s your ability to convene the right people at the right time and make things happen or your advocacy capabilities. These are all part of your Credibility Capital. Again, there’s a degree of consciousness and intentionality—recognizing, identifying the things that are your Credibility Capital and aligning your learning offerings tightly with those. Because that’s where you’re going to stand out in the marketplace. That’s where you’re going to have trust. That’s where you’re going to have authority and have the best chance of standing out and connecting with your prospective learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:13] As part of trust—because we keep talking about trust here—part of that is having respect for the audiences that you are interacting with or hoping to interact with. And personalization is a big part of how you show respect. Don’t send the e-mail about a particular course to everyone in your database. You need to be aware of which people in the database could benefit from it and are at the appropriate level to take that course. You need to be thinking about that, doing the due diligence on your part to make sure that you understand who you’re communicating with so that, when they do open that e-mail—if they do trust your name enough in their inbox to see it and open it—it’s going to resonate with them. Because, if you manage to get them to open it, and we’ve got such limited attention, and it doesn’t speak to them, and it doesn’t say something of value, again, just a big opportunity squandered there.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:17] That’s a nice perspective on personalization. Because we tend to think of personalization from the standpoint of getting the right stuff in front of somebody, which it is. You want to do that. That’s part of what you’re using the data for. But you are also using that data as an engine of respect, as you’re indicating, and making somebody feel like, in their interactions with you, you have their best interest in mind, and you’re showing up with the things that are really meaningful to them.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:47] And too, with Credibility Capital, with establishing trust and being respectful, don’t think purely about your formal education offerings and your course catalog alone.

Rethinking the Learning Portfolio

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:06] This is an interesting aspect of reach that we haven’t talked about enough. We’ve talked about it some in places. In my mind, it comes down to the distinction we’ve made before between learning and education—there is a difference between them. Education tends to be the formalized, structured experience. It tends to be represented by the types of products that go into a catalog and requires people who are going to design and develop and produce and market and sell. When we talk about being in the learning business, a lot of times that’s where people’s minds go immediately—to the catalog and to the learning products that you’re going to sell. Of course, that’s a small slice of how learning actually happens. Most learning isn’t formal. It’s in the relationships we build, the conversations we have, the volunteer opportunities we take, and just the…

Celisa Steele: [00:15:00] The podcasts we listen to.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:01] The podcasts that we listen to. There are just so many ways that we’re learning, in any given moment, in any given day. Those are opportunities to reach our audiences and to serve our audiences. They may or may not be monetizable—or at least immediately and directly monetizable—but they are the path to building trust. They are the path to representing the value that we want to represent to the audiences that we serve. A lot of learning businesses—in my mind, this applies particularly to, say, membership organizations that are trying to serve an identified base of members—need to step back and think about what are those informal opportunities that are represented by learning. Are we paying enough attention to those? Or is everything we’re doing focused on the catalog concept? Because, if you’re only focused on the catalog, then you’re probably being too transactional. You’re not really thinking about the longer-term, more nuanced relationship that you need to build with your audience to have the trust, to get the attention, to be able to fulfill the reach that you need to as a learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:09] Silos can come into play here. If you happen to be in an association learning business where events happen under one umbrella and courses happen under another and then publications under yet another, it can be very segmented.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:27] You stop seeing the connections between them.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:29] You’ll have organizations where you’ll have a chief content officer. And, if you broadly think about all that content that you have, all that Credibility Capital that you have, which is almost always has the possibility for learning built into it because that capital is about knowledge and expertise. There may be some organizational hurdles that have to be addressed in order to think the right way about reach in your organization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:06] We see increasingly that it does help to have somebody who has that kind of high-level responsibility and accountability for looking across the knowledge assets, the whole portfolio of experiences that an organization can provide. Shout out to Todd Slater at NIGP, the chief content officer there. He thinks about things that way. They’ve got their formal education portfolio, but the events, the publications, all of their interactions with their membership base and their prospective audience, he’s attuned to all of that and where learning is happening all along the way. It’s important to have that sort of perspective, that person. It’s also a governance issue too, though. We see this more and more as we’re going into organizations. We’re having to pull together representatives from disparate committees or parts of the organization that aren’t connecting the dots in the way they need to be for the organization to be delivering the learning value that it needs to that is only partially represented by a catalog, per se. But that requires everybody thinking more systemically, more about an ecosystem, and less about just a catalog.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:12] We’re talking about reach. We’ve gotten into this idea of some silos and some divisions and mental blocks that might need to come down. There is a marketing aspect to this too. For us, there’s always been a really interesting connection between learning and content marketing because content marketing is fundamentally about providing something that essentially helps whoever’s receiving that content marketing. So they’re beginning to learn something. They’re beginning to see some value there. And, again, thinking about even the content marketing as a learning opportunity—I’m not sure enough organizations do that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:53] No, and they’re not really connecting the dots from what they might do in terms of providing marketing content into, say, that catalog finally. Eventually, you do want to get people to that catalog or to that event because that’s where you’re going to be able to monetize, but you have to be thinking broadly about that. And, by the way, there’s AI out there now. The way that we’re now seeing individual learners engage with knowledge, content, and learning experiences, they’re going to be doing it more through a chat interface than through a course in many instances. We’re already seeing a lot of organizations think about that in terms of setting up the chat-type interfaces, the AI interfaces, into their knowledge and learning base. And making some of that public, so it essentially is a marketing mechanism while you’re empowering and enabling people to learn from your Credibility Capital—to go back to that term—but then eventually reaching a point where there is a paywall, that you do have to pay something to get to the rest of it, whether that’s becoming a member, a subscriber, or whatever the case might be.

Conversion Is the Goal

Celisa Steele: [00:19:55] That’s a very natural segue into the next point. We started off by saying that attention is the fundamental issue with reach in many learning businesses. You’ve got to get that attention if you’re going to hope to have success with your reach. But you can’t stop with the attention alone. You do ultimately have to get to a conversion of some sort, to the action, if we go back to the AIDA model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:20] Yes, getting from that first A to that fourth A and providing that value along the way, whether that’s in the AI interface, the mini course, or whatever it is (however you’re engaging learners), where you are developing that interest in what you have to offer, you’re developing that desire, and ultimately getting them to that point of conversion.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:41] And that’s usually where revenue…

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:43] That’s where revenue comes in.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:44] Comes in. Back to the monetization part of this. Also it sets you up for the potential for impact. Because now you have a learner who’s signed on to engage in a particular learning opportunity, which is then hopefully going to lead to that impact that you want to have.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:05] And the impact is going to factor into the conversion. We’re now at this point where you can’t separate these things because they play into each other. But you’re generally not going to convert somebody if they don’t understand, can’t see what the impact of paying you some money to go further is going to be. And that can take a lot of forms. Social proof is very valuable. Testimonials, case studies, examples of what others have gotten from engaging in your learning experiences. Those typically have to be there. We’ve talked about this concept of signaling before and how, with your education, you need to be signaling something out to the marketplace, which is typically that, if somebody participates in this learning experience, it’s going to lead to X. And you want the learner to see that. You typically want the learner’s employer to see that. But that signaling is all about communicating the impact that you’re claiming and having evidence to substantiate that a learner is going to get it if they do commit to whatever learning experience you’re putting in front of them.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:18] That’s all part of making that argument for investment of further attention and time. You’ve had to get enough attention and time to even get to this point of trying to get them to conversion. That impact signaling is going to be a big part of someone saying, “Okay, yes, I’m willing to spend more time, more money to engage in this specific offering because I see the value for me.” And, again, this gets back to that personalization piece—you’ve got to know who you’re talking to enough that that message lands and lands appropriately.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:52] We’re at the point where we’ve been talking about reach for close to 25 minutes.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:58] We could go longer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:58] We’re not proud or tired. If you know, you know—“Alice’s Restaurant” reference there. We could go on and on. But we’re already seeing that reach is so tightly connected to the other two concepts, revenue and impact, and so we’re going to come back and talk about those more deeply in the future, but we thought it was worth dedicating some substantial time to that first R today.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:23:31] Reach, revenue, and impact aren’t separate challenges for learning businesses—they’re deeply connected. And yet we focused today on reach. But we’ll be focusing on revenue and impact in the future, so stay tuned.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:45] You can find show notes, a transcript, and related resources at leadinglearning.com/episode472.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:52] And, if you find the Leading Learning Podcast valuable, please consider sharing this episode with a colleague or co-worker who’s wrestling with reach.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:01] Thanks for listening—and we’ll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• Reach, Revenue, and Impact
• The 4-Part Formula for Selling Education
• The Strategic Outlook for Learning Businesses 2026
• What’s Broken with Association Education Revenue? (article)
• The Strategic Outlook for Association Learning Businesses 2026 (report)
• Learning and Education

The post Revisiting Reach, Revenue, and Impact—Starting with Reach appeared first on Leading Learning.

Most learning businesses are rich in content, but far fewer are intentional about which pieces of content sparks collective learning,

In this episode, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele explore the concept of social learning objects: shared artifacts that anchor attention, create common language, and turn individual consumption into collective learning. Social learning objects can take many forms—frameworks, visuals, podcasts, standards, events—but what matters is that they’re generative rather than inert.

Jeff and Celisa discuss what makes a social learning object effective, why simplicity beats complexity, and how questions, visuals, and intentional design can dramatically increase learning impact. They also consider what social learning objects make possible for groups, communities, and learning businesses operating in increasingly uncertain environments.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] Most learning businesses are content-rich, turning out resources and courses with great regularity. But how much of that content actually sparks collective learning?

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:28] In today’s conversation, we want to dig into the concept of social learning objects: the shared artifacts that anchor attention, create common language, and turn individual consumption into collective learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:41] Those artifacts can be process diagrams, other visuals, frameworks, podcasts, even events. The key is that they’re generative rather than inert.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] Our thesis, for your consideration, is that being intentional about social learning objects can dramatically increase the impact of your learning offerings.

What Is a Social Learning Object?

Celisa Steele: [00:01:04] So let’s start by defining “social learning object” a bit more.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:09] In the early days of blogging, when people tended to talk a lot about social, and somebody picked up the idea that we were all focusing collectively, there was this idea of a social object. It might be a blog post. It might be a video. These days it might be a TikTok or whatever that everybody’s focusing on. I took that idea of social object way back then and translated it into the learning world.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:38] So you added the “learning,” the social learning object.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:42] That’s right. That was my incredible innovation. It seemed a pretty natural leap to make because, when you think about people learning, an individual learning is usually going to be focused on some form of content for that learning. Content in and of itself is not learning, but your interaction with that content is what creates learning. And then, if you think about groups, teams, organizations, societies…

Celisa Steele: [00:02:08] By society you’re thinking American society, French society, Swiss society, not professional societies like the Endocrine Society.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:17] I was using “society” broadly there, as in American society, but it also applies in the context of professional societies, trade associations, and membership bases. If there’s something common as a point of reference that meaningful discussion can be engaged in around, that becomes a focal point for learning. It becomes a social learning object.

Why Do Social Learning Objects Matter for Learning Businesses?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:41] I’ll attempt to be a little bit more succinct and define “social learning object” as any artifact that multiple learners engage with for the purpose of learning. That’s what it is, but why do social learning objects matter for learning businesses?

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:01] Because, as a learning business, you should be thinking about how to get intentional about the social learning objects that you’re using with your audiences. What are you putting out and using in your online community, in a classroom, or wherever and however you’re engaging with an audience?

Celisa Steele: [00:03:20] Let’s talk about some things that are social learning objects. To your point, Jeff, as a learning business, organizations should be thinking about what do we have that is a social learning object? What do we have that could become a social learning object? What social learning objects might we create? And the idea is that a social learning object is a special kind of content.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:46] A social learning object as an artifact is content. But it’s content that’s geared towards a purpose, and that purpose is to get people to focus on and interact with it. People’s interaction around the social learning object is most likely to be a discussion, whether that happens in person or online, synchronously or asynchronously. People are going to be making meaning from that object, applying it to their situation, coming up with ways in which that object is meaningful to their situation.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:20] Let’s get even more concrete. One of the reasons that we’re talking about social learning objects today is because we ourselves aim to create this type of content. It’s the kind of content we use in consulting engagements and/or put out into the world more broadly, through a published report, a blog post, or through a Webinar or event. One specific example that may be familiar to a lot of our listeners is the Value Ramp.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:49] The good old Value Ramp. We created that many, many years ago to visualize the correlation, the relationship between price and value. As value goes up, price should go up, logically speaking. And all the Value Ramp is is two axes with a curve. The curve goes from low on the lower left to high on the upper right, and you can plot offerings in your learning portfolio along that curve. But, a big part of the value of the Value Ramp is that it’s not terribly complex as a visual or a concept, which makes it possible to put it on a screen, a flipchart, or a whiteboard and gather others in your organization to think about your catalog, your portfolio and see where your offerings fit within this simple concept.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:38] That plotting allows you to see if you are—or aren’t—telling a logical value story with your portfolio. It allows you to see where maybe there are some gaps along the curve. It lets you have conversation to uncover potential disagreement about where a particular product belongs on the Value Ramp.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:59] It’s true that an individual, a single learning business leader or professional can use the Value Ramp on their own. And they should. But the real power, from our viewpoint, is that if you put it up—whether that’s in a virtual meeting or a physical meeting room—and if you look at it together and start having a conversation about what’s on that curve, what should be on that curve, what’s not there, what do you need to change about it, that starts to generate new thinking, different thinking, learning that leads to whatever change you might make around how your Value Ramp is configured. That’s just a single concrete example.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:44] I want to verbally highlight a word that you just used, Jeff. You said “generate.” Again, that generative nature of the content is what makes it a social learning object. A more recent example of a social learning object that we’ve put out is a two-by-two matrix that we’ve called the Mission-Margin Matrix, so you end up with four quadrants.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:06] This has two axes: mission and margin. And you have low to high performance along each axis, which gives you four quadrants. Again, if you can get people in a room thinking about what in your portfolio falls into each of these quadrants, that can spark meaningful conversation and debate. What should we be doing more or less of? Questions about “Are you sure that’s the quadrant where that product goes?” It can be very eye-opening to have people realize, “Wait—what? That product is losing that much money?” Those sorts of things.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:44] The simpler a social learning object is, the easier it is to use. Because, if you can just quickly draw those two axes in a curve or put up four quadrants, it doesn’t take that long to explain the social learning object. You can just take two or three minutes, people get it conceptually, and that means that you can get to discussion and meaning-making faster. You can segue into thinking about the application to your specific situation quickly, and that’s the real value of the social learning object. That said, you can have more complicated social learning objects. Our Learning Business Maturity Model is a slightly more complex social learning object.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:28] It is a bit more complex, but even it is easily explainable at a fundamental level, and people can get it pretty quickly. It’s five domains and four stages (so we’re away from that simpler two-by-two matrix structure), but, when people see it, they get the concept of maturity pretty quickly. They understand that there would be domains. They understand that there would be stages of progression. Then, yes, you need to go deeper to explain what it’s all about, but, at its base level, the Learning Business Maturity Model is readily grasped.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:05] But there are some social learning objects that truly are more complex. I’m thinking of things like standards or competency models that organizations create, for example. Those can be social learning objects, but they may require a higher level of communication. And I think the less explanation, the better. Now you can’t always simplify. Some things are complex, and you have to respect and recognize the complexity of the subject matter. But the main thing is to not overcomplicate it. When simplicity is possible, go with simplicity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:40] And, if more explanation is needed, then the learning business putting that social learning object out into the world has to be very intentional in thinking about how does that get communicated well so it becomes useful? Because what happens with so much content is it’s inert. So think about how do we make things as simple as we can and no more complicated than necessary? And then how do we think about what’s going to help people create connections?

Celisa Steele: [00:10:12] Basically, how do you make it generative? A lot of content that gets put out is not generative. It’s declarative. It’s inert.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:20] The danger in complexity is that, when something is very complex, it drives it towards being inert because nobody’s going to engage with something that’s really, really complex. There’s probably some sort of social learning object to be made around that—simplicity versus generativity in your social learning objects.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:38] Probably. Maybe we’ll create that social learning object at some point. But, for now, our point is, as a learning business, be intentional. When you’re creating, whether that’s a course or a conference or a publication or even an e-mail to your list of learners, really think about what’s the purpose of this? What is the learning potential of this? How do we make accessing that learning potential no more complicated than necessary? What can we do to boost the generativity of it?

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:10] If it’s a set of standards, maybe there’s a set of questions that go along with the standards. Or something that you have to develop training workshops around—obviously social learning objects can be the center of more formal types of educational activities. You want to recognize them as such and build that right scaffolding, that right structure around them if they happen to be that complex and that rich and that deep. But you want to be thinking is there something you release along with that social learning object that helps the learning to happen around it?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:46] I was thinking about the role of questions. Questions will often be key to social learning objects and how they get used because questions are naturally part of dialogue, and discussion is what social learning objects are meant to prompt. If you continue with that example of standards or a competency model, where you’re delineating a lot, it can feel very declarative and authoritative. “We know what’s what. Here’s the official, sanctioned way to think about this.” All of that can make that content feel closed off and inert. There’s not necessarily an invitation to interact with it. But, if that competency model or if the standards came with some questions that help you interact with the model or the standards and think about how they apply to you, then there is that invitation to engage, to generate some ideas, and to think about application.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:45] That makes me think about learning theory. You just used the term “declarative,” and much of what gets put out in terms of content is declarative. It ties to declarative knowledge. No higher-level learning happens when there is no generative component to it. If you’re dealing with things that people really do need to be able to learn, and that knowledge needs to be transferred, then there have to be the opportunities for application. There have to be opportunities for engagement with the content. You can think of the age-old Socratic method, which is usually engagement around a particular question or problem, and that’s then surrounded by a dialogue to help elicit the meaning of whatever that problem or question is in the circumstances in which it’s being raised.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:33] One of the benefits of the more discursive approach to learning is that the value of discourse goes up the more you’re in a VUCA environment—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. Many of the industries and professions that learning businesses are serving right now are dealing with uncertainty. They’re feeling unsettled. Things aren’t super clear. And so there’s a bit of a question around what can you still offer that is supportive of the kinds of discussions that need to happen, even if you can’t offer an answer? A social learning object can help.

Prior Knowledge and Shared Language

Celisa Steele: [00:14:16] I want to come back to the idea of a social learning object being succinct, and that it’s often visual. Social learning objects take the format of visuals a great deal of the time because, again, you can put it up on a slide, on a flipchart, and get people to understand it conceptually quickly, at a glance. There’s an invitation there for listeners to be thinking about what your learning business offers in terms of content. Where might you translate some of the key pieces of your intellectual property or core content into a process visual or diagram that helps convey a concept and helps to structure discussion?

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:00] A social learning object gives people that common point of reference that’s easy to access. A visual is one of the most obvious ways to do it. There’s a reason that your average consultant walks into the room and draws a four-quadrant matrix all the time—because that can easily illustrate a point and get dialogue going. But it doesn’t have to be a visual. It’s worth pointing out that we started the Leading Learning Podcast as a social learning object. It was a lead-up to the first face-to-face event we held many years ago—the Leading Learning Symposium—with the idea that we were going to have speakers who were going to be at that symposium, and we could do some pre-content. We were going to do some pre-content on the topics that we were going to be covering at the event, with the idea that attendees at the event would be able to listen to this beforehand and have a common point of reference, at least a small set of shared knowledge coming into the event.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:56] We were trying to level the playing field, or the learning field in this case. How successful that was, I don’t know—it’s been over a decade at this point. But it has led to this podcast continuing for many years.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:11] That’s right. You hear us say all the time, “Pass this on to your team. Listen to this with your team.” We get people who tell us that they have done just that. They have team members listen to a particular episode or parts of an episode and then have some dialogue around that, which is exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about a social learning object.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:33] And part of what we were trying to do with the podcast initially, in tying it to that event, was to help some with prior knowledge. We know, especially when we get into working with adults, that learners bring a significant amount of prior knowledge, differing levels of prior knowledge, differing levels of experience to a learning situation or, for that matter, any situation. And so there’s value in the social learning object providing some shared language and some shared concepts. That way, even if three people are bringing three different perspectives and three differing levels of fluency in a particular subject, if you put up that Mission-Margin Matrix or the Value Ramp, then whatever they know about portfolios, that social learning object is helping to frame the discussion. And that can be very powerful because otherwise sometimes you get a group together, and you say, “We’re going to talk about strategy,” or “We’re going to talk about portfolio makeup,” and everyone has a different way that they’re going to approach that. But a social learning object provides a frame that can help you focus together.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:37] Yes, a social learning object can change the dynamic. It changes the discussion in the room to introduce and then have something that can be a focal point, a common point of reference. Whether you’re talking about a customer base or you’re talking about a membership base, a lot of people who are listening and are representatives of the types of organizations that are in the Leading Learning audience, often you’re looking to build a sense of community. You’re looking to build a sense of cohesion and identity across an audience—or at least tap into that and help sustain that community in whatever profession or industry or whatever it is that you’re serving. And having these kinds of common points of reference is really helpful—I’ll argue essential—for that. If people don’t have enough or substantial enough points of reference, it can hinder their individual or smaller group learning, and then, across a broader body, the broader audience that you’re trying to serve, you don’t have enough commonality to really accomplish big things. So, if you want to lead learning in your profession or industry (which is what we talk about all the time), you have to have some baseline commonality to build around and to lead people forward from. The whole concept of a social learning object is incredibly important and central to this whole idea of leading learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:02] And we can take this out to a broader societal view as well. There are plenty of social critiques out there right now that say a lot of what’s happening in the United States is because we lack cohesion at this point.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:17] Right. We’re getting deep and philosophical now. We used to have a lot more commonalities societally, in these social objects that we were all focused on. Some of us can remember back to three TV channels and the evening news. People were focused on the same body of content and stories and had the same points of conversation. And now, today, the whole media landscape, the whole social object landscape is completely fragmented.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:44] There are obviously upsides to that surge in options. People can do what they want to do, you be you, all that sort of stuff. There’s a lot positive to that. But what goes along with that is that there’s not that same amount of social cohesion. There’s not the shared prior knowledge that people can bring to discussions. The result is that you end up with a lot of people talking past each other or getting angry at each other.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:10] So there are bigger, broader philosophical and societal implications to this whole concept we’re discussing. But bringing it back down to just serving a specific community or set of people, that’s much more manageable, and you can be intentional about this and focus on social objects that are going to be meaningful in terms of helping to generate learning and helping to generate change in whatever audience you’re serving.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:39] And one last point that I’ll call out is attention. We’ve talked about focus, we’ve talked about shared frames of reference, and those hint at attention, but I want to call out attention specifically.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:53] We try to reflect this in our gatherings and events. I feel like the best events I attend and the organizations I see that are most successful with gatherings are very intentional about how they’re focusing attention when they bring people together. Because a lot of this really is about focusing attention. Whether an event is organized around a concrete and actionable theme or there are actual artifacts that are the focus of the event, if you’ve got those there, and if you’re particularly focused on doing things like getting teams to events, if you can get teams from an organization to an event and have them focused around those same points of reference, those same social learning objects, your events can have an impact that ripples throughout the field and industry you’re serving and the organizations within that field or industry.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:21:52] Social learning objects don’t have to be elaborate or expensive. What matters is that they give people something shared to think with, talk about, and apply.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:03] And that requires intention. It means asking not just what content are we producing, but how are we focusing attention, and what kind of interactions are we inviting?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:15] Whether it’s a framework, a visual, a podcast episode, an event, the key question is always does this object generate learning?

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:24] If you can design more of your learning offerings to be generative rather than inert, you don’t just increase engagement—you increase the likelihood that real learning and real change actually happen.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:36] Be sure to visit leadinglearning.com/episode471 for show notes, a transcript, and options for subscribing to the podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:44] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share this episode or another with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:54] Treat it as a social learning object, and discuss it with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:57] Thanks again—and we’ll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• Associations as Architects of Learning
• Becoming a Learning-Centric Organization with Mike Moss
• Tool Talk: Social Learning Mixer

The post Social Learning Objects: From Content to Collective Learning appeared first on Leading Learning.

Many learning businesses know they need to innovate, but moving faster and experimenting can run headlong into culture and the fear of being wrong. This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast looks at why that happens and what to do about it.

Elizabeth Engel and Jamie Notter, co-authors of the white paper “Lean at Ten: Culture Eats Methodology for Lunch,” join co-host Celisa Steele to discuss the core elements of lean startup, the cultural patterns that can undermine using the methodology, and how pairing lean startup with design thinking can help organizations build empathy, surface assumptions, and learn more effectively.

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] Many learning businesses know they need to innovate, but moving faster and experimenting can run headlong into culture and the fear of being wrong. This episode looks at why that happens and what to do about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:29] The episode features my conversation with Elizabeth Engel and Jamie Notter, co-authors of the white paper “Lean at Ten: Culture Eats Methodology for Lunch.” Elizabeth is chief strategist at Spark Consulting, where she provides membership consulting and also helps associations with new product development using lean startup methodology. Jamie is a consultant, speaker, author, and self-proclaimed culture scientist.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:55] Elizabeth explains the core elements of lean startup and why this approach is especially well suited to resource-constrained organizations like associations.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:04] And Jamie speaks to the cultural patterns that can get in the way of effectively adopting the methodology.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:10] Elizabeth and Jamie also talk about pairing lean startup with design thinking, building empathy with learners, and taking practical steps to make organizations more agile and more willing to learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:22] If you’re trying to move faster or innovate without burning out your team, the conversation with Jamie and Elizabeth offers not just food but a feast for thought.

What Is Lean Startup Methodology, and How Can It Help Associations?

Celisa Steele: [00:01:38] I want to talk to you guys about “Lean at Ten: Culture Eats Methodology for Lunch,” the white paper that the two of you put out. That title refers to the lean startup methodology. I’m thinking that it would be great to have you explain briefly what that methodology is and why you think it can be helpful to associations. Elizabeth, I’m going to ask that of you.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:02:01] The methodology was developed by a guy named Eric Ries, and he had a background in Lean Six Sigma and also in startups. He had an epiphany that there was no point in working efficiently if you’re going the wrong way. Lean Six Sigma is all about process improvement, being efficient, and all that good stuff. But, if you’re going the wrong way, you just end up at the wrong destination faster. He wanted to stop this from happening as early in the process as possible. In any product development situation, he realized that you are making assumptions about certain things when you are thinking about developing something innovative, something new, for your audiences. You’re making an assumption about the audience, you’re making assumptions about whatever the problem is that you think that they have, and you’re making assumptions about what your solution might be for them, and any of those things could be off. What he did is he constructed a methodology to help you figure out if one of those things is off and course correct as quickly as you possibly can.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:03:05] There are a couple of key elements to the methodology, and they are called Lean Canvas. Basically, it’s a series of questions that helps you develop a one-page business plan that helps you surface your assumptions about audience problem and solution so that you can actually test them. How do you test them? That’s the core of the methodology. It’s the build-measure-learn cycle. The idea is you build something, then you measure what’s happening, and you learn from it. And the additional elements that help you do that—the thing that you’re building is an MVP. It’s a minimum viable product, which is a fancy way of saying a prototype. You’re basically trying to build something that approximates what your solution is with the absolute minimal investment of resources, broadly defined, that you can possibly do. Truly, it’s a beta. You are making a prototype. Then you are getting it in the hands of your audiences as quickly as possible—that’s the measure piece. And so, when you’re measuring what’s happening with your prototype, you’re not just asking people what they think; you’re giving them a call to action and asking them to do something and then seeing what happens. That requires you identify appropriate, useful, good metrics. That could be a whole podcast in and of itself—what are those things?

Elizabeth Engel: [00:04:39] There are tons of resources out there that can help you figure out what are metrics that actually matter to determine whether you’re going in the right direction on your audience problem and solution. And so the idea is you’ve got all this data, and you’re supposed to learn from it—that’s the third part of the cycle. And then what you’re doing with that data that you have, that learning that you gain from going through this cycle, is you’re making a decision to persevere (“We’re headed in the right direction; let’s keep going.”), to pivot (“We were not quite going the right way with regards to audience problem or solution, so we need to make some changes here.”), or kill it (“This whole idea is not going to work, and so let’s stop this, again, with a small investment of resources and move on.”). That whole small investment of resources thing that I keep mentioning is why I have felt, for the past 10 years or more, that lean startup methodology is so helpful for associations because people look at it, association execs might look at it and say, “Startup? I’m not a startup. Why are you pushing this on us?” And the answer is we have some things in common with startups, one of the most important being we have highly limited resources.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:05:54] Now, with startups, it’s all about your VC money and your runway, and that’s not our world. But associations tend to be resource-limited, and that’s not just money. It’s staff time and attention. It’s volunteer time and attention. It’s member time and attention. Because of that, we want to make sure that we are using those limited resources responsibly and in an efficient and effective way to try to help our members solve their biggest problems and achieve their most important goals. And that’s what lean startup methodology can do.

How Do You Define Culture, and What Cultural Patterns Derail the Use of the Lean Startup Methodology?

Celisa Steele: [00:06:30] Thank you for that explanation of the methodology and then for why you think it can help associations. Jamie, I have a question for you because it’s about culture, which I know is your area in particular. Part of what you argue in the white paper is that it’s culture that’s holding back many associations from being able to make use of lean startup methodology. First, will you define culture for us and how you think about that? Second, what are the cultural patterns in associations that tend to derail or undermine lean startup efforts?

Jamie Notter: [00:07:07] My definition of culture is pretty short. Culture is the collection of words, actions, thoughts, and stuff (sorry for the technical term) that clarify and reinforce what is truly valued in an organization. The culture in your organization is all about what’s valued because what’s valued drives behaviors. Whether you’ve paid attention to culture or had an all-on project to develop it or anywhere in between, you’ve got one. People know what’s valued, whether you told them or not. And sometimes you tell them what’s valued and then they say, “Yes, I know that’s what you’re saying, but that’s not really what’s valued.” People know what’s valued, and they know that through the words you use, how you describe your culture, what you talk about, through the behaviors, the actions, and, if the actions are different than the words, the actions win on that one. The behaviors are more important. Thoughts are about underlying assumptions, mental models, beliefs. Sometimes that stuff ends up driving behaviors in ways that are different than what you thought you would in your culture. And then stuff is just tangible aspects of work—the equipment you use, the way your office is designed, dress code, anything that’s not human. Those things also tell people what’s valued. That collection is a little complex, but it’s out there. That makes it clear what’s valued, and what’s valued drives behavior.

Jamie Notter: [00:08:25] For the second question, what we say is valued is not always what is valued, and what I have found around culture patterns is there are a lot of things inside organizations that everyone consistently says they want, like collaboration and transparency, and two that are relevant to lean startup, agility and innovation. We all want that, we say we want that, and we do value those things. Turns out there’s a competing commitment inside your culture that negates that value, or at least part of it. Innovation is the biggest one for lean startup. Elizabeth’s description of the lean startup methodology…this is not our first rodeo, by the way. We’ve done a bunch of podcasts. And that was the best, most succinct description so far, Elizabeth. I’ll give you an A+ on that one. It’s really clear—build, measure, learn. And prototyping requires engaging in what I call the practices of innovation, which is experimenting and sometimes being wrong and being okay to fail. Because, if all your experiments are right and they all succeed, you’re doing them wrong. You’re doing stuff you already know how to do. You’re not going to get innovation by doing stuff you already know. You need to be able to fail.

Jamie Notter: [00:09:39] There’s a commitment we have inside organizations, most cultures that says, “Look, I value innovation. I want to unlock new value. This is cool. Let’s do it—as long as nobody is ever wrong, as long as I don’t have to say I failed at something.” We value being right. We value being the smartest people in the room. We value providing right answers to our colleagues and helping move the ball forward. That’s a good thing to value, but, if you push too hard on that, it generates behaviors where people say, “Well, we can run an experiment, but I’m not going to tell anybody.” Or “We can run an experiment, but I’m only going to test a little tiny thing because I don’t want to have to go to the board and say ‘I did something, and it didn’t work.’” We’ve got this pattern where we value the concept but not the practice of innovation, which means we say we will be behind lean startup, and we will try it, and then no one does any experiments that are worth it, where you get the real learning. You do some experiments, but I probably could have told you that outcome without running that experiment. We make it small, and it doesn’t work.

Jamie Notter: [00:10:43] There are several patterns that impact that. Agility is one of them. We don’t fix things. We don’t stop things. That’s a challenge, I think, for doing this work. My original background is in the field of conflict resolution, so this is a bias of mine, but our inability to have difficult conversations makes doing lean startup really hard. And a lot of organizations have that. The number one correlation between the 64 things I measure in culture is managing change and managing conflict. If you can’t do your conflict, you’re going to have a tough time doing this change. It’s going to come out in the learning process, I think. You build, measure, and learn. What we learned was my original idea was right, but the customers were stupid, and we need to keep going forward. No one’s going to say, “No, we were wrong. This product is going to fail.” If you can’t have those real conversations, you dumb down the learning, and you end up doing the process but making not as good decisions and not getting as good results.

Of Four Culture Areas, Which Is Hardest for Associations?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:47] I heard you mention innovation practices. You mentioned difficult conversations. In the white paper, you mentioned four culture areas. Those are two of them. You also mentioned effective action and organizational clarity. Maybe I already know the answer based on what you’ve shared, but do you see that one of those tends to be the hardest for associations? Again, you already mentioned specifically innovation practices right at the outset. Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe you have another answer.

Jamie Notter: [00:12:11] Which is the hardest? All of them. These are ones where most organizations, not just associations, struggle. And the organizational clarity one contains the silo issue. Everybody is bad at silos. And silos are fine. You can have silos. What I don’t want are silos where I can’t see what’s going on across those lines, where I can’t step over the line and engage with someone. It’s like you should have fences between your silos, but they should be a foot and a half high. I know where the lanes are, but I can get across if I need it, and I can see what you’re working on. That piece, again, is across the board, but, from working on culture in associations, that is almost always something that they actively work on when they start a culture design initiative—the silo question. So that piece is big. The innovation piece is big. But I will say they are not unique to associations. They cut across. I work mostly in associations, but I have also worked in government and corporate, and we’ve got a lot of data from those other industries, and the data looks the same.

How Does Design Thinking Fit with the Learn Startup Methodology?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:18] Elizabeth, that one other thing that you all mentioned in the white paper is design thinking and how you feel like it can pair well with the lean startup methodology. Tell me a little bit about how those two approaches reinforce each other and why you’re seeing a place for both in associations.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:13:38] Design thinking is creative problem-solving that relies on human-centered approaches to innovation, and the concepts of design thinking parallel lean startup concepts really well. The two methodologies really complement each other. If you read the white paper that we’ll give you the information about a little bit later on and that Celisa mentioned at the top of the podcast, you’ll see that it was our National Council of Architectural Registration Board’s case study, they were the ones who really built design thinking heavily into their particular—and this will be important to think about later—iteration of how lean startup works. What they realized, in putting together their lean startup practice, is that empathy with your audiences, your members, your learners, your customers, etc., is the key. That’s the secret sauce to making this thing go. You want to develop a member-centric, customer-centric perspective so you can learn what their real and significant problems are, what their most important goals are. That allows you to focus on providing solutions for those things. To Jamie’s point that he raised earlier, this whole idea of “Oh, the customers were just dumb. My idea is great.” No, the customer is not wrong. You might be wrong, but that’s okay as long as you learn something from being wrong. And that development of empathy and an empathetic practice of learning about your audiences is what’s going to make this thing go.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:16] That emphasis on empathy and the member perspective, the learner perspective, the user perspective, whoever that is, is really important. And I feel like it can be hard to get the time and attention of members, learners, those users whose perspective is ultimately so important and that you really want. I would love any practical suggestions you have for how an organization can get the input it needs. Jamie, I’m going to throw this softball to you.

How Do You Get Time and Attention from Users?

Jamie Notter: [00:15:48] We say we don’t have the time to get the information from the users, the learners, whatever it is. In fact, we have all the time in the world to do that. We just choose to spend our time doing other stuff that’s not as valuable. One of my mantras in this conversation—and I’ve said this outside of lean startup stuff—is organizations run too lean. I don’t mean lean startup. I mean, we are doing more with less times 100 years, and we’ve created a system where we have no slack. We have no ability to do what we need to do. And it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the case studies that Maddie [Grant] and I wrote about in When Millennials Take Over is a software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m going to get this wrong, but they had a position in the organization—I think it rotated, so it wasn’t a permanent job description—but, on every project, someone was the customer anthropologist, and they went out and lived with them. It was like participant observation. If they were designing a wedding-planning Web site, someone went out there and planned a wedding with people who were planning weddings, talked to them about it, hung out with them, and went to the dress shops and did the stuff, and—this is the empathy stuff—learned their perspective deeply. And they managed to do that and be profitable.

Jamie Notter: [00:17:11] This is part of the agility piece because we’re not stopping things. We don’t stop things, and we don’t fix things, so we don’t have the bandwidth to do it. We need to get much more disciplined about what activities are generating value in our organization and stop doing the things that are not generating value. That’s a bigger-picture answer. I don’t know if it’s what you were looking for because you said “practical.” There’s nothing more practical than freeing up time by not doing things that are not providing value anymore. It is hard to do, though—I get it—because part of it’s cultural. Part of it’s just “We’ve always done it that way.” And part of it is, by doing certain things, you then generate the demand for those things, even though they’re not driving value. So it’s a tough conversation, but that’s where people should be focusing.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:00] You answered one side of the question—meaning if, in my association, we want to prioritize empathy with the people we serve, we need to put in the time and, like you’re saying, maybe stop doing something else so that we do have the time to do it. There’s the added layer too of, if you really want that member’s or prospective member’s input, that takes some time on their side, potentially depending on your instrument. How do you manage to make the case to the people that you want to build this product for? “We want to do it the best possible way, but we need your input.” And knowing that most people feel a lot of constraints and requests for their time and attention, how do you get them to engage and allow you, even once you do that work internally, to say, “Okay, this is important”? How do you get that external buy-in to say, “Okay, I’m going to participate and give you feedback,” whether that’s through a focus group, a survey, or whatever type of instrument you’re using?

Jamie Notter: [00:19:01] Elizabeth can probably say this better than me, but, for me, you’re not giving them a survey and a focus group and asking them what they want. You are delivering something that meets their need. You’re saying, “Hey, I’ve got something that is going to make your life better. It’s just an MVP.” (You wouldn’t say it like this.) “But it’s just an MVP. It’s just a prototype. But I want you to use it and have it make your life better.” That’s the incentive, I think, for someone to be involved. It’s like, “Hey, I actually get to get my job done faster because of this. I get to be happier at work because of this.” Whatever problem you’re solving, you deliver that in a small way, and they’re like, “You mean I get to use this, and it’s going to make my life better?” “Yes, I just need to have a conversation with you at some point about how it worked and what was great about it or bad about it.”

Elizabeth Engel: [00:19:54] And, yes, to add, the other piece of this is, “And, if it doesn’t make your life better, I need to know that. Tell me ’This did not make my life better.’ If it is making your life better, but it’s missing some stuff, I need to know that too.” One of the other things that people get freaked out about with this whole idea of giving somebody a prototype is, “My members are going to hate that. They’re not going to want to use something that’s not completely beautiful and perfect and fully functional and blah, blah, blah,” and sort of, yes, with a caveat. Some of your members do not want to be faced with a half-baked idea, a product that’s still in the process of being fleshed out, etc. Some of them can’t deal with that. But not all of them. And part of figuring out what your lean startup work is going to look like in your organization is figuring out who are my audience members that I go to them and say, “I’ve got a prototype. I want you to help me with this. Tell me what you think. What’s working? What’s not working? What’s missing? What did we put in that doesn’t need to be here?” They’re going to go, “That’s great. That’s exactly what I want to do.” You have to know who those people are.

Jamie Notter: [00:21:08] If you’ve got something that you’ve designed that you think is going to make their life better, and you’re testing that out, and nobody—including these people that you’ve identified that are the types that would dig this—has time to do it, then you’ve just learned you don’t got something here. You got to go back or pivot or whatever you’re going to do. So the “They don’t have time” thing is not an excuse because you can find people who like it, and, if they really don’t have time, it’s because they don’t like what you’re offering.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:21:39] And, in that particular instance, it’s very likely that although you may have identified a problem that they face, it is either not a real problem or not a significant problem. It’s not high enough up on their priority list. So, therefore, move on to solving something that’s a bigger deal for them.

How Does an Organization Behave Like a Lifelong Learner?

Celisa Steele: [00:22:02] Elizabeth, I know in this white paper—and you’ve made the argument before that associations, many of them through their education and training and other offerings, while they serve lifelong learners, need to act themselves organizationally as a lifelong learner. Talk a little bit about what that looks like. How does an organization start behaving more like a lifelong learner?

Elizabeth Engel: [00:22:23] The key underlying attitude change that you need is to, from top to bottom of your organization, develop a constant curiosity about your members and other audiences and their worlds and operating environments. Just task everyone with becoming a sponge for gathering information. You want to develop that deep interest in learning about what drives my members? Once you’ve got that piece going, everybody’s curious; everybody wants to know what’s driving your members. They’re all collecting information as often and frequently and in as many formats as they can. This gets back to Jamie’s thing about fences between your silos—they need to be really low fences. You want to be transparently and openly sharing that information internally, which means you can’t sit there and hoard data, like, “This is mine, and I’m not sharing it with anybody else because [reasons].” You’ve got to be willing to share data across those low fences and also across your hierarchies. Your frontline staff, customer service people, those who are interacting with your members, your learners, and your other audiences on a day-to-day basis get all kinds of insight that often doesn’t make its way up the chain. You need to create mechanisms for that to happen.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:23:47] The other thing that is useful—both to becoming a learning organization and your larger lean startup practice—is suspending your need for immediate certainty. You basically want to be extending your process, your time period in which you are asking questions, in which you are developing hypotheses, in which you are testing hypotheses. We don’t have to know the answer immediately. We just have to keep asking good questions. Here’s a short example of developing a learning practice. When I worked for the Children’s Hospital Association—which at the time was called NACRI—one of my areas of responsibility was running our corporate partnerships. We were doing all right with corporate partnerships when I came in, certainly making some money, but there was definitely potential there to make them happier and to bring in more money as a result.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:24:39] And so back to Jamie’s example of that person at that startup in Ann Arbor who was tasked with going out into the field—that’s exactly what I did. We had corporate partners all across the country, and, yes, I had to get approval to do this, and there was some investment of money, but the first year or so I was there I visited every single one of our corporate partners in their offices—wherever they were—to talk to them about “What are your goals with our audiences? What are you trying to achieve here? Where are the barriers that you’re finding? What opportunities do you see?” Etc. So curiosity—get out there, talk to them, pick up as much information as you possibly can, and then bring it back and share it, not just with our little team running corporate partnerships but with all of our program areas across the association. “Here’s what these people are looking for and what they are trying to achieve and what they want to do. How does this potentially fit with your program area?” Some program areas didn’t fit at all, but some program areas were like, “Oh, my god, we have a thing over here that we never thought about pitching to a corporate partner that could help them. It would help us.” Everybody benefits.

How Can an Organization Get Ready to Try the Lean Startup Methodology?

Celisa Steele: [00:25:56] If there’s an organization that doesn’t feel culturally ready to try out lean startup methodology, or maybe they’ve even toyed with it some and haven’t had a lot of success, what’s a small but meaningful step that that organization can take to try to get more culturally ready for something like lean startup?

Jamie Notter: [00:26:17] The first step is conversations with your people about what your culture is—what it really is, not what you want it to be, not what the ideal culture is, not, for the love of all things holy, your core values. You can do all that stuff, but that’s later. Because that has to come from where you are. So have a conversation. You could take a culture assessment and get real data and talk about it. That’s fine too, but that’s not a simple step. The simple step is getting around the table and saying on the key things (innovation, agility, transparency, collaboration), big topics, big concepts that everyone likes, “How do we do on those? How do we do that?” And ask yourself, “Where are we doing it well, and where are we not doing it well?” Nobody wants to have that conversation about where are we not doing it well in our culture. You just need to have it because it is what it is.

Jamie Notter: [00:27:10] And, if you start to have the conversation that says, “You know what? We love to share information, but we also like to control it,” to Elizabeth’s point a minute ago. “I’d feel so much better if I just have control of this information.” Why do we do that? You can talk about why you do it. It’s like, “Well, where could we let go of a little control?” Then conversation about what your culture is. And then try some stuff that would fix those parts that you think are holding you back. I use this example all the time: “Hey, how about, after our senior team meetings, we share the notes with everybody?” “Oh, no, I don’t know how people would use that. And there’s confidential things that happen.” “Don’t share the confidential stuff then. Just bullet points. Let everyone know.” “Okay, we’ll try it.” And then, when they do, they realize nobody cared. Because you talk about boring stuff in your leadership team meetings. “Okay, that actually makes me a little more relaxed.” These little behaviors start to loosen things up. And it’s an experiment.

Jamie Notter: [00:28:14] And I just Trojan-horsed a little bit of experimentation into your culture by having you experiment with your culture. But it loosens things up a little, and suddenly you’ve got people that are willing to say, “You know what, I don’t know that I can do a full lean startup on this, but I’m going to start changing the way we ask questions about our new product development in our meetings.” And so you can see some changes around the edges right away. Again, the more progress you get with that, then the more bold you’re going to get and say, “You know what? We really need to overhaul this piece of our culture around experimentation. Let’s get a team together and design a new way of doing things.” That’s the big culture-change stuff. You can get your way there through smaller changes that, as long as they keep working, will give you momentum.

Lessons Learned from Lean Startup Case Studies

Celisa Steele: [00:29:10] You guys include some case studies in the white paper, and I really appreciate that because that helps bring these concepts alive. Elizabeth, when you think about those case studies, what’s something that one of those associations that you highlighted did that listeners might consider doing or trying out in their own organization?

Elizabeth Engel: [00:29:30] I have a quick one from each of them. The National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians started by creating a shared definition of innovation, which is really important because we tend to talk about it a lot without always making sure that we all mean the same thing. And they started there. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, which I already mentioned, figured out how to adapt the methodology to their own culture and way of working. They were the ones who said, “We’ve got to bring in this whole design thinking/empathy piece.” You don’t just go to the store and buy the box of lean startup methodology and open it up and out pops this fully formed practice that you could run with. You have to make it your own. And the American Association of Veterinary State Boards invested time in training their team, including their board of directors, so that everybody understood what was happening. You probably noticed when we first kicked this off, and Celisa asked about what are the key components of the methodology, it’s a little jargon-y. If some of your folks develop facility with that, and some don’t, it’s like you’re not part of the secret society. Well, they made sure that it wasn’t a secret society. Everybody understood and knew what was going on. If you ever see me in person and want to talk about this, for your listeners, ask me about the minimum viable lemonade stand because it’s a fun story.

Jamie’s and Elizabeth’s Takeaways from the Conversation

Celisa Steele: [00:30:53] I love a little Easter egg in a podcast, so people can follow up with that. I really appreciate the fact that you guys put out the white paper, that you’ve made the time to come on the podcast and talk about it. There’s a lot more in the white paper. We will make sure to link to that in the show notes and encourage listeners to go and download that. But, as we’re beginning to wrap up, I would love to know from each of you if there’s one thing that you hope listeners take away from the conversation today. What is that? What would you have be that highlight for them? Jamie, do you want to go first?

Jamie Notter: [00:31:27] I’m just going to repeat the “understanding what your culture is” piece. Start that conversation. Stop being afraid of culture and thinking it’s too big and too hard. Just start having the conversation that says, “We’ve got a culture, and it’s driving behaviors here. What is it, and which behaviors are the ones that are getting in the way?” The sooner you start that conversation, the sooner you get to the other side, where you’ve got a place where everyone loves working there and where you can do lean startup. So I would start with changing your conversation about what your culture is.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:54] Elizabeth, how about you—what takeaway?

Elizabeth Engel: [00:31:56] I would say pick a project that’s completely under your control, experiment with the methodology, and then share the results widely, whether it is persevere, pivot, or kill. When people can see how the methodology works and see it working in their own organizations, they’ll want to try it themselves. If you read the AAVSB case study, that is very much what’s happened there because they’ve made this—back to Jamie’s part of this—part of their culture. It is now the case that anytime anybody comes up with an idea for something, they go to AAVSB’s chief innovation officer, Chrissy Bagby, and they’re like, “Hey, Chrissy, can we run this through the methodology?”

Jamie Notter: [00:32:34] I’m going to add on to that, though, because this is such an important point. We’ve talked about how your existing culture can prevent you from doing lean startup effectively. The converse or inverse—I don’t know what it is, but it’s one of those “verses”—is true. You can change your culture by running this process. This could be a culture play—in my language—where you say, “You know what? We need to be better at experimentation, so I want to run this process, and we’re going to see if it works.” It’s interesting that, if you consciously make it part of culture change…so many people are like, “Oh, well, it’s a culture change thing. Let’s try it out,” whereas you just went to the boss and said, “You need to do lean startup because it’s the best thing ever.” Like, “Oh, no, that’s too hard.” It also can open a window if you frame it as “We’re going to use this as a way to try and change our culture.”

Elizabeth’s and Jamie’s Approaches to Their Own Learning

Celisa Steele: [00:33:24] This is the Leading Learning Podcast, so we always like to ask guests who come on about their own learning practices and habits. I would love to hear from each of you about how you continue to grow and improve yourselves. Elizabeth, tell me a little bit about your approaches.

Elizabeth Engel: [00:33:40] That is the point of the whole white paper series. I’ve been doing these annual-ish white papers ever since I launched Spark 13 years ago, and that’s how I pick whatever the topic or focus of that year’s or year-ish’s white paper is going to be. What’s something associations need to be paying more attention to that I want to do a deep dive on and learn more about myself? Pick the topic. Do the research. Find the co-author. Make it so.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:08] Great. Jamie, how do you approach your own learning?

Jamie Notter: [00:34:12] Recently I’ve switched, as part of my deciding within the last year that I wanted to call myself a culture scientist. If I’m a scientist, I need to do research, and so it’s a little bit following Elizabeth’s model. But I now try and identify what my research question is. Once I have a research question, then I need to create a practitioner guide, based on the research, that I put out in the community, and people use it to do things and experiment with things and then report back their learning to me. I’ve done this before in my career, in different formats, but the key is creating a structure, like Elizabeth was talking about. I need a structure where I’m having questions that I want answered, and I need to go out and do it. I also read a book and think that’s interesting. We do this all the time, but, without the structure, it’s too slow, in my opinion. So having a structure of question, investigation, and next steps, I’m finding very, very useful.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:11] I like that both of you prioritize very active hands-on learning in your answers—rolling up your sleeves and doing something with whatever it is you want to learn more about. Do either of you have something else that you are hoping to have a chance to say that you haven’t yet had a chance to say in the conversation?

The Urgency for Change

Jamie Notter: [00:35:29] Both the culture work and the lean startup work are ultimately about speed. And I can’t say enough how much speed is needed in the association world. I’ve used this on some other stuff that Elizabeth and I have done. Quote from Justin Trudeau, former Canadian Prime Minister: “The pace of change has never been as fast as it is today, and it will never again be this slow.” That line is going in one direction. Honestly, with AI and everything else that’s going on, it’s getting steeper. I still hear associations saying, “Well, I’m going to go ahead and develop my five-year strategic plan.” “I’m going to go ahead and wait a while. “The board doesn’t meet until next August, so we’ll make that decision then.” I hear lots of “slow” in associations. It’s really imperative that we move to make these kinds of changes, to do these kinds of processes if we’re going to keep our heads above water. So I just want to add some urgency to it.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:37] We’re not done quite yet—stick around for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:36:40] Download (completely free, no sign-up required) the “Lean at Ten: Culture Eats Methodology for Lunch” white paper, plus visit Jamie Notter’s Web site and newsletter and Elizabeth Engel online at Spark Consulting.

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:57] If you got value from this episode, please share it with a colleague, or leave a rating and a review. Those actions help others find the Leading Learning Podcast and support the work we’re doing.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:08] One thing that stayed with me from the conversation was Elizabeth’s admonition to suspend the need for immediate clarity. Her invitation to linger with the questions and hypotheses rather than rushing to solutions feels both countercultural and exciting to me.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:25] Speaking of culture, I appreciated Jamie’s comment at the end that there’s an urgency to this work. There are real costs associated with not doing this work.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:35] It’s interesting to think about those two takeaways side by side. There’s a kind of surface-level disagreement—Elizabeth encouraging us to linger, and Jamie urging us to action. But at a deeper level their advice is 100-percent compatible.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:50] Definitely. Taking action should be predicated on the idea of what’s the right action or, at least, what’s an appropriate action to take, and determining that right or appropriate action usually involves asking good questions and developing and then testing hypotheses.

Celisa Steele: [00:38:08] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• “Lean at Ten: Culture Eats Methodology for Lunch” (white paper)
• Connecting Organizational Culture and Learning with Maddie Grant
• Responsible Consumption and Production of Research with Elizabeth Engel and Polly Karpowicz
• The New Education Paradigm with Shelly Alcorn and Elizabeth Engel

The post Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Culture with Elizabeth Engel and Jamie Notter appeared first on Leading Learning.

Strategy is about making choices—where to focus, what to invest in, and what to stop doing. Data can help bring clarity to those decisions, especially in a complex and competitive environment.

In this episode, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb share insights from a survey of learning businesses to help you think about strategy in 2026. They explore top strategic goals and drivers, key trends and challenges shaping learning businesses, and three themes that emerge from the data: the tension between mission and margin, alignment with credibility and areas of authority, and a growing confidence gap around achieving both strategic goals and revenue expectations.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] We all know that decision-making is part and parcel of what any organization has to do, and strategy is ultimately about decisions—what to do and what not to do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:27] And we believe that data can be helpful when setting strategy and when making decisions. That’s why we’ve annually surveyed learning businesses for the last several years, and it’s why we want to devote this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 469, to sharing data from our most recent survey to help you as you begin 2026.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:49] We think this is a useful set of data to help you have internal discussions and make some decisions about where to focus and invest. So let’s jump in.

Background: The Responses and the Report

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:59] The data we’re sharing is based on responses to an online survey we conducted in September and October of 2025. We received qualifying responses from 156 learning businesses. We also put out a report in December 2025 based on survey responses, so we encourage you to check that out.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:24] The report that you just mentioned, Jeff, draws specifically on the responses we received from association learning businesses. Of the 156 qualifying responses from learning businesses overall, 107 came from associations. Associations were the largest grouping of respondents. Other responses came from commercial training firms, charities, learning businesses embedded in academic institutions, and others.

Strategic Goals and Drivers

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:52] Let’s start by looking at the data around strategy. That’s where the survey started, and part of why we started the survey by asking about strategic goals and drivers is because we believe strategy should be driving what you do. We asked two questions about strategic goals. What’s your primary strategic goal for the year ahead? And what’s your secondary strategic goal for the year ahead?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:15] We offered seven predefined choices along with an “I don’t know” and a “something else” answer option, and then folks could fill that in. Respondents could choose one answer.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:28] For primary strategic goal, what was most selected by a pretty good margin was increasing revenue—29.5 percent.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:38] The second most popular response was strengthening alignment with workforce needs—21.8 percent of respondents selected that as their top strategic goal. That was about eight points lower than increasing revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:53] The next top responses were enhancing learner engagement. That just barely beat out growing enrollments and registrations, both at around 17 percent. Those were the top primary strategic goals that folks picked.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:09] All of the other options—we had seven predefined options—were selected by under 10 percent of respondents. And the four we just mentioned—increasing revenue, strengthening alignment with workforce needs, enhancing learner engagement, and growing enrollments—sum up the primary strategic goal for the majority of learning businesses responding to the survey.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:35] We also asked about secondary strategic goal. Same answer options as for the primary goal, and 22.6 percent selected increasing revenue as a secondary goal. When you put together those who chose increasing revenue as a secondary goal with those who chose it as the primary one, you get a majority of respondents saying revenue is a top strategic goal.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:59] Yes, that’s a clear takeaway from the data. Increasing revenue is front and center for learning businesses in 2026. Now, after asking about those primary and secondary strategic goals, we also asked about strategic drivers to get at what’s behind those goals and why learning businesses are focusing on those goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:22] For this question, respondents could pick all that apply from a list of eight named options plus a “something else” option. The top choice was a need to increase financial sustainability or profitability—63.6 percent chose that as a strategic driver. That pairs nicely and appropriately with the top goal of increasing revenue.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:46] The second most selected driver, chosen by 57.1 percent of respondents, was to be seen as setting the pace in the respondent’s field or industry.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:59] I was a little surprised last year to see this driver rank as highly as it did then, and it’s high again this year. I think this is because of the competitive pressures that organizations feel. It’s hard to stand out in the market for continuing education and professional development. If you’re not seen as somebody who’s setting the pace in your field or industry, it’s going to be hard to attract and convert those learners that are going to contribute to your financial sustainability and profitability.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:32] With your read of that setting-the-pace answer, then we can think about those top two strategic drivers as being existential questions. Can we bring in enough money to keep the lights on and to do what we need to do? And, if we’re not seen as setting the pace in our field or industry, how long can we remain relevant and continue to exist?

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:54] Indeed. This is particularly applicable to our association listeners. As an association, you want to be seen as that leader in your field or industry. It’s a brand thing. It’s not just related to education; it’s related to membership. Are people going to come and even join if you’re not seen as setting the pace?

Celisa Steele: [00:06:16] The third most popular strategic driver was support workforce development—56.5 percent of respondents chose that. Here again we see neat alignment with the strategic goals. The second most popular primary strategic goal choice was strengthening alignment with workforce needs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:37] This really was heartening for me. I feel like we’re finally starting to see a lot more visible focus on workforce development and tightly aligning educational offerings and credentialing with employer needs. Even if you’re selling primarily to individual customers or individual members, it’s often the employers who foot the bill for participation in education. So, if they don’t see the value in what you’re doing, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be selling to that individual. And, of course, we’re seeing more focus now on business-to-business (B2B) selling and going directly to the employer and saying, “Hey, use us.”

Celisa Steele: [00:07:14] Jeff, you’ve made the point before that the employer often still has to support the individual learner even if the learner is the one paying and footing that bill, not the employer. The learner may have to take time off work to be able to go to a conference, attend a seminar, or complete that online course. So, if an employer isn’t supportive or makes it hard to do that, then it makes it hard to sell even in that direct-to-consumer (B2C) situation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:43] The fourth most cited strategic driver is evolving learner demands—51.9 percent selected that. We were just talking about the importance of speaking to employers and their needs. This driver is about the learners’ needs.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:00] Individual learners now have many more choices than they did a decade ago, even half a decade ago. And they also tend to have a greater need for flexibility in terms of scheduling or in terms of formats. The pandemic got them used to doing things online. This strategic driver of evolving learner demand speaks to all of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:24] “Learner demand” is kind of a catch-all bucket. It’s the kind of thing that we often get called in for because organizations are struggling. They have this sense that demands are evolving, but what does that really mean? What do they need to offer? Do learners want microlearning? Do they want microcredentials? Do they want cohort-based learning? You’ve got to figure that out and be able to evolve as a learning business with those evolving learner demands.

Top Issues and Trends and AI

Celisa Steele: [00:08:54] After asking about strategic goals for 2026 and then the drivers behind those goals, we asked about eight trends and issues, how important those are for learning businesses in 2026, and how they’re informing their strategy. We used a five-point scale. For respondents who said that something was “critical,” we assigned that five points; “very important,” four points; down to “not important,” one point. That allowed us to get a weighted average. Here are the eight trends and issues: (1) artificial intelligence; (2) workforce and employer needs; (3) learner preferences for flexibility; (4) personalized learning; (5) increased competition; (6) growth in alternative credentialing, microcredentials, and digital badges; (7) virtual and/or hybrid events (things that are entirely or partially online); and (8) diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA).

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:59] Out of that list, number one was workforce and employer needs—3.77 weighted average in the responses. Learner preferences for flexibility had a 3.66 weighted average, and then providing more personalized learning experiences had a 3.58 weighted average. To me, those both go a long way towards the whole learner engagement issue. How are you going to be able to create content in a way that engages with learners and meets those evolving demands that we were just talking about?

Celisa Steele: [00:10:37] We asked about the same set of trends and issues in the survey that we did about a year before this one, and these are the same top three as the previous year. So these seem to be at the crux of what learning businesses are focusing on. Now, when I ran through that list of eight, you might remember that at the top was artificial intelligence, but AI is not on that list of top trends and issues that we just touched on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:04] No, it did not make the top three, though we are seeing in general that the AI dial has moved in some areas. Still, in my opinion, we’re lagging on how well we’re engaging with and using AI. Around 40 percent of respondents say that they’re having internal discussions about AI, but they don’t have a clear implementation plan. Another roughly 10 percent say they’re not even discussing AI currently. That’s half of the overall responding audience essentially doing nothing with AI at this point—or nothing substantive other than talking about it.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:42] We did see almost 20 percent of respondents say that they are in early stages of AI implementation, things like pilots. That’s significant—a fifth of respondents doing something. And then 16.7 percent say they’re using AI in some offerings, and 6.9 percent say they’re using it in most or all offerings. Both of those are up compared to last year.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:07] Yes, up a good bit percentagewise. That’s encouraging. Somewhat. But clearly there’s room for a lot more engagement with AI at this point.

Top Challenges to Maintaining or Growing Enrollments and Registrations

Celisa Steele: [00:12:18] We also asked about challenges around maintaining or growing enrollments and registrations. We heard very clearly that revenue is an issue and focus. If you’re a learning business, the way you’re going to grow or maintain revenue is through enrollments and registrations. So what are the things holding learning businesses back or the things that they’re worried about holding them back? Again we provided some predefined choices—eight of them—and then also a “none of these/something else” answer option. In this case, respondents could pick up to three options. We’ll touch on the top four challenges to maintaining or growing enrollments and registrations. All four of these were selected by over a third of the respondents.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:03] I’ll put these into two buckets. One is a capacity/structural bucket, and the other is a market bucket. Going in that capacity bucket, the top challenge identified was insufficient internal resources (staff or budget)—45.3 percent said that. The other challenge in that capacity bucket, which may be a subset of the first one, is limited marketing resources—39.3 percent said that.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:34] The other two challenges go in your market bucket, Jeff. Pricing challenges were also cited by 39.3 percent—the same number who cited limited marketing resources. This gets to that difficult question of how do you price yourself out there in a very competitive market? That’s clearly a question on respondents’ minds.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:56] And then the fourth challenge, also going in that market bucket, points to the very competitive market situation. Increased competition was the fourth challenge—35.3 percent of respondents indicated that. Existing in a competitive market, not quite knowing how to price, and with limited marketing resources and insufficient internal resources summarizes the challenges that organizations are seeing.

Top Areas of Investment

Celisa Steele: [00:14:23] We also asked a forward-looking question about where learning businesses plan to invest in 2026. Again we gave some predefined choices (ten), and folks could pick up to three. We’ll share the top four areas of planned investment.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:40] Number one was increasing learner engagement—41.1 percent said this. That dovetails well with the earlier focus on evolving learner demands.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:51] The second most popular area of planned investment is enhancing marketing and outreach efforts—35.2 percent said they’ll be investing there. We were just talking about limited marketing resources as a challenge, so this clearly responds to that. But I do think it’s worth noting that the marketing and outreach efforts option last year was a much more popular choice. This year, about 35 percent, as I just said; last year, almost 59 percent. Maybe we could do a little armchair analysis on what might be behind that drop.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:25] Yes, but it’s hard to say. It could be a glitch because these are non-statistical surveys. It could be because people spent marketing money last year, didn’t get the results they wanted, and so aren’t putting as much into it this year. Or maybe they’re not being given the budget to invest in it in 2026. But marketing and outreach may be tied in some ways to the next area of investment, which is increasing efforts to partner with other organizations—31.7 percent indicated that. The survey didn’t ask about what underlies that partnering or why they’re looking to partner, but I suspect that many organizations are partnering because they want to expand their reach and get to new customers that may be represented by the partner’s audience. Respondents may be looking to partnering as a way to expand reach rather than direct investment in what would typically be thought of as marketing and outreach efforts.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:27] The same number of respondents who chose partnering chose providing personalized learning experiences as a top area of investment—31.7 percent. This again speaks to the fact that learners have more and more options, and their needs and preferences are evolving. Their expectations for flexibility are changing. And that’s what personalized learning is all about—making sure that the learner is getting the right content in the right format at the right time.

Mission-Margin Matrix

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:57] Let’s turn to the first of three themes and takeaways from the data and our analysis of it. One of the themes has to do with mission and margin. This emerged out of interviews we did with 27 association CEOs about the role of learning and education.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:16] There’s often a tension—and sometimes actual confusion—about the role of education and learning in mission and margin when it comes to the products and services in the portfolio. This is particularly applicable for association learning businesses, but there are other learning businesses that are also mission-driven. If you’re a mission-driven organization of any type, then you’re going to have two dimensions along which you can assess products in your portfolio. One of those dimensions is the contribution to mission. How well does that product support what you’re trying to do and why you exist?

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:55] The other dimension is sustainable net revenue. Is that product profitable? Is it able to bring in a net margin consistently? This mission-margin question is an essential tension that often doesn’t get made as explicit as it needs to be when organizations are thinking about product decisions, how they’re going to invest, and what the challenges are. If you have products that aren’t generating much revenue and also aren’t contributing to your mission in a measurable way, then you really need those out of your portfolio. I know there are people listening that, if they’re honest with themselves, have those in their portfolios and know that they need to be gotten rid of.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:39] We encourage you to access the “Where Mission and Margin Meet” executive briefing that has a visual of this matrix that maps out these two dimensions that we’re talking about here. It’s a very simple tool, but it can help you plot where different products or product lines in your portfolio fit. Jeff, what you were just talking about there is the lower left quadrant, things that need to be retired or redesigned. That’s where the product has weak connection to mission and also weak revenue associated with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:13] But organizations probably also have some things in their portfolio that are solidly about mission but aren’t generating much revenue. Can you look at those and figure out how you might get them to generate a little bit more revenue if you apply some disciplined thinking? Possibly you’re in the position of having some things, on the other hand, that are generating quite a lot of revenue for you but don’t have that much to do with your mission. With those, you might want to ask if can we spin them off and get some cash that you can invest back into the products that are more aligned with mission?

Celisa Steele: [00:19:54] Of course, there are sweet-spot offerings—products that deliver on mission and generate strong net positive revenue.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:03] Most organizations are lucky if they’ve got, say, 20 percent of their portfolio in the upper right of the matrix, where that sweet spot is. Can you find more of those products? And, to the extent that you’ve got them, can you strengthen your investment in them and get more out of them?

Credibility Capital

Celisa Steele: [00:20:23] One way to potentially find more products that will fit in that upper right sweet spot—if you’re mapping your offerings out on this matrix—is by making sure that you’re using what we call your Credibility Capital^TM.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:39] We talked earlier about organizations wanting to be seen as setting the pace or leading their market. A lot of what makes that possible is having a high level of credibility in your market—being seen as the authoritative source, a trusted source. That’s typically tied to specific assets that you have as an organization. I’m thinking particularly of associations, but this can apply to any type of learning business that has intellectual property, which most do, or other types of capital—things like standards and guidelines that you’ve created, credentials you’ve created that have market value to them, accreditations potentially for the businesses and other organizations that are in your sphere, specialized research you produce, market data that you’re known as the source for, even your ability to convene the right people around the issues and challenges and opportunities in your marketplace, being recognized as the advocate for the challenges and issues and opportunities in your marketplace. All of these are potentially parts of your Credibility Capital.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:48] We asked in the survey how closely respondents feel their portfolio of offerings is aligned with their areas of authority, AKA that Credibility Capital that you were just talking about, Jeff. 30.9 percent of respondents said that they feel their portfolio is fully aligned with their areas of authority, and 49.3 percent said they were mostly aligned. That may sound pretty good at first blush. But we think that fully aligned group needs to be bigger.

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:20] Yes, and also there could be a little bit of the curse of knowledge going on here. There’s the potential for respondents to be overrating their alignment from their perspective of inside the organization. The person responding is thinking, “Yes, of course we’re supporting our standards and our credentials and everything else.” But that’s from their perspective. From the market’s perspective, that alignment and the strength of that alignment may be much less clear.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:47] As we talked about in our last episode around “Associations as Architects of Learning,” this is another example of a not-bleeding-at-the-neck issue. A lot of education businesses are running along fine but maybe not great. Same thing here. You’re mostly aligned but not fully aligned. Mostly aligned can be a very dangerous place to be because it can almost feel like justification to keep doing the same things. This is the “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mindset. But, if you were more fully aligned, what might that mean in terms of revenue and in terms of contribution to your mission? This is a place where you want to be thinking about coherence and discipline. Once you know what you’re supposed to do, be ruthless about doing it and not doing other things. To go back to the matrix, if you want to be in that upper right quadrant with those sweet-spot offerings, what does that mean? It probably means you need to get rid of some things that should have been sunset long ago, and you just haven’t gotten around to. When you’ve got lean teams, when you’ve got tight resources, when you have a highly competitive market, the way you’re going to be able to do what you need to do to have those sweet-spot offerings is by being disciplined, focused, and fully aligned.

Confidence Gap

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:12] The final takeaway we’ll share has to do with confidence and, in particular, a confidence gap that we feel we’re seeing. We asked respondents about this in a couple of areas, starting with confidence in achieving their top strategic goals.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:29] Less than a quarter said that they were very confident or extremely confident in achieving their strategic goals. Jeff, you and I are the kind of people who think that strategy is the basis of everything. We believe you need a clear strategy, and you need a clear plan of execution to achieve that strategy. So, if one of those two is missing or weak, you don’t have confidence in achieving your strategic goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:55] Which is not the place you want to be in. It’s definitely a place to apply some discipline, as you said, Celisa, and make sure that you do have strategic clarity, that you’ve considered your tradeoffs, that you’re focused on what really is important, and that you’re confident around your execution on it.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:14] We also asked survey respondents about confidence in meeting revenue expectations in 2026, specifically revenue expectations for education and learning products. Remember, the top primary strategic goal was increasing revenue, so how confident are you in achieving what is for many of these learning businesses their top strategic priority? And again we have under a quarter who are extremely or very confident. In both cases, we have tiny slices who are extremely confident. So our suggestion is to do what it takes to increase your confidence, to close that confidence gap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:54] This may not be representative of you and your learning business, but it is a good thought experiment. Think about how confident you are in achieving your strategic goals and in meeting revenue expectations. And, if you and your team aren’t very confident, then why? What can you change? What can you perhaps invest in? What can you stop doing? Find those tradeoffs that you need to make. What is it that you need to do to grow your confidence, to close that confidence gap? These are connected very tightly. You’re not likely to have confidence in meeting your revenue expectations if you don’t have confidence that you actually have a strong strategy in place that you’re capable of executing against well. If you’ve got that in place, then it should follow from that that you’re going to be in a good place to meet your revenue expectations. There are going to be wrinkles, of course. Every strategy, once it hits the market, is subject to change. But, if you’ve had some rigor, if you’ve had some discipline in looking at the data, understanding your market and your situation, making those tradeoffs, and developing the strategy, it should follow that you’ll be confident in meeting the revenue expectations that go with that strategy.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:12] We encourage you to check out the report The Strategic Outlook for Association Learning Businesses 2026, which we did based on the association-focused slice of data from this survey.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:30] If you access the report, look at this data, find it useful, we’ll ask you to put a little note on your calendar for around next September or so when you see this survey come out again because the reason we’re able to do this is because people generously give their time to participate in the survey. It takes between 10 and 15 minutes, and it yields data that’s really useful to learning businesses—that’s our audience. For those of you, if you’re listening and you did participate in the survey that’s behind this report, we’re truly grateful for that. Thank you. And, if you didn’t get the chance to participate in 2025, again, we hope you’ll make that note to participate in 2026 when it comes back around.

Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:28:22] Be sure to check out the two publications we mentioned in this episode: the executive briefing based on interviews with association CEOs and The Strategic Outlook for Association Learning Businesses 2026. You’ll also find show notes, a transcript, and options for subscribing to the podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:46] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share this episode or another with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it. And please spread the word about the executive briefing and report too.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:59] Thanks again—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

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Related Resources

• The Strategic Outlook for Association Learning Businesses 2026 (report)
• “Where Mission and Margin Meet: How Associations CEOs Think About Learning and Education” (executive briefing)
• Associations as Architects of Learning

The post The Strategic Outlook for Learning Businesses 2026 appeared first on Leading Learning.

Mindset shapes how adults approach learning, challenge, and change—and it has important implications for learning businesses. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 468, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb explore Mindset, the influential book by psychologist Carol Dweck, and the broader concept of mindset.

They unpack the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets; examine how mindset affects learners, leaders, and organizations; and discuss practical ways learning businesses can foster conditions that support resilience, effort, and meaningful learning.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] Both the concept of mindset and Carol Dweck’s book titled Mindset continue to influence how we think about learning, leadership, and performance. This episode, number 468, is an encore airing of an episode from our archives in which Jeff and I dig into the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets, explore how those mindsets shape the ways adults approach challenge and change, and connect Dweck’s research directly to the work of learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:45] Originally released in May 2019, we think the conversation remains highly relevant as organizations deal with uncertainty, look to cultivate innovation, and work to foster the development of resilient, adaptive learners. We hope you enjoy this revisit to mindset—capital M and lowercase m.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:09] Jeff, here’s a statement for you to consider: You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are. Would you say you mostly agree or disagree with that statement?

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:21] I would have to mostly disagree with that statement. There are probably limits, but I also think that intelligence is much more malleable than we tend to appreciate or acknowledge—or maybe I’m just being hopeful about my own intelligence.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] Here’s another statement: No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially. Mostly agree or mostly disagree?

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:46] Now that one I emphatically agree with. You can definitely change the kind of person you are substantially, primarily through learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:55] Jeff, as you know, those statements appear in the book Mindset, published by Dr. Carol Dweck in 2007. And we’re going to devote this episode to talking about mindset with a capital M (the book) and mindset little m (the idea).

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:13] That’s right. We thought, why not go with a question-and-answer format for the episode?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:18] Why not indeed?

What Is Mindset?

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:20] The first question is simply what is mindset?

Celisa Steele: [00:02:25] Dweck’s research and work have become well known in the dozen years since Mindset came out, so I’m guessing many listeners are familiar with the term mindset. And, even if it happens to be a new term, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Mindset is the frame of mind, the perspective that we bring to anything we do or experience in life—whether that’s something on the job, at home, something professionally, socially, intellectually.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:54] Listeners might also know that Dweck says there are two mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe your qualities are carved in stone. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is founded on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:13] In other words, the growth mindset believes intelligence can be developed, and the fixed mindset believes intelligence is static. To talk a bit about how those mindsets play out, let’s circle back to those statements that I asked about at the very beginning of the episode, Jeff. Dweck uses those statements as a way for individuals to self-assess their own mindset. That first statement, “You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are,” conforms to a fixed mindset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:42] And the other statement, “No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially,” reflects a growth mindset. Now that we’ve covered what mindset is, let’s move on to question number two. How does mindset relate to learning?

How Does Mindset Relate to Learning?

Celisa Steele: [00:04:00] Growth mindset ties directly to learning. Dweck herself writes, “The belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning.” That is, if you believe you can change and always change substantially—and that your own efforts make that change possible—you’re going to embrace the potential of learning. So it seems that those of us who work in learning businesses should, by default, embrace the growth mindset. And yet…

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:29] And yet that doesn’t always happen. It’s important to recognize that we bring different mindsets to different circumstances. Something I wrote about in 10 Ways to Be a Better Learner and that I continually see in myself and in others is that we may have a growth mindset in many areas of our lives—maybe even most areas—and yet be stymied by a fixed mindset in others.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:51] I see that in myself and in others as well. And Dweck makes the point that, as individuals, we’re usually not entirely of the fixed mindset or entirely of the growth mindset. I might have a growth mindset about my ability in a sport. I might think I can practice tennis, and I can get better. But I might have a fixed mindset about my ability with music. I might tell myself, “There’s no way I can learn to play the violin at this point in my life.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:18] I think you can. Because one key to becoming a better learner is to ferret out those fixed mindset areas and, where appropriate, replace them with a growth mindset. It’s common for both learning business professionals and learning businesses to feel, for example, that they have a growth mindset as relates to creating effective education. That’s something they feel confident about—they can always improve there and do a good job at it. But then they feel that they have no abilities and no real capacity for growth when it comes to something like marketing, which is so essential for success as a learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:54] Yes, and there’s another variation of this kind of mixed mindset—we may have a fixed mindset about our own ability in some area but have a growth mindset for others in that area. Again, to use that violin example, I might think it’s too late for me to take up the violin, but I might believe that my kids can learn any musical instrument they want as long as they put in the time and effort.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:18] Those of us working in learning businesses may judge our own abilities differently than those of the learners and customers that we serve. We might embrace, for example, the almost limitless possibilities of learning—that growth mindset—but then think that our learners are just never going to get it. They’re not going to understand that concept and embrace that growth mindset. Vice versa—the learners can do anything if they’ll engage with those learning experiences we’re creating for them, but then, at the same time, we’re thinking it’s impossible to ramp up our learning business in new areas and to achieve the growth we’d like to with our learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:54] As we’re beginning to tease out here, mindset applies to (A) us as individuals (to ourselves), (B) to the learners that we serve, and (C) to our learning businesses as entities. We want to talk about each of those groups (A, B, and C), and so our next three questions are going to address each.

How Does Mindset Impact Us Personally?

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:17] How does mindset impact us personally?

Celisa Steele: [00:07:20] We’ve begun to address that mindset has huge ramifications because it’s the backdrop for everything that we do. It’s the backdrop for how we engage with others, for how we learn, for what we choose to learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:35] It’s worth adding that the growth mindset does come with a kind of perseverance. Dweck writes, “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even, or especially, when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.”

Celisa Steele: [00:07:51] I think that’s critical. The two mindsets see challenge, risk, and effort very differently. The growth mindset embraces challenge and effort and sees failure as an opportunity to learn and to improve. The fixed mindset, on the other hand, sees challenge and effort as dangerous. If intelligence, social skills, or whatever ability is fixed, then working hard for something is a sign of inferiority. The logic of the fixed mindset is, if you’re good at it, it should come naturally, effortlessly, immediately.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:26] Yes, the fixed mindset sees failure as forever. If you have a fixed mindset and you fail at something, then you’re bad at that thing. It doesn’t offer a whole lot of opportunities for recovering versus a much more generous viewpoint from the growth mindset that, if you fail, you just did that thing badly that one time. Of course, you’re going to be able to bounce back. This view of setbacks is so important because we know that challenge and effort are important aspects of learning. They’re fundamental to it. Think of the concept of effortful retrieval, for example.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:03] Yes. And effortful retrieval makes me think of the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:10] Yes, those authors mentioned Dweck more than once (dozens of times) throughout the book because they recognize how important mindset is to successful learning. In fact, we’ll be sure to link to an episode we did with Peter C. Brown, who was one of the co-authors of Make It Stick. Definitely go check that out. But, in the meantime, let’s move on to the fourth question, which is how does mindset impact the learners you serve?

How Does Mindset Impact the Learners We Serve?

Celisa Steele: [00:09:37] First and foremost, mindset impacts the learners we serve in the same way that it impacts us. That means mindset determines the attitude that learners bring to a learning experience. And the learner’s mindset plays a huge part in how effective any learning experience can be.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:57] It’s important to recognize that mindset is not going to be even across groups of learners we serve. Some learners will come with a growth mindset, but others are going to show up with a fixed mindset. This adds a dimension to the concept of prior knowledge that Malcolm Knowles pointed out so many years ago. Not only do learners come to our offerings with different levels of expertise and experience on the subject matter—that differing prior knowledge—but they also bring those different mindsets.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:30] Which adds another layer to teaching and makes it extra tricky. But the good news is that people can be put into a growth mindset, and doing that—putting your learners in the growth mindset—strikes me and probably you too, Jeff, as a potentially powerful tool for learning businesses. So let’s talk a little bit about how we might put learners in a growth mindset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:54] Definitely. Here are some pretty simple ideas. One is to tell learners, just say it to them, that whatever they’re about to study can be learned. Emphasize that. And then also emphasize that the learning experience you’re offering is going to give them the chance to learn it.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:12] A related approach, going slightly deeper, is to give the learners an article. Dweck ran tests where she gave research subjects a scientific article that describes people who didn’t have natural ability but developed exceptional skills. Just reading that article was enough to put her research subjects into a growth mindset for at least a period of time. We can do something like that—give them an article to read. We can also put learners in the growth mindset through the messages that we send, like setting rules and norms that often happen at the beginning of an instructor-led or facilitated experience. You might have the instructor or facilitator stress that effort and contribution are what they’re looking for from the learners and that they value effort and contribution above the learner being right or doing something quickly.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:07] Yes, that kind of upfront work reminds me of Robert Cialdini and what he and I talked about in terms of pre-suasion in the learning context. We had an episode with Bob a while back. We’ll be sure to link to that. But we discussed that just putting a question like “Do you consider yourself a committed learner?” on a slide before the start of a conference session, so it’s up in the room where people can see it as they’re coming into the session, just doing that can pre-suade those people in the room to think of themselves as lifelong learners and better prime them for the learning experience that they’re about to engage in, make them more receptive to it. You could further refine that slide to put those people in the room into a real growth mindset by basically borrowing Dweck’s question and putting something up there like, “Do you believe, no matter what kind of person you are, that you can always change substantially?” You might want to put in parentheses “Yes!” or something like that to further prime them. But, in any case, it’s a simple approach to getting people into that growth mindset in a learning experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:20] Those are great ways to prime and pre-suade. And then you have to make sure that you keep that growth mindset front and center as you head into the learning experience. One aspect of that is feedback, which is such a tricky area or can be a tricky area. One thing you need to do is make sure that, in the feedback, you stress and praise learners’ effort and the process that they go through to do something versus judging the learners’ talent or intelligence. You have to be careful about how you give that feedback and what you’re stressing in the feedback. Now, I mentioned facilitators and instructors when I was giving an example earlier, but I want to note that these approaches could apply to asynchronous online courses too. You don’t have to have a human delivering this growth mindset. Jeff, the example you gave of a slide, there’s no human involved there. That’s just up there. It could be easily having text and audio in an e-learning course, as long as what it’s conveying is that growth mindset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:28] A word of caution here. Just as we can put people in a growth mindset, we can also put them in a fixed mindset. So we do have to be careful. We need to make sure that those who are designing and delivering learning experiences know about the mindsets and understand what triggers them—something that you want to discuss particularly with your subject matter experts if you’re using volunteer SMEs, for example, to deliver sessions. Make sure they understand this concept, and make sure they understand—they need to know—that labels can trigger the fixed mindset. Even positive labels can do this. Calling someone smart equates that person with their achievement or performance. To prompt a growth mindset, you want to label it a little bit differently. You want to praise effort or way of thinking, saying, “That was a smart way to think about that problem.” That’s very different from simply saying, “You’re smart.”

Celisa Steele: [00:15:25] On the label front, you said even positive labels can do negative work. Sometimes labels that seem innocuous or seem fact-based, Dweck points out that those can have a negative effect. She cites research that shows that just checking a box to indicate race or sex can trigger a stereotype in the learner’s mind and lower test scores. It’s important to think about whenever you’re asking someone to identify themselves, to label themselves, whenever you’re labeling them, that can have an impact on the learner—keep that in mind, and be sensitive to it. A lot of this can feed into bias. Jeff, you got to talk with Howard and Shilpa about bias, so we should link to that episode in the show notes as well.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:14] Howard Ross may cite the same research in his book Everyday Bias. Howard Ross and Shilpa Alimchandani—we had a great episode. It’s still one of the most popular ranking episodes. It’s been one of the most shared. Very powerful episode and connects into mindset in so many different ways.

How Does Mindset Impact Our Learning Businesses?

Celisa Steele: [00:16:37] With that, we come to our penultimate question. How does mindset impact our learning businesses?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:43] There is a very important way that mindset connects into learning businesses, connects into our Learning Business Maturity Model, because it directly impacts one of the domains in that model: capacity. How we perceive the capacity of our learning business and how we cultivate that capacity as leaders also connect into the leadership domain of the Learning Business Maturity Model because, as leaders, we have the ability to influence the mindset of those who follow us, so it’s going to influence capacity, and it’s going to influence our ability to cultivate capacity. It’s really, really critical.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:25] That point you made about impacting leadership—Dweck herself dedicates a chapter to “Business: Mindset and Leadership.” And probably no big surprise to listeners, Dweck finds that good leaders have a growth mindset usually and that the fixed mindset tends to be toxic. This is where you have those companies with the big-ego CEOs that tend to shut down feedback, ideas, and innovation from those who serve under them.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:52] Yes. We’ve done episodes on the Learning Business Maturity Model before and talked about these domains, capacity and leadership. We’ll be sure to link to those. But another danger of a fixed mindset in an organization is that it tends to encourage groupthink—that, of course, deprives the organization of the diversity of opinions and views that often yields insight into the market and also the ability to solve the problems or come up with the innovations that are going to take your learning business forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:31] You can self-assess at the organizational level. Just as we opened today’s episode with a couple of questions that help you gauge your own mindset, you can ask questions about your organization to get a feeling for the overall mindset there. You might ask, “How do you act towards others in your workplace? Do you believe that they can change? How do others act towards you? Do they believe that you can change?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:57] It’s incredibly important. So many times we come across organizations where there is a pervasive fixed mindset in many ways. There’s not the belief in the organization that they can achieve what they want to achieve as an organization. We may need to do a whole episode on this at some point, but it’s an issue of low organizational self-esteem because they’re stuck in that fixed mindset when they need to be tapping the growth mindset. Incredibly important. But, for now, let’s turn to our final question. What takeaways do we want to emphasize? And that might be a cheat question, but it’s one that allows us to start wrapping up.

What Takeaways Do We Want to Emphasize?

Celisa Steele: [00:19:39] I’ll emphasize that the growth mindset doesn’t equal learning, and, by the same token, a fixed mindset doesn’t mean no learning. But a growth mindset does increase the odds that learning will happen, and a growth mindset increases the odds that that learning will stick.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:00] And I’ll emphasize that mindset impacts multiple levels of what we do, how we act as learning businesses. Embracing a growth mindset is good for our learners, obviously, so they’re going to get the impact out of the learning experience. It’s good for our learning businesses. We talked about that concept of capacity and impacting the capacity of the business. And then, for us as learning business professionals and especially in our work as leaders of learning, mindset is just so important.

Wrap-Up

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:36] That wraps up this encore airing of our episode on mindset.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:47] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share this episode or another with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:55] Thanks again—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

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Finally, follow us and share the word about Leading Learning. You can find us on LinkedIn.

Related Resources

• Make It Stick with Peter C. Brown
• An Essential Guide to Andragogy for Learning Businesses
• Redux: Revisiting Adult Learning Theory
• On Learning Well: A Practical Look at Metalearning for Learning Businesses
• Pre-suaded to Learn with Robert Cialdini
• AI in the Learning Business Maturity Model

The post Redux: Maximizing Learning with Mindset appeared first on Leading Learning.

Content is everywhere, governance is slow to change, and technology expectations keep climbing—association learning businesses are feeling squeezed. Most are still operating like catalog providers in a market that now needs architects.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb share a Rumelt-style diagnosis based on conversations with 27 association CEOs. They unpack the issues hollowing out the old education model—and what learning leaders can do to design trustworthy, employer-aligned, tech-enabled learning pathways for the future.

If you want clarity on the current landscape and what it means for where your learning business needs to go next, tune in.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] If you lead or work in a learning business, you already know the ground is shifting under your feet—slowly in some places and breathtakingly fast in others. The familiar offerings—conferences, catalogs of courses, CE tied to licensure—still work. Sort of. But that model is hollowing out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:37] This year we spoke with 27 association CEOs about the role education and learning play in their mission, their economics, and their future. One thing we heard remarkably consistently is that the old model isn’t broken enough to force change, but it’s definitely not strong enough to power the future.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:56] We have an executive briefing called “Where Mission and Margin Meet” that combines what we learned from those CEO conversations with some of our own observations. In this episode, we’re going to share a Rumelt-style diagnosis of the core problems many associations face in their learning businesses: the shift toward employer-driven demand, the explosion of supply, the drag of governance, the technology issues, and more. Think of this as a bonus audio chapter to accompany the executive briefing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:29] We hope this diagnosis gives you useful insight, and, for a fuller picture of how associations are thinking about learning and education, we encourage you to download and read the full executive briefing. But let’s dive in.

About Richard Rumelt

Celisa Steele: [00:01:41] I said we were going to do a Rumelt-style diagnosis. At the beginning of the conversation, we should explain who Rumelt is, what a Rumelt-style diagnosis is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:51] That probably would be helpful. Richard Rumelt is one of our favorite strategic thinkers and writers on strategy. We lean on him pretty heavily in our own work in developing strategy for organizations. He has a very elegant and deceptively simple approach to strategy in which he breaks things down into three key elements: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent actions. Diagnosis is what we’ll focus on today. Diagnosis means really understanding the situation. Until you do that, you can’t—or at least you shouldn’t—start making the choices that are going to allow you to solve the problems or pursue the opportunities that exist in that situation.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:38] Jeff, you said “deceptively simple,” and that’s a very good way to characterize Rumelt’s work. So much of good strategy is deceptively simple. Understanding the situation to get to a diagnosis involves simplifying the complex. The situation, everything that’s happening in the world and the environment in which any learning business operates, all of that’s relatively complex. But you have to be able to home in on what exists and what’s evolving that really matters and makes a difference for your learning business.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:14] Once you’ve got that diagnosis, you can move to creating what Rumelt describes as the guiding policy, which is the overarching approach to what you’re going to do, given that diagnosis. How will you make choices to solve the problem or take advantage of the opportunity that’s before you? The guiding policy can be boiled down to just a few sentences that say, “This is how we’re going to go about our work.”

Celisa Steele: [00:03:42] Then the coherent actions are going to translate that guiding policy into the trackable and manageable things that need to be done. One of Rumelt’s key insights about strategy is that you can’t separate it from execution. For strategy to work, things have to be done. That’s why coherent actions are part of what he covers. But, for today, we’re going to focus on diagnosis, not the guiding policy, not the coherent actions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:09] And we’re going to base the diagnosis on what we heard in the association CEO interviews and what we know from broader work with learning businesses.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:19] We’re focusing on the diagnosis because we believe that big parts of this diagnosis will apply broadly to many association learning businesses. The guiding policy and the coherent actions are going to be more specific to any given association. That said, for this to be a true diagnosis for your learning business, you’re going to need to go deeper on the points that we’re going to raise. You’re going to need to think about how they apply in your specific situation. But we do believe that the eight points we’re going to cover are broadly descriptive of the situation most association learning businesses are operating in. The first point in our diagnosis already came in the intro. It’s the observation that the old model still works well enough that it’s blocking reform.

The Old Model Works Well Enough to Block Reform

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:12] This is the classic, “We don’t have a ‘bleeding at the neck’ problem here” that you hear business leaders talk about. For decades, associations have been at the center of their professions’ learning ecosystems. They could charge reasonably for required CE or draw on member loyalty to get folks to come to conferences and courses. And they could make enough from that to fund the rest of the work that they do—or at least help to fund that work.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:39] More recently, we’re seeing attendance, renewals, and attention all dropping off. They can’t be counted on as certainly as they could be counted on in the past. Many associations aren’t getting the same level of attendance at conferences or the same number of enrollments in courses. Renewal isn’t necessarily a given anymore, and, on top of all that, simply getting member or learner attention has gotten much, much harder.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:09] A lot of the leaders we spoke to said revenue from education is flat or even declining. At the same time, learner expectations are rising—they expect more polish and the latest and easiest tech. They expect convenience and speed. This slow bleed—remember it’s not a bleeding-at-the-neck problem—is creating a false sense of stability. The business isn’t imploding. It doesn’t look like an immediate emergency. As a result, boards and executive teams may be postponing fundamental or structural changes, postponing ponying up the investment needed for education if it’s going to continue to play the significant role in the association’s value and revenue structure that it has in the past.

Market Power Has Shifted from the Individual Learner to the Employer

Celisa Steele: [00:07:00] So that’s the first point. The second point in our diagnosis is a shift in power and focus from individual learners to employers. Many of the CEOs that we interviewed are seeing great potential in serving not just those individual learners but the employers where those individual learners work.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:20] Arguably this has always been true—you may have an individual purchasing, but the employer has always been standing behind them as a source of reimbursement or at least as important in freeing up the time for the learner to participate. But the employer role is becoming more forefronted. A lot of companies, corporations, governmental agencies, whatever are looking to outside sources to support what they’re doing in training. Training is one of those things that can fluctuate up and down with economic conditions. If employers can look to an association in their field that has the expertise, that has the curricula that are going to serve their people, that’s incredibly valuable. And both employers and associations are starting to realize that value more now.

Supply Has Exploded; Authority Has Not

Celisa Steele: [00:08:07] That point leads into our third point in the diagnosis, which is that supply has exploded. There are so many more choices out there now, for both your B2C and B2B customers. Jeff, you were just talking about employers recognizing associations as potential sources for training. That’s true—but it’s also true that, in some markets, employers compete with the association. They have enough in-house staff working in L&D that they’re not going to necessarily turn to an association to help them with onboarding or upskilling. That’s one example of some competition, but there are many others.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:44] Yes, the market’s flooded with free Webinars, YouTube videos, vendor academies, and massive open online courses. Now we’ve got AI, which can generate pretty much whatever you want in terms of a learning experience on demand. But, in the midst of that explosion of content and options, what’s scarce is trust. Some of the CEOs talked about their associations providing a stamp of quality in their marketplace, and many perceive trust as their last defensible advantage.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:17] A lot of associations are the owners or developers of standards, or they develop and own a certification. They often have peers or experts reviewing content. All of that contributes to that idea of being a stamp of quality. An association can say, “Hey, this material’s been vetted; it can therefore be trusted,” and that’s not necessarily true of a YouTube video or a ChatGPT answer, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:43] And we know credibility alone isn’t going to pay the bill for developing content. There’s been too much of a culture that’s developed over time among members of expecting to be trained or educated for free. Associations are caught between being a source but then also being a validator of quality, and, at the same time, they’re under tremendous pressure to offer content for free or inexpensively. It’s a difficult economic position to be in.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:12] What it takes to truly stand behind a stamp of quality can be quite expensive. The time and the energy that many people have to put into that review and validation can cost a lot. So we have exploding supply, and there’s this issue of trust, and, for the moment, associations tend to have an advantage there compared to the alternatives.

Portfolio Logic Is Broken

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:33] Our fourth point in the diagnosis is that portfolio logic is broken.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:41] What we mean by this is that many associations have landed on their current portfolio unintentionally. It wasn’t built intentionally. They’ve inherited a patchwork of legacy programs. Maybe there’s not a whole lot of apparent logic—economic/pricing logic and logic in what content is covered, about what’s in the portfolio. There’s an attitude of “We have these things; we inherited them; we’re going to keep them running.” A number of the CEOs that we talked with said they have really big catalogs, but only a small percentage is being used.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:18] So much gets driven by committees in associations or individual subject matter experts who advocate for one course or another. As you said, it turns into a patchwork of offerings. The typical association portfolio is going to contain maybe one big or a few profitable offerings—a conference or a certification. Then there will be some break-even offerings—maybe a little online learning or some Webinars. And then there’s typically a long tail of low-margin or flat-out loss-making programs. There’s often no disciplined pruning. It’s very hard for organizations to sunset anything.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:58] One of the CEOs said that the missing capability is “purposeful abandonment.” I like that phrasing: purposeful abandonment. It’s a nice, fancy way of saying “sunsetting.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:09] We’ve talked about four of our eight points so far. One, the old model is chugging along, not well enough to pave the way to the future but also not badly enough to force reform. Two, market power has shifted to employers. Three, supply has exploded, but authority and trust have not, and there’s still a lot of authority in associations. And then, four, the portfolio logic is broken. Now the fifth point in our diagnosis is that technology and specifically AI are changing both production and consumption and doing it faster than most associations feel able to retool.

Technology and AI Are Rewriting Production and Consumption Faster than Associations Can Retool

Celisa Steele: [00:12:54] At this point, it’s easy for a learner to turn to ChatGPT or an equivalent, maybe upload some source materials or point to an association publication and say, “Hey, give me some questions to help me prepare for the exam” or “Help explain this concept to me.” Those are things that associations have traditionally, historically done. They’ve provided the exam prep. They’ve created microlearning. So all of this raises an existential question for associations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:23] It really does. I talked to a CEO who did this herself—and good for her for doing it. She thought, “We’re offering this exam prep toward a certification, but maybe a learner could just go ask AI to create that prep.” So she tried that, and, yes indeed, AI created some completely viable exam prep for that certification. That shows that AI isn’t just about delivery efficiency and being able to crank out content. It’s also about AI flooding the market with credible-looking instruction, which weakens associations’ claim to be the trusted source—unless associations build technical literacy and proprietary data advantages. Back to trust. There’s trust and authority, and associations need to be able to use technology and AI tools to help surface and reinforce their trust and authority.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:15] That points naturally to an idea of an association taking all of its vetted content and creating a locked-down AI model that only draws on that vetted material. At least two CEOs that we talked with were thinking along those lines, of creating a cordoned-off large language model to deliver immediate and personalized learning support that is grounded in vetted, trusted content. But, at least for those two, that was just an idea at this point.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:47] We’re seeing some associations implement AI, but more are still in that “just talking about it” phase. I’m also a little concerned that most of them are thinking about private AI in terms of a member benefit or something they build into their Web site. I’m not sure they’re thinking about it as professional development, as education, as something that could have a business model associated with it.

Governance and Culture Reward Continuity Over Experimentation

Celisa Steele: [00:15:13] The sixth point in our diagnosis deals with governance. Along with governance, we’ll throw culture in there as well. A lot of associations are structured in a way, governed in a way that rewards the status quo. It rewards continuity rather than experimentation or innovation.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:32] During these interviews and in some other conversations I’ve had with CEOs, I’m hearing leaders of organizations question whether they should even be in the education business because they’re having such a hard time with governance and culture, feeling like they’re having to fight against governance and culture. And, in the meantime, for-profit competitors are running circles around these associations.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:00] The ability to experiment is going to be critical for association learning businesses who want to move beyond diagnosing the situation and get to those other parts of strategy that we mentioned at the beginning—the guiding policy and a set of coherent actions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:10] One CEO I talked to mentioned a radical restructuring of his organization, including looking at how committees are formed and dissolved. They had to change bylaws so they could be more responsive and agile. Another talked about a constant battle to cut back on committees, but no sooner do they cut some back, than others spring up.

External Understanding of Associations’ Role in Education and Learning Is Underdeveloped

Celisa Steele: [00:16:31] I remember that. He said it was like playing Whack-a-Mole. That question of whether associations should remain in the learning business at all is interesting because we asked the CEOs if associations were to stop offering education, what would the result be? Several of them said, somewhat sadly, that they’re not sure that people would miss it. Would anyone even notice if they were to stop? Personally, I think that, for many associations, if they were to stop offering education, that would be missed. It would be noticed. Not always, but often. That said, even if it were to be noticed, I do think there is a broader recognition issue at play. Associations aren’t recognized in the way that they perhaps should be when you think about the pivotal role that they play in adult lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development, all that training that needs to happen after someone completes higher education—or not even higher education, if a degree isn’t involved. There’s a lot of work and value that associations are delivering, but it’s not broadly recognized by society. And that’s the seventh point in the diagnosis: The understanding of associations’ role in education and learning is underdeveloped outside of the association world.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:54] It really is. It’s an interesting thought experiment. I suspect that if you were to turn off the tap completely on all association education, people would notice immediately that it’s no longer there because associations are playing a critical societal role in adult lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is increasingly recognized as essential in the world and the economy in which we all live. But you don’t often hear association CEOs out there talking about that and making that point. You don’t see associations referenced in articles around lifelong learning. I’ve noticed this for years. One of the CEOs made the point that so much of what associations do tends to happen in back rooms and conversations about advocacy that happen in the hallways of conferences. So what associations are doing is not necessarily visible in the way that you might see, for example, a university promoting what they’re doing with continuing education and professional development. For the university, that’s their whole identity; that’s their business versus it only being part of what associations do. Universities are going to be out there in the press and media around that. They are out there in the press and media around that. But a university doesn’t have the kind of profession/field/industry depth that an association has or that ongoing relationship and contact with a set of members, the people who are working in that field or profession.

Capabilities and Capacity Are Real Constraints

Celisa Steele: [00:19:28] The eighth and final point in our diagnosis of the current situation for learning businesses has to do with capabilities and capacity. We heard clearly from most of the CEOs that they know they need to be more data-driven. They know they need to have some sort of organizing concept—a competency model—that drives what they’re offering, and they need to map their offerings to that organizing idea. They know that they need to engage with employers and get crystal clear on what those employers need and value. They know that they need modern technology that’s going to help create that wonderfully smooth user experience and provide ready access to rich data that they can mine internally to help make decisions. All that is clear. But having access to the money, the know-how, the time, the energy to do all of those things, that’s less clear.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:27] That loops us back to the first point we made around the historical, traditional model. It’s not broken enough for boards and executive teams to say, “All hands on deck! We must invest the time and money in steering the ship in a different direction—hiring more people, hiring people with different capabilities, putting the technology and processes in place to be able to deliver excellent, meaningful, modern learning experiences.” All that is different from standing up a catalog and running people through an e-commerce system or standing up an event and taking registrations.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:05] You tied this back to the first point. It also ties to the sixth point, which was about governance and culture, because part of what’s at play is that acting in the way that these CEOs know they need to act is often not what’s familiar and comfortable for associations. This requires an agile mindset. It requires an ability to make decisions quickly and then to act quickly. It takes experimentation and being okay with some failures as long as you’re learning from them. And a lot of what’s needed to get the capabilities and capacity that these associations need can be slowed down by those governing structures that are committee-heavy or rely on set monthly meetings, and maybe decisions can’t really be made outside of that meeting timetable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:55] It gets back to the title of the executive briefing: “Where Mission and Margin Meet.” There’s a certain culture, a certain infrastructure, a certain operating model that goes with a mission-driven organization, like an association, that tends to be different from what you might find in, say, a commercial training provider or any solely revenue-driven business. Associations have to balance mission and margin, and that’s a leadership challenge. It’s one that many of the CEOs we interviewed are facing up to and wrestling with—and good for them. Unfortunately, more broadly across the association sector, that’s not necessarily happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:36] We’re seeing association learning businesses grapple with that mission-and-margin question that you just pointed to, Jeff. They’re thinking about how do they make sure that their portfolio is supporting their mission without draining the organization, maybe even contributing back to the organization? And how are they making sure that what’s in that portfolio truly is what should be there? What will serve the learners, what will serve the employers, what will serve society at large?

The Diagnosis in Brief

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:04] To sum the diagnosis up, the individual member-retail model that once sustained associations is giving way to more employer-driven demand.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:14] Abundant and often free digital offerings now available have created a very different dynamic in the marketplace. There is so much choice now than there was a decade or two decades ago, certainly more than 50 or even 100 years ago when some associations were being formed. And, because of all that competition, it’s noisier and harder to even get the attention of your learners. Even if you do get their attention, even if they do recognize that they need to learn something, you’re just one option in a field of many options.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:51] Credibility remains high for associations at this point, and it helps them stand out for now, but that credibility, trust, and authority need to be bolstered and guarded.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:03] There are governance issues and cultural habits that may be holding associations back from addressing the competition, from pursuing opportunities like B2B models. There are patchwork portfolios that need to be made more intentional. There’s an underinvestment in technology, including AI, and in other aspects of capacity and capabilities, and that underinvestment is preventing organizations from being able to adapt as they need to.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:33] The strategic core of the problem is a structural mismatch. Associations still operate as catalog providers in a market that now needs architects—architects designing trustworthy, employer-aligned, tech-enabled learning pathways and infrastructure rather than simply maintaining a catalog of programs.

Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:25:01] Be sure to check out the executive briefing that’s based on these interviews with association CEOs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:18] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share this episode or another with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it. And please spread the word about the executive briefing too.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:31] What we covered today is part of a larger story. The CEOs that we spoke with offered sharp and honest insight about what’s holding their education businesses back and what’s needed to move forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:44] We hope today’s episode and the executive briefing spark some internal conversations and maybe some overdue shifts in your own learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:52] Thanks again—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d be grateful if you’d rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Reviews and ratings help the podcast show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

Finally, follow us and share the word about Leading Learning. You can find us on LinkedIn.

Related Resources

• “Where Mission and Margin Meet: How Associations CEOs Think About Learning and Education” (executive briefing)
• Becoming a Learning-Centric Organization with Mike Moss
• Responsible, Pragmatic AI with Tori Miller Liu

The post Associations as Architects of Learning appeared first on Leading Learning.

Building or refreshing certification prep, reviewing prices, or expanding into new formats? This conversation offers concrete examples of how to move fast, listen well, and align your portfolio with both mission and margin.

Letty Kluttz, senior vice president of membership, education, and programs for the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about launching three certification prep courses in under a year, developing a clear pricing philosophy, and introducing microlearning and microcredentials to meet learners where they are. Letty also discusses how APIC is using data and collaboration to focus on high-demand topics, building a content strategy that works and connecting education outcomes to measurable impact in healthcare settings.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Learning businesses are constantly asked to do a lot—support the mission, satisfy learners, and drive sustainable revenue. This episode offers a real-world look at how one organization is doing all that.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:29] This episode, number 466, features my conversation with Letty Kluttz, senior vice president of membership, education, and programs for APIC, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:43] Letty shares how APIC developed and launched three new certification prep courses in less than a year, what they learned about listening to learners, and how they balance mission and margin in pricing and portfolio decisions.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:56] We also talk about APIC’s shift to more flexible learning formats—including virtual instructor-led programs, microlearning, and microcredentials—and how APIC is using data and collaboration to focus on topics learners most need.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:11] The conversation offers a useful perspective for anyone managing an education portfolio that has to deliver both impact and income. Here’s the conversation with Letty Kluttz.

About APIC and Its Education Portfolio

Celisa Steele: [00:01:27] Tell us a little bit about APIC, what it does in general. Also, I would love—given that we’re the Leading Learning Podcast—to get a high-level look at what’s in your learning portfolio, what you offer by way of education and learning.

Letty Kluttz: [00:01:40] APIC is the leading professional association for infection preventionists, or IPs, as we like to call them, and our mission is to advance the science and practice of infection prevention and control, ultimately to protect patients, healthcare workers, and communities. We have about 15,000 members in a variety of different settings—from acute care, hospitals, long-term care, home health, you name it—but they are the unsung heroes of keeping everyone safe and free from infection. So that is who we are and what we do. As far as education, as you can imagine, with an association, education is so, so important and one of the critical things that we do. Education helps our members develop professionally and personally. It also helps them stay on top of all of the things that they need to be aware of when they are keeping patients safe. It is definitely a cornerstone of what we do and what we offer. We offer a suite of different trainings—short, longer, online, instructor-led, asynchronous, synchronous, you name it—because we really want to meet our members where they are in their professional development and education journey. That’s just a very high-level overview of what we offer.

Creating Three Cert Prep Courses in Under a Year

Celisa Steele: [00:02:56] One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that I’ve had the chance to hear you speak a few times over the last year or so about some of what you have going on around certification and some certification prep work. For the sake of our listeners, and for my own sake to get to hear it again, would you give us a sketch of what APIC has done and gotten out into the market in an impressively short period of time?

Letty Kluttz: [00:03:21] Sure, and thank you—because we look back, and we’re like, “I can’t believe we actually pulled that off.” This work began in earnest in 2022, and it feels like that should be so much longer ago than it actually is. We saw the need to update and upgrade, quite frankly, our cert prep. At that particular point, it was almost divine intervention and this perfect storm of different things happening at the same time. Our certification body, CBIC (the Certification Board of Infection Control and Epidemiology), was getting ready to launch a new certification, and we knew that the first question our members would ask is, “How do I prepare to take this certification?” That is what sped things up and got the ball rolling when we looked at “Okay, we don’t have the bandwidth or the expertise, quite honestly, to create a cert prep course for this new certification.” And then it became “Okay, our members have been asking for certain aspects as part of cert prep, from flashcards to pre-test to post-test.”

Letty Kluttz: [00:04:25] We took a step back and said, “This is an opportunity for us to upgrade the experience,” and so we reached out to the Holmes Corporation. I had worked with them in a previous life on cert prep, and we put together a timeline and a plan to bring all of this to fruition. We created three separate cert prep courses in less than a year, which I do not recommend for anybody, but it is something that we certainly are very proud of. The feedback has been fantastic. As IPs in particular and in healthcare, this whole concept of continuous improvement has certainly brought forward with our educational experience, especially with cert prep, continuing to listen to what our members want, to what they’re looking for. We just launched an updated version of our cert prep courses, so they have been exceeding our expectations, and our learners have been very, very happy with the materials that we’re providing to them.

Listening to Learner Needs

Celisa Steele: [00:05:27] You were talking about how the feedback’s been great, how what you’re hearing is really positive. One of the things I would love to get you to talk about is about how APIC goes about listening to member needs, to learner needs, what methods or processes you might use to make sure that you’re hearing what they say they need, and then to what extent you might perhaps augment what they’re saying they need with what you know they might need that they might not even know that they need yet.

Letty Kluttz: [00:05:55] That’s a great question. We solicit feedback from a variety of different places. We have all of our cert prep take place in our learning system, and, as part of that, when someone finishes going through the cert prep course, there’s a survey that we provide to them that asks questions about what they liked, what they didn’t, suggestions for improvement. Sometimes we get suggestions that are unsolicited. When we do instructor-led, we also do a survey at the end of that. A variety of different ways where we want to hear from them. “Did this help prepare you? What are some things you would like to see as part of these courses?” To your point, it’s balancing what they say they need with what we know we can provide to them. A perfect example of that is, in the previous version, before we launched the upgraded platform, it was no audio. You just went through; you read. And that was some of the feedback we got: “We would like to be able to listen. We would like to be able to go in our car and put this on audio and study as we’re driving to whatever place or have that as an option.”

Letty Kluttz: [00:07:05] And so we did just that. That’s a good example of listening to where our members and customers are and what they’re looking for. That was extremely helpful. And flashcards—it sounds so simple. People love flashcards. They love a good flashcard because it’s a good, again, checks and balances to help make sure that they’re learning the content. Those are two examples of “We knew that this is something they had been asking for years,” and it validated what we thought. Because the other thing is that you don’t want to assume that you know what your members and your customers need, and so being able to ask the questions in a variety of different ways helps validate what you think they need at the same time, so that, again, you’re meeting them where they’re at.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:48] The reliance on post-course surveys or post-learning experience surveys feels pretty common. A lot of organizations do that. How do you go about hearing from folks that might not fill those out? Or perhaps it’s required, and so you’re getting more feedback there, but again that balance of are you hearing from the vocal minority? Or do you feel like, “Oh, no, we’re actually hearing from our membership what they need”?

Letty Kluttz: [00:08:13] What’s nice is, in order to get a certificate of completion, you have to take the survey, and you have to provide feedback. That’s a little carrot that we dangle. Part of it too is helping them understand that we take their feedback seriously, and we do something with it. It’s not just you filling out a survey for the sake of filling out a survey, but we want to make sure that we are providing information and content that they find useful, that they find valuable, and it’s worth the investment that they’re making—because it is an investment.

Balancing Education’s Role in Mission and Margin

Celisa Steele: [00:08:43] One of the things that I know about associations and association learning businesses is that often what they offer in terms of education or learning can end up having to walk a balance beam between being out there because it supports the mission of the organization and also potentially being this revenue driver for the association to help feed some of the other expense areas of what has to happen. I would be curious to ask you about how APIC thinks about that—or how you, Letty, think about balancing mission versus margin in terms of what you offer as education.

Letty Kluttz: [00:09:20] That’s a great question. I think it’s something that probably all associations struggle with. At the end of the day, no mission, no money, but, obviously, our mission is our priority. I don’t think there’s anyone who couldn’t get behind a safer world, a world without infection, and driving the science and practice of IPC. It’s definitely a mission that everyone rallies behind, which I think is a great thing. But you do have to balance that, and you do need to look at making sure that you are bringing in enough revenue to cover the expenses that you’re providing because, again, no money, no mission. It is absolutely a delicate balance, and it’s something that we struggle with. Something that I have certainly learned throughout this process and this journey is that understanding and communicating the value proposition to the people who are purchasing your education materials is so, so important, and you don’t want to undervalue the education that you’re providing to your members. And that was an aha moment for me because you can always discount. You can’t increase pricing.

Letty Kluttz: [00:10:32] It’s having a different approach and a different thought process but having a pricing strategy as an association, as an organization, and looking holistically across the portfolio that you offer about the value proposition that you’re giving to your members—it’s such a critical part of that conversation when you’re looking at “How do we drive revenue, and how do we have those conversations internally?” But, again, educating your members on the value that they get and all of the different features and doing some competitive pricing too is a really important part of the process. Because, again, you don’t want to devalue what you’re providing to them, but you also don’t want to be like the Porsche of the education space, especially in the association, where there is so much price sensitivity, especially these days in healthcare, where everything’s being cut right and left. We want to be mindful of that. But it’s a balance, and it is a dance between the two, to be perfectly honest.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:29] I appreciate what you’re saying there because sometimes what can be missed is the idea that price is perceived, often not consciously, as an indicator of value. If something’s priced too low, sometimes ironically then the learner can be like, “Well, it can’t be that good if it’s that inexpensive.” Does APIC keep some things in its portfolio that might be only breaking even because it really does support mission? And then you might have others that still, of course, support mission, but are bringing in more. Do you have any kind of way you try to actively balance what the makeup of the portfolio looks like in terms of the revenue that’s being brought in?

Letty Kluttz: [00:12:13] Yes, I think it is a balance, and you have to look holistically. You can’t just price one thing in a vacuum. It is looking across the organization and across the portfolio, across the suite of products that you’re offering. And we offer a variety of different educational opportunities outside cert prep. We have our online learning courses. We have Webinars that are all a member benefit right now. It is looking and being mindful about what is the strategy behind what you want to price and what the overall objective is because you may have some things that, yes, are, to your point, strictly revenue-producing. Then you have others that you say, “You know what, this is the right thing to do, so we’re going to price it accordingly so that we can get more people at a lower price versus fewer people at a higher price”—having those conversations and being mindful of what that looks like when you’re putting new products and services and education material forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:20] How often do you revisit pricing? Is that something that’s baked into a regularly scheduled review?

Letty Kluttz: [00:13:26] It is now. I started it last year and took the time to put together an entire smartsheet with all of our offerings, and now we review all of our pricing as part of our budgeting, and we have a conversation so that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing, being very mindful of “When do we increase? When do we not?” A perfect example is with some of our signature products pricing hadn’t been raised in 10 years, but the breadth of what we had offered had grown significantly. Making sure that we are having those conversations and reviewing stuff yearly. Now it doesn’t make sense to increase every year. It just doesn’t. When you have updated content that you’re rolling out or new content, yes, that’s when you look at that, and you look, again, holistically across the suite that you’re offering and making sure it makes sense so that “like products” look like “like products.” If you have, for example, an online course, and it’s two hours, you don’t want to price it the same thing as something that is eight hours because that just doesn’t make sense. We have much more structure and an actual strategy and a pricing philosophy so that we are reviewing it every single year, every single product, and having those conversations as part of our budgeting process.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:47] As part of looking at pricing, are you also looking not just at the price tag but at the costs that go into making these products?

Letty Kluttz: [00:14:56] Yes, absolutely. Because we’re healthcare, we have to review our content every three years and update it accordingly, which is part of when we provide continuing education credit, for example. And so you have to build that factor into the budget, and you have to be mindful of “What does that look like?” As we all saw the past couple of years, you never know. I feel like change is happening so much quicker now, and sometimes those updates don’t fit that three-year lifecycle. Because there are costs associated with it, and you do want to make sure that you’re covering them as part of those conversations. When you look at updating or revising, does it make sense? That is all part of the pricing conversation—what goes into making sure that we are keeping our content fresh? One of the things that associations don’t do well—and I can pick on associations since I work at one—is we don’t do well with sunsetting material. Part of this process too…not just looking at pricing but looking at sales, looking at does this make sense to continue?

Letty Kluttz: [00:16:06] Sacred cows. There are so many sacred cows. And everyone’s stuff is so important to them—but make sure that you are making those decisions that are smart for the association and sunsetting material where the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.

Generating Revenue and Value Amid Broader Shifts

Celisa Steele: [00:16:22] You talked a little bit about change and how it seems like the pace of change is increasing. Tell us a little bit about how APIC is continuing to evolve its approach to revenue generation, to member value when you look at the next couple of years, given broader shifts—AI, changes in continuing education, all those things that are going on.

Letty Kluttz: [00:16:48] We seem to be in this shift of reduced attention span. I guess that’s not really recent. That’s been around for a long time. But, in a lot of ways, what I find fascinating, and one of the few positives to come out of COVID, was the thirst for virtual, for instructor-led in a virtual environment. We have so much engagement virtually, where before we didn’t really do anything that was virtual. Everything was in person. And, after COVID, we do a smattering of in-person, but most of it is all online and all virtual. Because, again, a lot of times, with our audience, with our members, with IPs, they don’t have the luxury to be able to leave their facility for three to four days, and this allows them to be able to stay at home, to not travel. It reduces costs. Virtual has been a huge game changer for us. We have gotten into microcredentials, these small, bite-sized, flexible ways of learning. That’s something that we launched earlier this year in June; we launched our first microcredential on surveillance. It’s an eight-hour course. You can do it as quickly or take a year to review the content and take the exam at the end. But that’s an example of how we are doing smaller, bite-sized learning opportunities.

Letty Kluttz: [00:18:22] We have our microcredentials. We also have microlearning. So we’re talking 10- to 15-minute snippets on very, very specific topics. You have to be specific when you have that short amount of time. But, again, meeting our members where they are. A lot of times they want just-in-time. You know that you want to learn something about this particular topic. Well, I can now go here and find that particular topic that I can spend 15 minutes on as a refresher versus sitting through a three-day course just to learn a part of the content that you want to see. Again, it’s meeting people where they are—being able to offer all of the different types of learning. We like to say choose your own adventure when it comes to your preferred method of learning and engaging with content. It gives the learner a lot of flexibility—again, to meet them where they are.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:21] Is the microlearning something that they can earn credit towards maintaining…?

Letty Kluttz: [00:19:26] Yes, it’s a couple of different things. For example, the one that we launched in June is on surveillance, eight-hour course. At the end of the course, you take an assessment, and then when you pass it, you get a digital badge. That digital badge is something that they can then put on LinkedIn, on their signature in Outlook, whatever it is. You can also—if you take those microcredentials—earn what we call infection prevention units (IPUs) for our certification that is offered through CBIC. You can use it in a variety of different ways. You can also get continuing education credit, from a nursing standpoint. There are a lot of different options for the learner, depending on what they need recertification or continuing education credits for.

Challenges and Opportunities for APIC

Celisa Steele: [00:20:17] When you think about what’s coming, what challenges or opportunities are you seeing for APIC? What’s on your mind? What are you tracking

Letty Kluttz: [00:20:26] This political landscape we’re in right now is challenging. It’s hard, and it’s hard for our members. Healthcare in particular has been impacted by this, and so that is absolutely on the forefront. And, again, it comes down to meeting our members where they are and making sure that we’re providing educational content for them. Some of the things that we’ve been talking about and brainstorming is “How do we unbundle some of our topics?” One of the things that APIC is working on this year is having what we’re calling “expert-informed resources,” which is basically our version of a content strategy. Really focusing on specific topics to help us focus on telling our members—and this is all based on data that they’ve told us—that we know they want information on these specific content areas. That is helping us focus our time and energy into making sure we’re providing the education that they told us they want.

Letty Kluttz: [00:21:39] But it’s also looking at “What do you already have?” You never have to always create something from scratch. Taking a step back and saying, “What do we have that we can repurpose? Where are the gaps? What do we need to do? How do we collaborate across the enterprise, across the organization, to make sure that we’re putting together these different educational opportunities?” Maybe there’s a Webcast, maybe there’s a microlearning, maybe there’s a microcredential, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be all of the things for the same content area. I am super excited and really proud that we’ve taken that step. It’s something that we’ve talked a long time about. And I think it is absolutely going to come back in dividends to us. We’re honing in on specific areas where we know our members have said, “This is where we need help. This is where we need more information on….” I’m a big fan of working smarter, not harder, and that is a really good example of what we’re doing to ensure that that happens.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:42] Talking about working smarter, not harder, you said you have about 15,000 members. How big is the APIC staff?

Letty Kluttz: [00:22:49] We are small but mighty. We’re about 50 employees. There’s a lot of collaboration, as I’m sure you gathered from that conversation we were just chatting about. From a content strategy standpoint, it’s all hands on deck. Honestly, it takes a village. It doesn’t fall on one person’s shoulders to bring this forward. Going back to one of your previous questions about our membership, we were spending a lot of time talking about the member value proposition. We’re going to be doing a membership campaign, talking about the benefits of being a member, all of the things that we offer to our IPs. Because that’s also a critical part of this too—helping people understand the value and that they’re proud to be part of an association that is bringing forward all of this information to help them be better and do better.

Tracking the Impact of Learning

Celisa Steele: [00:23:41] You’ve talked about positive feedback. We’ve talked some about revenue. Both of those are indicators of how you’re doing with your learning products and education products. But I’m also thinking about this idea of impact. When a learner comes in, engages in one of these microlearnings, does a microcredential, or does the cert prep, there’s the idea of impact. Are they actually learning? You even said about the mission statement is about changing practice or improving practice. Talk about how you think about the impact of what you offer in terms of learning. What are you tracking? Or what would you hope to track that you can’t currently track?

Letty Kluttz: [00:24:21] That’s another good question. One of the things we’re tracking, especially with certification, there’s a huge opportunity when you’re tracking those who go through cert prep courses, who obtain their certification—how do you tie it back into metrics that impact infection prevention? How do you tie it back into reduced-HAIs (hospital-acquired infections)? We have a research center, and they have been doing so much research in that regard. They launched a staffing calculator. You put in data specific to your facility; it then spits back a report that says, “Here’s the recommended number of IPs that you should have on staff.” And the data they’re pulling back from that show that there’s a direct correlation between the number of IPs you have on staff and a reduction in the number of infections. That’s golden.

Letty Kluttz: [00:25:23] There’s been so much work in collaborating with our research center with our EIR (expert-informed resources), making sure that we are all tying it back to how we can help them be better and do better. You also get the testimonials and anecdotes, not the hard and fast metrics, but stories that people talk about, how it helped them do X or Y. We have two publications that we offer: AJIC (American Journal of Infection Control), which is our scientific magazine, and Prevention Strategist, so we always encourage members to submit their stories, submit what they did to demonstrate the value of the practice of infection prevention and how it impacted patients’ outcomes, what they’d done so others can learn from their own experience. It is holistically bringing in all of those different stories to show people how what they learn and put into practice has an impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:34] That’s great. It sounds like you’re doing really good work to be able to make that clear connection between “Here’s what we’re helping you learn, here’s what the IPs provide, and this is what it means in terms of reduced infection.”

Letty’s Approach to Her Own Lifelong Learning

Celisa Steele: [00:26:45] This is Leading Learning Podcast, so we always love to ask folks who come on a little bit about their own approach to lifelong learning. Do you have resources, practices, or habits that help you stay up-to-date and on top of your game?

Letty Kluttz: [00:26:59] Yes, I’m a huge proponent of lifelong learning. You never know everything. I think having that mindset and that perspective of “You can always do better and learn more” is important to being a better human and employee. I really do. Whether it’s learning about leadership or infection prevention, how you can better serve your members, being a sponge and constantly reading the articles that are submitted for our publications and reading the research agenda and the stuff that comes out of our research center and staying informed makes you be a better, informed consumer of information too. I read our magazine all the time, making sure I am listening to what our members are telling us.

Letty Kluttz: [00:27:53] As you can imagine, there’s never a dull moment with what’s coming out of the White House right now, so being on top of current issues is so important, but making sure you are approaching it and hearing all different sides. It’s easy to fall into—especially in the political environment we are in right now—listening to one side and not understanding what everyone is saying about different things. That’s a really important perspective, especially in the healthcare space, to have that lens of “Okay, today I’m going to listen to this particular news. Tomorrow I’m going to listen to this one. I want to hear what’s going on.” Our members aren’t shy. They will share their opinions with us, which is a great thing. Yet again, I’m a huge, huge proponent of continuous learning. It’s also the nature of healthcare—performance improvement, continuous learning, continuous improvement. Having that perspective, you have to carry it forward when it comes to learning and continuing to develop as a leader.

Letty’s Three Key Takeaways

Celisa Steele: [00:29:00] It sounds like you’re walking the walk. If you’re going to be talking to your members about continuous improvement, you need to embody it yourself. We’ve covered a fair amount of ground, so if you wanted to make sure listeners took away one, two, or three points, what would you point them to? What would you want to reinforce?

Letty Kluttz: [00:29:20] I would say don’t undervalue what you provide your members. Making sure you are reviewing pricing holistically across your organization on a regular basis—that’s so important. The third thing is listen to what your members and customers are telling you, and then meet them where they are.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:52] We’re not done quite yet—stick around for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:54] Check out APIC’s Web site and Letty’s LinkedIn profile. And Letty is happy to chat and share from her experience, as she is a big proponent of sharing to help others learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:11] If you got value from this episode, please share it with a colleague or leave a rating and review. Those actions help others find the Leading Learning Podcast and support the work we’re doing.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:23] Thinking about all that Letty shared, I was really interested to hear that APIC’s research center has data showing the direct correlation between the number of infection preventionists on staff and a reduction in the number of infections in that setting. That’s the kind of real-world outcome and impact that learning businesses need to be able to show.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:45] Another thing Letty said that’s very well aligned with our thinking is her admonition to not undervalue what you offer. We’re big proponents of value-based pricing and understanding that price is often unconsciously correlated with value—low price, low value; higher price, higher value.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:03] And even though our podcast is free, rest assured that what we offer is high-value stuff. Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

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• The Value of Credentials Now
• Measurement and Evaluation with Alaina Szlachta

The post Cert Prep, Pricing, and Impact with Letty Kluttz appeared first on Leading Learning.

If you work in a field like medicine, law, or accounting, the basic unit of continuing education is a commodity. Credits are everywhere. Prices have been pushed down, often to zero. It is very hard to differentiate one provider from another.

The usual response is predictable: more topics, more formats, more discounts.

None of that gets at the real issue, which is demand. Not “How do we get more people to sign up for our Webinars?” but “What are the problems and ambitions that actually matter to them—and where are those problems still poorly served?”

That’s where latent demand lives. And most learning businesses never really look for it.

What follows is a practical way to do that work. While the focus is primarily on markets like continuing medical education (CME), continuing legal education (CLE), and continuing professional education (CPE) where the obvious demand has already been strip-mined, everything here applies to any learning business trying to deal with weak or declining demand for its offerings—you’ll just need to do a modest (and valuable) amount of work to translate examples into your own situation.

Demand Hides in Jobs, Not Topics

When people talk about “what the market wants,” they usually mean topics:

• “Our members want more AI.”
• “People are asking for [flavor of the month] content.”
• “Soft skills are hot right now.”

That’s not demand. That’s noise.

The useful unit of analysis is the job people are trying to get done in their professional lives. Not their job title, but the underlying “I need to…” that’s driving behavior.

For example, a physician might be trying to do the following:

• Stay out of trouble with regulators and malpractice insurers.
• Keep up with changes in guidelines without spending every weekend reading journals.
• Move from a purely clinical role into leadership.

An accountant might be trying do the following:

• Shift their book of business from low-margin compliance work to higher-margin advisory work.
• Use AI to increase throughput without risking confidentiality or running afoul of professional standards.
• Keep clients calm and informed as regulations and reporting expectations shift.

“Get CME credits” or “Get CPE hours” is one job. It’s also the most commoditized job in the entire ecosystem. If your discovery process begins and ends there, you will stay stuck in a low-value race.

The starting point for uncovering hidden demand is simply changing from this question:

• “What topics do you want next year?”

To this question:

• “What are you trying to accomplish in your work that learning could help with—even if you wouldn’t normally call it ‘education’?”

Listen for Anxiety and Workarounds, Not Wish Lists

Once you shift from topics to jobs, the next step is to listen differently.

Most organizations already “listen” in the following ways:

• Periodic topic polling
• Open-ended questions at the end of course evaluations
• Tuning in to the few vocal volunteers who always have opinions

That kind of listening is fine if you want incremental improvements (or, more often, hit-or-miss programs). It rarely surfaces latent demand.

You get much richer insight by asking people to walk you through specific situations:

• “Tell me about the last time you felt behind—on a regulation, a technology, a clinical issue. What did you do?”
• “Walk me through the last time you were scrambling to meet CE requirements. How did that play out?”
• “Think about a time you felt exposed—legally, reputationally, financially—and realized you needed to learn something fast. What happened?”

In those stories, you’re listening for these points

• Jobs
  The recurring “I need to…” patterns that show up across people and settings
• Outcomes
  What “success” looks like in their own terms
• Workarounds
  The cobbled-together solutions they rely on now (YouTube, internal wikis, vendor materials, AI tools, the one colleague who actually reads the regs, etc.)
• Anxieties
  Where people feel genuine risk or opportunity, not just mild curiosity

When you hear a physician say, “I mostly just ask the rep and hope for the best,” or an accountant say, “I copied a template I found online and prayed it would pass muster,” that’s the sound of demand. Not for another one-hour Webinar, but for something that actually reduces risk or increases performance.

You won’t get that from a checkbox survey.

Ask a Few Better Questions at Scale

Qualitative interviews are essential, but at some point you need to move beyond anecdotes. That doesn’t require an elaborate study. It just requires asking better questions of a broader group.

Most continuing education surveys look like this:

• Which of the following topics interest you?
• How likely are you to attend a course on X, Y, Z?

Those questions tell you what people are willing to click on. They do not tell you where demand is strongest.

A more useful approach involves translating what you heard in interviews into outcome statements and then asking people to rate each one on two dimensions: importance and how well it’s being met today.

For example:

• “Minimize the time it takes me to translate new guidelines into what I actually do day-to-day.”
• “Reduce the risk that my use of AI tools will be judged unprofessional or non-compliant.”
• “Increase the share of my work that is higher-margin advisory rather than low-margin compliance.”
• “Reduce the stress and uncertainty I feel when my CE records are audited.”

For each, you ask:

• How important is this to you in your work? (1–10)
• How satisfied are you with how well this is handled today? (1–10)

Where you see “very important” and “poorly handled,” you’re looking at unmet demand.

You’ll almost always find the following:

• Credits themselves are of medium importance and reasonably well served.
• Risk, performance, and transition issues (into leadership, into advisory, into AI-enabled practice) are of high importance and unevenly served at best.

Those are the cracks where a new kind of offer can wedge itself in.

If your next “needs assessment” is just a list of topics with Likert scales, ignore whatever it tells you. It’s not measuring what matters.

Scan the Edges of Your Market

Two groups are especially interesting if you’re hunting for non-obvious demand:

1. People already living in the future
2. People who barely buy from you—or not at all

The first group are the ones who are already experimenting with things everyone else is just talking about:

• The practice that has built its own internal AI guidelines and workflows
• The firm that has aggressively automated basic compliance and now treats CPE as a strategic investment in advisory capabilities
• The professional who is visibly out in front on climate, ESG, or other emerging risk areas

They’ve had to solve problems before the rest of the market even noticed those problems existed.

Ask them:

• “What have you had to figure out that nobody helped you with?”
• “What did you build for your team that others keep asking you about?”
• “Where do you feel pain now that you suspect others will feel in a couple of years?”

The second group—noncustomers and minimal customers—are the people who prove that your current offers aren’t as essential as you’d like to believe:

• Professionals who meet requirements using free or ultra-cheap sources
• Employers who have built their own internal training and send people to you only when they have to
• Younger professionals who engage with online communities, YouTube, and AI tools but never quite get around to joining or buying

Ask them:

• “When you really need to get up to speed on something important, what do you do?”
• “Why don’t you use [your organization] for that? What gets in the way?”
• “Under what conditions, if any, would you gladly pay—or ask your employer to pay—for help?”

Between the lead users and the noncustomers, you’ll see two things:

• Problems that are starting at the edges but will move toward the center
• Problems that are so poorly served by your current offerings that people would rather improvise than buy from you

That’s far more useful than yet another “Our overall satisfaction score is 4.3 out of 5” evaluation report.

Turning Insight into Non-Obvious Offerings

Once you’ve done even a modest version of the above, you’ll have a short list of jobs and outcomes that meet the following criteria:

• Very important
• Poorly served
• Likely to become more painful as larger shifts (e.g., AI, climate, regulation, payment models) play out

The temptation at this point is to go straight back to what you already know: “Great, let’s build a course on that.”

Sometimes that’s fine. More often, you need to stop thinking in terms of individual events and start thinking in terms of solutions.

A few examples to make that more concrete.

1. From Credits to Coverage

If you hear a lot of anxiety about audits, regulatory reviews, and documentation, the job is not “Earn 40 credits.” The job is “Never fail an audit and never be surprised.”

Instead of another Webinar series, you might create an annual “compliance coverage plan” that includes the following:

• Planning and reminders so people aren’t scrambling at the end of a cycle
• Centralized tracking and documentation
• Templates, checklists, and a quick-response help desk
• Audit simulation or review for employers
• CE built in, but as a means to an end, not the main selling point

You’re selling peace of mind and reduced risk. Credits come along for the ride.

2. From Courses to Performance

If you hear firms and employers worrying about margins, throughput, and quality, the job is “Improve the performance of my team,” not “Keep everybody technically up to date.”

Here, you might design the following:

• Role-specific pathways that tie learning to concrete performance metrics (error rates, turnaround times, advisory revenue, patient outcomes)
• Bundled “competency as a service” offers for employers that include learning, assessments, simple dashboards, and reports they can show regulators, boards, or clients

Again, CE is part of the package, but the demand is for improved performance that can be shown to someone who cares.

3. From Content to Credible Transition Support

If you keep hearing about people wanting to move into leadership, into advisory, or into emerging domains like AI and climate, the job is “Make a credible professional transition,” not “Get familiar with the basics.”

Possible responses include selective cohorts or micro-fellowships that offer the following:

• A structured path
• Real projects
• Feedback from respected practitioners
• Some form of signal (credential, endorsement, visible recognition) that actually matters in the market

What people are buying there is identity and status: “I’m one of the people who is leading our AI transition,” not just “I took a course on AI.”

Of course, all of this can still carry CME or CPE. But if you design from the job and the outcome, you stop treating credit hours as the product and start treating them as one feature of something more valuable.

Start Small, But Stop Guessing

None of this requires a massive research budget or a heroic reinvention of your learning business. It does require a different posture.

Concretely, you could do the following over the next 90 days:

1. Run 10 to 15 serious interviews.
   • Talk to a mix of highly engaged users, reluctant users, a couple of employers, and a few people who don’t buy from you.
   • Focus on last-time stories, workarounds, and anxieties.
2. Turn what you hear into a short list of outcomes.
   • Develop 10 to 20 statements about what people are actually trying to achieve or avoid.
   • Ask a broader group to rate importance and how well each is handled today.
3. Pick one promising job and build a very small experiment around it.
   • Create a one-page concept sheet.
   • Call a handful of lead users and employers to pressure-test.
   • Develop a simple landing page or e-mail offer that asks for a real commitment: time, money, or both.

If nobody will commit, you’ve learned something useful relatively cheaply—the demand isn’t there yet, or you haven’t articulated the job in a way that resonates.

If people lean in—especially employers—you’ve just found a pocket of demand that does not depend on winning the race to offer the cheapest credit.

In mature markets, that’s about as close to a competitive advantage as you get.

And, if you’re in a world where CME, CPE, or generic professional development has become a commodity, that shift—from credits to real jobs and outcomes—is probably the only way you’re going to move the needle on reach, revenue, and impact over the long term.

About the Author

Jeff Cobb is a co-founder of Leading Learning and a co-founder and managing director of Tagoras, the company behind Leading Learning. He has nearly three decades of experience working as a consultant, researcher, author, and entrepreneur in the market for adult lifelong learning and has witnessed firsthand how it has evolved over that time period. Jeff is also the founder and host of Learning Revolution, a site that supports entrepreneurial subject matter experts. You can find out more about him on the Tagoras and Learning Revolution Web sites.

The post Beyond Credits: Finding Hidden Demand in a Commoditized Education Market appeared first on Leading Learning.

Unsure about AI guardrails, AI data risks, or which artificial intelligence project to pick first? You’re not alone.

Tori Miller Liu, president and CEO of the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM), talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about treating artificial intelligence initiatives as data initiatives, picking one to three practical use cases that augment people (without replacing them), writing a lightweight AI usage policy that’s easily understandable and updatable, and balancing mission and margin with a simple product profitability lens. They also touch on how AIIM’s portfolio supports information leaders who are turning messy, unstructured content into fuel for generative AI—and improved performance.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] If you’re grappling with how to start or how to continue responsible AI use in your learning business, this episode can help. If you’re unsure about guardrails, worried about data risk, or struggling to pick the right first project, you’re not alone.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:31] This episode, number 465, features my conversation with Tori Miller Liu, president and CEO of the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM). She’s very passionate about collaboration with people, collaboration with technology, and how people can collaborate effectively with technology. AIIM helps organizations turn messy, unstructured information into fuel for performance, and Tori brings a pragmatic, personal lens to AI adoption.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:00] Tori talks about why data access and data quality are the real gating factors, how to pick one to three concrete AI use cases that augment people rather than replace them, and why a lightweight AI usage policy you can revisit beats a 12-month strategy document.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:19] Tori and I also talk about mission versus margin trade-offs, product profitability, and how AIIM’s portfolio supports its learners.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:28] In short, there’s lots in this episode to help you take action, so let’s roll the interview with Tori Miller Liu.

About the Association for Intelligent Information Management

Celisa Steele: [00:01:41] For listeners who may not be familiar with the Association for Intelligent Information Management, give us a short version of what AIIM does and the problem it exists to solve or the resource it exists to be.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:01:56] We were founded in 1944—recently celebrated our 80th anniversary—and we are a nonprofit organization that serves information leaders in over 67 countries around the world. Our vision is to create a world where every organization can benefit from information management. For those who are not as familiar with that terminology, information management is the management typically of unstructured and semi-structured data. That’s what people might call “dirty data” that’s typically outside of your tidy databases. E-mails, invoices, contracts, engineering schematics, text messages, social media posts, even videos and audio—that’s all unstructured data. These days, it is absolutely the fuel for generative AI. It’s gotten quite a bit more focus in the last three years than it had before that. But folks have been doing unstructured data management since before even the 1940s, since the establishment of our organization, and it started with records management and archivists, but it’s expanded well beyond that.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:01] Tell us a little bit about how you came to lead AIIM and the path that got you there.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:03:08] I started with AIIM in November 2022. And I should mention that AIIM looks at the practice of information management through the lens of technology. We’re very, very focused on artificial intelligence and automation. AIIM, when they were looking for a new CEO, specifically wanted someone with a technology background, and my background happens to be in IT. I was formerly a chief information officer for an association, so that was a natural fit. And I’ve been really pleased and happy to help AIIM grow. We help people understand this landscape of information management through certification, resources, research, and training. It’s all that kind of stuff that I loved doing as a CIO that I now get to help our members with.

AIIM’s Learning Portfolio

Celisa Steele: [00:03:52] You mentioned certification, training. Go ahead and give us a fuller picture of what AIIM offers in terms of education and learning resources.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:04:05] We have a Certified Information Professional certification, and that’s a certification that’s for experienced technology-focused practitioners in the unstructured data management space. For our events and educational programs, we have our hallmark program, which is our annual AI+IM Global Summit. That’s a recently redesigned and rebranded event that serves a 400-person group of individuals who want to explore the intersection between AI and information management, and we do that through interactive sessions, hands-on workshops, and also cohort-based learning. We have about 40 to 45 cohorts that are meeting throughout that annual event, and they also meet beforehand and afterwards. It’s a very interesting educational program.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:04:55] Beyond that, we have regional events. We have forums that are day-long, problem-solving events that feature roundtables and solution mapping. And then we have regional exchanges that are two-hour roundtable events that are focused on critical trends. We also have a wealth of virtual programs. We do live virtual training workshops around M365 (Microsoft 365) and also preparing for our certification and the exam. We also do Webinars and insight series that explore critical trends in the space. And we have an online training library and several different certificates, including an AI certificate, and about 45-plus and growing on-demand courses as part of that library.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:37] It sounds like a pretty robust set of offerings. Tell me about the size of the team that is behind making all of this possible.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:05:46] Small. We’re a staff of five. As part of my role as CEO, I did have to lead the organization through some transformation. We’ve reorganized/reduced workforce over the last three years. Now we have a very efficient and stellar group of staff that are doing a ton of work in keeping a big ship moving with that skeleton crew.

An Intentional Shift to Peer-Based Learning

Celisa Steele: [00:06:12] That’s impressive to hear all that you were able to outline in terms of what AIIM offers and then to hear that that’s being done with five staff behind it. Impressive. The other thing that I heard when you were talking through those offerings is that emphasis on collaboration. It sounds like you have a lot of these cohorts; you have these round tables. Prior to you joining AIIM, has that been something in the DNA of these folks who work in information management, or has that been more of an intentional shift towards more peer-based learning in more recent years?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:06:47] I would say it’s really an intentional shift and probably a reaction. It’s ironic. While we talk a lot about AI and automation—you could say we’re pro-AI; I’m pro-automation, of course—we also understand that the way that you learn about emerging technologies and feel comfortable with them is often through human-to-human, peer-to-peer learning and understanding and being able to talk through case studies and talk to peers and crowdsource your problems. It’s been a very, very deliberate shift over the last three years to make sure that that’s at the heart of all our educational programming. We also do community conversations on an informal basis, but, on a formal basis, we found a lot of success with virtual live training workshops and all the roundtables and cohort-based learning.

The Mission/Margin Tension

Celisa Steele: [00:07:38] For many learning businesses that are part of an association, there can be a bit of a tension between mission and margin, especially when it comes to education offerings. Where does AIIM sit in terms of how you think about the education and learning that you provide, in terms of supporting mission versus generating revenue? Which one is more important?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:08:02] Our organization has been in a period of financial transformation, and we’re finally beyond that hurdle and in a position where we can stop worrying about keeping the lights on and focus on thriving. That said, we didn’t have the luxury of not thinking about product profitability, and a lot of small associations, even the large ones, have been in a similar situation. I think if you’re so focused on mission that you’re not focused on whether or not your business is healthy and functioning, you’re delusional. The business model of constantly eating into reserves is not sustainable, and part of our responsibility as association executives is not to just fulfill the mission but also to protect the legacy of this organization and its sustainability. So I’m a little torn. We’re a mission-first organization. We always ask, when we’re introducing new programs, “Is this advancing our mission, fulfilling our mission?” But if there’s no profitability, we are not doing it. We’re not moving forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:04] That sounds like it’s part of the initial discussion around standing up a product—is it supporting mission, and is there a business model that can support it? Talk a little bit about, once a product’s out there in the market, if it turns out to not, perhaps, be bringing in the revenue, is AIIM intentionally looking at things like sunsetting or periodically reviewing the portfolio to say maybe we need to recall some of these things?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:09:27] We do, yes. Our board and finance committee have been instrumental in helping me do that. We do have a product profitability matrix, where we’re looking at both the direct and indirect costs of the products that we produce, and it’s a pain to constantly update, but it is helpful in at least starting that dialogue. We do have one or two products in our portfolio that aren’t necessarily meeting our profit margin that we would want, but the board has at least intentionally had a discussion of, “No, this is core to our mission. We do need to see if we can improve the profitability, but we are unwilling to sunset this.” And, in other cases, we have stopped programs because they were not worth the squeeze. “The juice is not worth the squeeze,” as one of my old bosses used to say.

AI Aspiration Versus AI Reality

Celisa Steele: [00:10:15] You’ve mentioned AI and how that has changed a bit of the focus in your area of information management, how that’s become so much more important in the AI era. I know you’ve written and spoken a lot about AI and about how there’s AI aspiration, but then there’s this gap between that aspiration and reality. What do you see as the biggest barriers to being able to use AI in the way that you think organizations should be? Is it governance, skills, fear, or something else?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:10:53] I appreciate all the thought leadership that’s occurred around shifting culture and changing mindsets and change management around AI. While I appreciate it, and I agree with that, people are fundamentally critical to successful technology implementations. As AIIM’s president and CEO, I’m really focused on a paramount obstacle, which is data quality and data access. When we lack access to content for AI, that’s huge. If you can’t put data in a large language model to train it, then you’re already shooting yourself in the foot. The other side of that is, when you’re permitting access to content that should not be permitted, you are jeopardizing your association.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:11:40] Organizations have been rolling out tools like Microsoft Copilot, which is a great tool. That’s one of the biggest hurdles that you have to overcome—that it’s shining a spotlight on security issues. And then the third thing, is your data even good quality? Are you missing metadata? Is it an old version? The funny thing about all this is none of this is a new problem. We’ve been doing data analysis for over a decade now. And, as organizations were rolling out tools like Tableau and Power BI, that was shining a spotlight on content access and content quality. Really, what AI has done is point an even bigger spotlight on those preexisting issues, and so there does need to be quite a bit of attention paid to data.

Data Is Essential for AI

Celisa Steele: [00:12:31] There needs to be attention paid to data. How does an organization go about doing that? They want to be able to embrace what AI can offer. They come to the realization that their data isn’t in the best shape. What are some of the practical steps or ways that an organization can start addressing that?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:12:49] First of all, don’t allow yourself to get paralyzed by the magnitude of the task. It’s unreasonable for a leader to come in and say, “Oh, well, data is the problem, so fix all of the data.” That is not attainable unless you have a ton of resources to back up that challenge. It’s really about managing scope. With an AI project, you want to identify a use case first, look at the data that you need to be successful with that use case, and manage the scope. Then it becomes a much smaller dilemma to deal with. You can learn from that experience. You can learn from saying, for this particular AI project—maybe it’s, say, a matchmaking AI system, where I’m going to give it all of my membership data, and I am going to give it all of the sessions for our conference, for instance, or all of the interest areas for our members, and now I have three sets of data that I want to look at, and I want to help match people who might have similar interests.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:13:51] That’s a much more manageable project than saying, “Oh, I need to look at all my finance data.” “I need to look at all my publications data, events data.” Etc. Keep it small, keep it focused, and then focus on how good is good enough. You don’t need the data to be perfect for AI, but it does need some fundamental things, especially around metadata. It needs to know, is this data the most current version? There might be other metadata fields that you need populated, depending on the circumstance and the use case. But there are consultants that can help you with that, if all of that still seems overwhelming. And there are also certainly quite a number of certifications and data certifications that you could look at to help build those skill sets and understanding, not just from AIIM, but groups like DAMA [Data Administration Management Association). There are lots of groups that offer really good training that can help you feel a little more confident.

Enthusiasm and Skepticism Around AI

Celisa Steele: [00:14:42] You also mentioned security and risk when you were talking about some of those barriers to AI implementation and getting to where organizations might aspire to be. Recognizing that there are those risks in potentially sharing data that shouldn’t be shared with the AI, all of those things, but then also seeing the potential for what AI can do, where do you put yourself on that spectrum between AI enthusiast and AI skeptic—you can name the endpoints on that spectrum with other terms if you prefer—but how do you describe how you like to think about AI and your opinion of it?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:15:18] I don’t know if this is an option on this spectrum, but I’m probably an enthusiastic skeptic. I’m very pro-AI. Fundamentally, it can help us make better decisions and help us process and make use of really large sets of data that were not humanly possible for us to make any use of before. When it comes to diagnostic care in healthcare, or when it comes to helping us make decisions about an association—of all these proposals, which proposal helps us most meet this critical learning objective—those are all cases where it’s a ton of data, and it’s great for us to have AI as a tool. I’m very skeptical when it’s AI replacing human creativity. In a responsible AI world—and I hope we’re investing in implementing responsible AI—I think humans are responsible for providing oversight and context.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:16:21] I also think that my biases are probably against AI replacing human creativity. I have a background in the arts, so I don’t love when AI is replacing writing, film, audio, or images. Humans are best, still, at providing that level of creativity and ingenuity. But I am skeptical also for implementations, and that’s the role of information managers and data managers. I love that the Project Management Institute (PMI) talks about every AI project is also a data project. Every AI project needs someone who is curating and stewarding the data, and they are best as skeptics. You want them to be skeptical about the quality of the data; otherwise, they’re not really fulfilling the role on that project. I think having that healthy dose of skepticism around content quality, content accessibility, system interoperability is healthy when you’re trying to implement successful AI.

The Costs of Not Consciously Thinking About AI Adoption

Celisa Steele: [00:17:19] There’s a lot of potential for AI to help organizations with what they’re trying to achieve. You’ve been throwing out some examples, which are great to think about—the potential ways that an organization might make use of AI. If you think about an organization that might still be on the sidelines, maybe dabbling a little bit in AI but not in any sort of systematic or full-fledged way in trying to explore what it might do, what do you see as the cost that comes with sitting on the sidelines and not trying to think about AI adoption at this point?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:17:58] There’s a part of me that feels like it’s so naive that people think that it’s even a choice of if. It’s a choice of when and how. You’re not delaying the decision or deciding we’re just not going to use AI. You’re just running the risk of inviting shadow AI into your organization. Your workforce is going to adopt the use of AI, whether you like it or not. Your members are going to adopt the use of AI. I even had a member a couple weeks ago that—and this wasn’t a bad thing; I’m not judging them for doing this—took one of our research papers and created an AI application to help them better understand the research. It was a really interesting dilemma. But that’s an example of shadow AI. And I don’t want to take us off course talking about how I managed that, but it’s going to happen whether or not you like it. Couple that with your vendors are already rolling out AI features, and, in some cases, they’re not giving IT leaders a choice in whether or not those AI features are exposed to users or not.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:18:53] The big point is you saying, “Well, we’re not ready for AI” is just you delaying the inevitable, and then the problem is, when you’re lacking direction and intentionality, there’s a cost for that. The cost is going to come first and foremost through an impact on employee satisfaction and member satisfaction, which is eventually going to trickle to market share. It’s essentially the equivalent of—let’s time-travel back to the mid-90s—if your association was saying, “Well, we’re not going to create a Web site.” Eventually, we all did, and you lost some market share while you were dragging your feet on creating a Web site. I think that’s going to repeat itself. We have been here before with Web sites, with social media. I don’t think, fundamentally, it’s all that different from historical scenarios.

AIIM’s Future Challenges and Opportunities

Celisa Steele: [00:19:48] When you think about the next 12 to 24 months and you’re thinking about AIIM and AIIM’s future, what are the opportunities and the challenges—which may or may not be tied to AI and all that we’ve been talking about—what are those challenges and opportunities that you’re thinking about? And then also adding that lens of education and learning, how might that impact what you’re offering to the market in terms of your learning portfolio?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:20:17] Our biggest challenge right now is our research is showing that the practitioners themselves are changing, so we’re moving away from a lot of the traditional titles of records manager and document manager. The titles are all over the place. I have members who are engineers and developers now. And the organizations are also all over the place, so a lot of our members are no longer in legal or inside an insular, little records management team. They’re in the IT, marketing, or HR teams. That’s all to say the state of the practice is really changing. They’re being pulled into AI projects. We’re looking at what’s happening to the people that we serve and recognizing that they’re transforming from information managers to information leaders in the AI era.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:21:10] It’s a much different educational challenge to train someone on “Here are best practices in information governance and records management” to “Here is how we prepare you to sit at the table of an AI project and be that data logistician, that data steward.” A lot of our certification and education improvements and enhancements are wrapped around that. It started with us rolling out an AI certificate in the past 12 months, but it’s going to continue with how we update our certification exam, what new courses we introduce. It’s even impacted the education strategy that my staff has developed for 2026—to make sure that the education that we do is focused on how do you prepare that person for that seat at the table of an AI project.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:59] That’s great. It seems like you have a lot of clarity, despite the fact that there’s so much shifting and changing in the roles, but this idea of, okay, imagine this person at that table helping make decisions about those AI projects, that then allows you to step back and understand what education, what learning, what resources do they need to, and then you’re making those available. It sounds really smart and on target.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:22:21] I want that sound bite: “It sounds like you have a lot of clarity.” I can play it on repeat in the morning as morning affirmations. Because when you’re doing it, it feels like you’re swimming in chaos. So I need Celisa saying, “Sounds like you have a lot of clarity,” and I’ll just play that 30 times to make myself feel better.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:39] Great. Glad I could give you that.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:22:40] Thank you.

How to Become More AI-Ready

Celisa Steele: [00:22:42] Again, if we have organizations, wherever they might be in their AI journey at this point, but if there’s something they could do in the short term—next week, in the next seven days, or so—what is it that you would recommend that an organization do to help them get a little bit more AI-ready in that near term?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:23:04] I’ll keep it simple for folks because it’s so easy to get overwhelmed with all this nonsense. Challenge yourselves, if you haven’t already, to come up with one to three good use cases, focusing on complementing human potential and not replacing it. That would be step one. You could do that with your leadership team, with your board, whomever. The other big thing is—if you don’t already have an AI usage policy—do some research into that. Again, you can keep this really simple. I am firmly against comprehensive strategies and comprehensive policies around AI because it’s going to change, and it’s going to adapt. This technology is moving so quickly. If you’re investing 12 to 18 months in developing a strategy or developing a usage policy, it’s wasted effort. So keep it really simple. Challenge yourselves to put down the very basics of what you need to feel like you’re responsibly implementing AI and have that conversation with folks.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:24:07] I did, over the summer, work on a facilitation guide with Alex Mouw with Amazon and Thad Lurie with the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and it’s literally a conversation guide—this is how you have conversations with stakeholders, your board, and your staff about AI. You can download that. I’m happy to share it with folks. But there are also other resources out there. It’s really about having the conversations. And then, beyond that, once you have use cases identified, once you have the guardrails around how you want to approach AI, you can start thinking about AI maturity and readiness. And that comes with looking at the available data, looking at its quality, looking at its accessibility, and focusing on your staff. Do they have the data literacy and information literacy to advance your use cases, to make use of AI or automation to accomplish the goals? I always worry that still feels really complicated, but it’s not. You can talk to folks like me. It’s not as bad as you think it is.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:11] That conversation guide is an excellent resource, and we can make sure to make that available to listeners. I might be misremembering the number of points, but you also shared AIIM’s AI usage policy at some point, and it’s five points or something. It’s a very short thing.

Tori Miller Liu: [00:25:27] Yes, it’s so simple. We had to update it again. I just updated it with my staff four months ago because, even though it was only a year old, it was already out of date. This stuff is changing so rapidly.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:40] Just out of curiosity, do you remember what you tweaked, or what changed in the policy?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:25:44] Yes, before it was binary around…. When we first came up with it, it was really early days of ChatGPT. This was early 2023 when we were thinking about this, and we originally said, “We’re going to disclose any time we use AI.” That is not a sustainable task or a requirement of my staff because now it bleeds into the work. We don’t copy and paste AI. It’s really hard to distinguish how much of this was AI editing versus human authorship. It’s impossible. So that we removed. Unless we can confirm this is 85-percent AI—then we’ll probably disclose it.

Tori’s Approach to Her Own Learning and Development

Celisa Steele: [00:26:29] This is the Leading Learning Podcast, and so, when we have a guest on, it’s always fun, at least for me, to get to ask them how they tend to approach their own lifelong learning. Tori, do you have practices, habits, or resources that you like to use to help you continue to learn and grow?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:26:50] I like treating association management almost like a scientific or academic discipline. For me, that means that—even if we don’t have scientific journals for association management—I’m seeking out new research and thought leadership almost as a daily practice. That comes from ASAE Collaborate, Associations Now, CEO Update, Association Charrette, LinkedIn, anywhere where I can get it. And I find it interesting. For me, I’m too chaotic to say, “Oh, I’m going to spend an hour every day doing this.” It’s almost like every time I pick my phone up, I’m like, “Oh, let’s see what people are talking about now.” But I do it on a daily basis. And then, beyond that, I have challenged myself for the last three years to set one big educational goal, and sometimes that ends up in me getting a certificate in something. This year, I was focused on, specifically, executive leadership in uncertain times, which directed where I was spending my own professional development dollars. But, in prior years, I’ve gotten a certificate in objectives and key results. Last year, I got a certificate in facilitation. Those are the big goals that I like to set annually.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:06] We’ve covered a fair amount of ground in our time. If you were to point listeners to one specific thing—or two or three things—that we’ve touched on, what is it that you would hope they would walk away with from listening to this conversation?

Tori Miller Liu: [00:28:21] Three things. One, and probably the most important, is, for associations to continue to thrive, we have to focus on what makes us unique in the AI era, and that means human connections, human creativity, and human-generated content. First and foremost, focus on that, and then that can feed into what’s the appropriate use case for AI and all that good stuff. The second one is keep it simple with AI. Like I said, if you’re doing the usual governance stance where you’re spending 12 months developing strategies and plans, that’s not going to work. Keep it agile, but keep it responsible. And then remember that responsible AI starts with data and information literacy. You need to understand data to be able to be successful with AI but also to be responsible with AI.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:15] We’re not done quite yet—stick around for a recap of this conversation with Tori Miller Liu.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:20] Check out the AIIM Web site, the AI conversation guide that Tori mentioned, and her profile on LinkedIn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:33] If you got value from this episode, please share it with a colleague or leave a rating and a review. Those help others find the show and support the work we’re doing with the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:29:44] Tori did a very nice job of summarizing three key takeaways, so I won’t reiterate those. Instead I’ll say that I appreciated her reminder that AI efforts are really data efforts, and having access, governance, and a mindset of “good enough” quality for specific AI use cases are what are going to enable real results.

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:06] I’ll echo Tori’s skepticism around AI replacing human creativity. Like Tori, you and I have backgrounds in the arts, and I’d prefer for songs and poems to remain human. So I appreciated her suggestion of picking one to three practical use cases where AI augments and doesn’t replace people, doing something with them, and learning from them.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:31] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• AI in the Learning Business Maturity Model
• Building AI Capacity with Amith Nagarajan
• CE in 2030: Strategic Shifts and Emerging Realities
• Curiosity, Clarity, and Courage with Lowell Aplebaum

The post Responsible, Pragmatic AI with Tori Miller Liu appeared first on Leading Learning.

Artificial intelligence often magnifies what’s already happening in an organization. If your metadata is a mess, an AI recommendation engine might help you give prospective customers recommendations faster, but those recommendations aren’t likely to be effective.

In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Celisa Steele and Jeff Cobb place AI in the Learning Business Maturity Model to help you pick the next move for where your learning business is. While AI can’t fix an immature learning business, used thoughtfully, AI can help a learning business on its path to greater maturity.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] Dr. Philippa Hardman, AKA Dr. Phil, has said of AI, “If early 2025 was the age of rapid adoption [for learning], late 2025 is looking like the age of constructive AI pessimism….” And I feel like “constructive pessimism” does describe what we’re seeing with learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:37] Yes, we do seem to be past any artificial-intelligence-as-silver-bullet kind of thinking. And arguably we never should have been there. AI is a technology. It’s a tool that can be used for many things, and it can be used well or less well.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:52] Right, and AI often magnifies what’s already happening, what’s already in place. If your metadata is a mess or your catalog of courses is cluttered with offerings that should have been sunset years ago, then an AI recommendation engine might help you give prospective customers recommendations faster, but those recommendations won’t necessarily highlight the best path for the learners or result in any higher sales.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:19] Today we want to talk about AI and its use in learning businesses by placing AI inside our Learning Business Maturity Model. We believe this can help you pick the next move for where your learning business is.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:34] AI is not going to fix an immature learning business, but AI, used thoughtfully, can help a learning business on its path to greater maturity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:43] So here’s what we’d like to do in this episode. First, we’ll offer a short Learning Business Maturity Model refresher with stage-by-stage AI plays mixed in.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:54] Then we’re going to look at base requirements that you’ll need to address before making progress with AI, and we’ll talk about a few pitfalls to watch out for.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:04] We’ll close with immediate steps you can take plus a rolling plan for the next 60 to 90 days.

Learning Business Maturity Model Refresher

Celisa Steele: [00:02:11] So let’s talk about the Learning Business Maturity Model as a quick refresher. This encompasses four stages of maturity across five domains. The stages are Static, Reactive, Proactive, and, ultimately, Innovative. The domains covered are Leadership, Strategy, Capacity, Portfolio, and Marketing. AI shows up in all five of those domains, and the use of AI influences how mature a learning business is, whether it’s stuck in that Static stage or whether it’s able to advance to the Innovative stage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:49] We’ll offer some quick descriptions of the stages. Just hearing these may help you self-place while you listen, but we also have an assessment that you can take to gauge your learning business’s maturity.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:02] We do. Be sure to check out the show notes. There you’ll be able to get access to fuller descriptions of the stages and the domains. And you’ll also be able to find out how to access that self-assessment that Jeff just mentioned. But, for now, we’ll do short descriptions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:21] The first is Static. The static learning business primarily maintains past practices, with limited response to changing learner needs or market conditions. At this stage, processes may not be strategically aligned to the changes occurring in your market. Growth efforts tend to be ad hoc, and opportunities for innovation, operational improvement, and learner engagement may be flat out overlooked.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:48] That’s the first stage. The next stage is Reactive. A reactive learning business is actively responding to market conditions, but it’s often doing so in a short-term, tactical way rather than thinking long-range strategy. At this stage, organizations may meet immediate needs and do that fairly effectively, but they may struggle to proactively shape offerings, build long-term relationships, or consistently align what they’re offering in terms of learning with their broader strategic goals.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:22] At the next stage, a proactive learning business has shifted away from primarily reacting to market conditions and moved toward a more deliberate and strategic approach to managing and growing programs and services. At this stage, an organization has already established fundamental processes and is optimizing its offerings with foresight, innovation, and efficiency.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:46] And then the fourth and final stage is the Innovative stage. Once you have an innovative learning business, this organization is really leading. It’s setting trends. It’s continuously innovating, evolving to meet learner and market needs. At this stage, the organization has a strong foundation of processes, and it’s actively shaping the field or profession or industry that it serves through its offerings, strategic foresight, and collaborative ecosystem, where it’s trying to position learning as a core driver of growth and impact. Keep those stages in mind as we now talk about how AI use might look at each of those stages.

AI Plays for Each Stage

Static

Celisa Steele: [00:05:35] At the Static stage, AI tends to be used, if it’s used at all, in isolated instances, and it’s primarily used to solve immediate problems rather than being part of a broader, longer-term strategy. We’ve got sporadic AI adoption—no real, clear strategy or integration into the core functions of the learning business. Maybe AI is used to address surface-level issues, but it’s not being used to drive more fundamental business operations or transformation. And even though AI might be providing some data or helping a learning business to assess a situation, decision-making is still largely manual. AI data might be one input along with others.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:22] All of this means that AI tools operate in silos, which is characteristic of static learning businesses in general. Those AI tools are being added to the silos, and that leads to inconsistent results. There’s a lack of AI expertise among staff, and that results in suboptimal implementation. And there is no long-term AI adoption roadmap.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:44] In terms of what AI might be doing in a static learning business, it might be doing things like automating transcription. If you have recorded educational sessions, Webinars, or instructor-led online classes, you might be using a tool—if you’re at this Static stage—to capture what’s being said, create automatic AI-driven transcripts. Possibly you might also be making use of something like a chatbot to help with customer service inquiries, but odds are, if you’re doing that, it’s probably more internally focused and used rather than being something you forefront for any of your customers or learners. You might have some data analytics and data dashboards that are offering some AI-generated insights. Maybe you’re also making use of AI to help with some aspects of content curation. Maybe it’s helping suggest tags for learning materials, for example, and so you’re getting some auto-tagging happening.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:42] Celisa, you were somewhat cautious in saying “might” before you went through that list of potential uses. Call me cynical if you want, but I think that most static learning businesses aren’t doing much more than that automated transcription. Maybe they’re using an AI-powered chatbot to help with customer service, but, in the case of learning businesses embedded in associations, for example, that bot is often owned and managed by another part of the association, like Membership. We know in general from our research—the data we got back last year and, so far, this year—that a lot of organizations are either not discussing AI at this point or are discussing it but have no clear plans for implementation. So far, that’s about half of the people responding to our research this year, and these static businesses are almost certainly going to fall in that 50 percent.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:37] You’re talking about research that we do on an annual basis to look at the learning business landscape. We’ve talked about that research in past episodes. We’ll definitely be talking about the data we’re gathering currently in a future episode, so stay tuned for more about that. And, yes, it’s absolutely worth pointing out that a static learning business may not be using AI at all. For a static learning business, AI use goes from zero up to what I mentioned. And most of those use cases that I was mentioning, even if they are in play, it’s probably largely because those AI features are baked into platforms that the organization is already using. Transcription of an online meeting might be because it’s easy to have an automated AI transcript created. Or, if you have data dashboards that you look at, the system behind that probably is making use of AI. It’s a little bit of a hidden use of AI. You might not even, as a static learning business, be totally aware of the use of AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:43] So you’re not, in that case, probably fully benefiting from it. Part of becoming a more mature organization is becoming a more conscious organization and being intentional about having access to these tools and using them. To continue with AI in that static learning business context, a static learning business might have, as a goal, things like establishing guardrails and looking for one widespread efficiency win with AI if it is going to bring that AI in. To do that, you might do something like create a short, plain-language AI policy. Certainly a good thing for an organization to have at this point. Identify safe tools and make that list available to the relevant stakeholders. Offer some internal training—maybe something on prompt hygiene or a do/do-not session.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:35] You might establish a dedicated AI working group or task force to explore AI applications. You could begin cleaning up your metadata. You mentioned metadata earlier, Celisa. You need good solid data to use with AI. It doesn’t have to be all your metadata but some. Clean up your titles, your summaries, your tags for your top products. Pick a number of them or a percentage of them that you’re going to tackle. You can begin tracking AI-generated insights on a more consistent and intentional basis for decision-making validation. And you might pilot AI-driven personalization in small-scale learning experiences. All aspirational things that a static learning business might want to try to strive for with AI.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:22] Yes, with all of these stages—from Static all the way up to Innovative—be thinking about how you’re going to measure and see what progress you’re making. Given what you were talking about, Jeff, at this point, at this stage, key performance indicators would be something like the percentage of staff trained on your AI policy, or you mentioned that do/do-not session. How many of your staff have attended a training like that? It might be that you’re looking at how we reduce response time if you deal with customer service inquiries about your learning products and services. Or we were talking about metadata—what percentage of your metadata has been verified and cleaned up?

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:08] A major message is, even at that Static level, just start engaging with AI at some level. Even if you’re not directly applying it to your learning programs or actively into how you’re running your learning business, just getting your staff, your volunteers experience with it. We’re big fans of Ethan Mollick, and he talks about needing to spend that initial ten hours with AI to get a feel for what it can do. That’s going to be a big step for a lot of organizations seeing the path beyond Static as a learning business. So that’s the Static level.

Reactive

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:41] Let’s talk about the Reactive level, the next stage in the maturity model. At the Reactive stage, AI adoption expands, at least in theory, to improve efficiency and automate repetitive processes. AI becomes that operational enhancer.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:00] At the Reactive stage, AI might help with things like automating some administrative or operational tasks. Maybe there are some standard e-mail responses that need to go out. That’s the kind of thing that AI might help with. Maybe AI is taking a look at your learning analytics, and that’s helping you make some decisions about what you offer. Again, that’s probably, at this stage, still AI playing a role and not yet being a real core driver of decisions but making sure that the AI insights are included in what you’re thinking about. You’re probably beginning to have AI tools integrated into some of processes at this Reactive stage, but you’re probably not yet fully connecting those AI tools to all of your processes.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:47] Some common uses, again, in a lot of cases, are going to be things that are baked into software and processes that organizations already have, but you may be becoming a little bit more intentional about it. You might have AI-driven recommendation engines that are suggesting content based on learner behavior. You might have AI-assisted LMS automation doing things like grading or feedback generation. AI-powered e-mail marketing personalization. Or basic AI-driven learning analytics to identify trends. Again, you might find all of these things already existing in platforms that you’re using, and you’re starting to take advantage of them.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:29] At this Reactive phase, to make a little bit more progress, a learning business might be trying to standardize what’s working. Where are they beginning to see some benefits from use of AI and AI tools? They might want to look at creating a roadmap that shows how the different AI-powered systems might feed into one another and become more integrated so that you’re better able to leverage the AI insights. You might begin to explore using AI for some adaptive learning. Is there a way that you can help personalize those learning experiences a bit based on what you know about the learner and the content that you have on hand? And then, certainly, a reactive learning business is going to be providing more training for staff. How can you help them get up to speed more fully on the tools that you already have in place specifically but also the general uses and possibilities of AI?

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:26] Some simple key performance indicators (KPIs) here—in addition to what we’ve already mentioned for Static—might include things like time to create your learning experiences. That might be the total time that’s required to create a particular learning experience, a number of hours. It also might be the length over time. Does it take one week, or does it take eight weeks to get something done? Has AI helped you to collapse that process? Or things like reduction of routine tasks. If you know it took ten steps to get something done before, and now you’re getting it done in six, that’s a gain.

Proactive

Celisa Steele: [00:14:29] We’ve talked about what AI can look like in static learning businesses and then in reactive learning businesses. Now we’re going to talk about stage three, Proactive. At this stage, organizations have begun to embed AI into their strategic decision-making processes. AI is playing a role in things like program design, personalization, and even business strategy. You’re making use of predictive analytics to drive learner retention, to even inform curriculum adjustments. And you’re using automation, powered by AI, to help with marketing, operations, and learner engagement.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:49] Yes, this Proactive stage is probably where AI really starts to sing, so to speak. When we hear about organizations that are at this point implementing AI in one way or another, and it’s showing up in our research, this is the type of role that AI is playing. Some common AI use cases are things like adaptive learning systems that tailor content dynamically to learner preferences. When we ask people how they’re going to use AI, being able to adapt to learners and provide that more personalized experience is always top of the list, and they’re starting to do it in this Proactive stage. Next would be AI-powered career path recommendations, based on skill gaps and industry trends. Another one would be predictive analytics that forecast learner retention. Are they going to be coming back? Course demand and pricing models even. AI-assisted instructional design, using it to do things like generate your first drafts of learning materials and even going beyond that in many cases—obviously looping in your subject matter experts in that process. Finally, AI-driven customer segmentation for targeted marketing strategies—making sure you’re reaching those right audiences, making them aware, driving conversion with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:05] And because AI is starting to sing in this phase, there are challenges or things to be aware of. I talked about constructive pessimism at the opening of the show. Being aware of some of the limitations or biases and making sure you’re addressing those. Thinking about ethics, bias, and compliance issues will be important at this phase because you are trying to rely on AI for some core and important things. You got to make sure that you’re doing that in an ethical way, that there’s not untoward bias in there, and that you are complying to whatever guidelines you need to comply to for your learning business. You want to make sure that the AI-generated insights are being used effectively for decision-making, that they’re not necessarily dictating the decision but that they’re being used to inform the decisions. Of course, there’s going to be some challenges to look at around scaling the solutions that you’re finding across your portfolio or throughout your learning business. This is about taking what’s been working and trying to institutionalize it and make sure that it is there and happening at scale.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:17] To advance in this stage with AI—and remember, at this stage, we’re talking about organizations that are reaching the point of being conscious and intentional in how they’re thinking about their maturity and the different domains in it—you’re going to want to look at integrating AI across all five domains and measuring the outcomes you’re getting. You want to implement AI governance frameworks to ensure ethical AI use. You’re going to want to invest in deeper AI-driven learner analytics and experience mapping. You’re going to want to develop AI-powered business models, such as AI-generated courses or AI-enhanced credentialing programs or AI experiences themselves. It may be something more like a custom GPT becomes your course environment rather than the traditional course or credential.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:11] In terms of what you’re measuring at this stage in those key performance indicators, you might be looking at things like, “Is our use of AI changing our completion stats? Are we seeing more learners complete? Are we seeing the satisfaction of learners improve? Are we converting more of our prospects into learners who sign up for and complete a learning experience? Are we seeing changes in the time-to-certification or the time-to-competency?” Whatever you’re measuring there, but looking at what is the larger-scale impact of the use of AI?

Innovative

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:45] So that’s that Proactive level. Finally, we get to the Innovative stage of the maturity model. To extend our metaphor, if AI is starting to sing in that proactive stage, this is where we start to hit four-part harmony. Things are really coming together here. In that Innovative stage, AI contributes to differentiation and, you guessed it, innovation. AI is central to business operations, product innovation, and competitive differentiation. At this point, you can use AI for things like autonomously identifying markets. You’ve given it the power to go out and do the research and find new opportunities for you. AI is going to be enhancing learner experiences through hyper-personalization, getting down to that individualized learning path that so many organizations are striving for right now. And then AI-driven insights are going to be used to continuously refine your business models and to drive your revenue growth.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:51] This could look like, in action, AI-generated course content that is adapting in real-time to learner progress. Back to your point about individualization, that course is responsive to what I, Celisa, am doing in that moment, and it’s adapting and giving me the just-right content for me. AI might be powering coaching or even mentoring systems. I don’t know how many folks out there are Duolingo users, but there’s the Lily video call feature now in Duolingo, and this is where you have on call someone who can respond in real time to you—an AI agent, but it’s someone to assist, to coach, to mentor in real time. You might be using AI-driven business intelligence to inform new product development. What products should you be developing, and what should those products look like? You’re leveraging AI to help with automating decision-making, especially lower-level, very clear decision-making, but also to help with the predictive modeling so that you’re not only making the right decision in the moment but you’re trying to think about, “In the future, where do we need to be, and what should we be doing now to make sure we’re in the right spot down the road?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:08] AI can easily take you through all sorts of scenario planning along those lines to play out what might happen with particular products and audiences. But, of course, this does come with challenges. You’re going to need to be able to do things like ensure that AI dependency doesn’t lead to a loss of human oversight. You need to keep humans in the equation there. You need to manage the risk of AI-driven automation errors. As you start to give up some control to AI, start to use AI agents more, you’ve got to have those mechanisms for checking for errors and then maintaining a balance between AI-driven efficiency and human-centric learning experiences. You’ve just got to keep the human in mind. You can’t create a learning experience that’s so efficient that it takes the inefficient human out of the equation.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:59] If you’re at this stage, if you’re an innovative learning business, to help advance your use of AI, you’re going to want to continue investing in AI research and AI development so that you can use that for ongoing innovation. You’re going to make sure that you have good policies in place that help govern your use of AI and help ensure that you’re using it in an ethical way, that you’re being as transparent as you need to be with stakeholders about how you’re using AI. And then you also want to be thinking about ecosystem partnerships and how can AI help you in extending your market influence and your reach through some of those partnerships. You might be doing scenario simulations for practice. You might be integrating some copilots with employers so that you are surfacing just-in-time resources. You might be leveraging those coaching experiences. There are a lot of ways at this point that AI use could play out once you’re at that Innovative stage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:01] And you want to continue to develop KPIs that are a match for this stage. Obviously, you can build on everything that we’ve talked about for the earlier stages. But you’re going to want to look to the percentage of revenue that’s coming from AI-enabled products as you start to introduce those products. You want to look at the renewal and the retention rates around those products and what AI is helping to drive. And you want to be able to measure demonstrable performance gains. If you’re starting to individualize those learning experiences, those pathways, what kind of performance gains is that resulting in? Of course, you’re going to want to use those in your forward-looking marketing.

Summary of AI Use at Different Stages of Maturity

Celisa Steele: [00:25:40] To summarize, the story of AI use in learning businesses moves from zero, if we want to start there…

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:47] …and we probably should start there because we know a lot of organizations are at zero right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:51] This is no conscious use of AI up to ad hoc use of AI, where it’s much more hit or miss or gets used sometimes but not by everyone. Then it moves to inconsistent use without clear goals at the less mature end. And then we’re moving towards much more consistent, embedded, strategic use of AI as we move towards the higher ends of maturity and up to that Innovative stage.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:16] The movement is from initial engagement to experimentation to operational enhancement to strategic support to playing a real role in differentiation and innovation for your learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:31] It’s important for us to acknowledge here that we don’t see doing nothing with AI as a viable option. Even if your learning business decides to do nothing with AI, AI still arrives. It’s going to be that curious (or rogue) staff person who’s going to be engaging in the use of AI. Or AI is going to be baked into some tool that you are already using. Again, it doesn’t seem viable to us to say, “We don’t use AI.”

Base Requirements and Pitfalls

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:02] No matter where your maturity is, you’re going to need to have some things in place if you’re going to take advantage of AI. There are some base requirements for any kind of AI use case that you might pursue.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:14] You want to have these prerequisites in place. First, you need that AI policy, and we advocate for being short and clear so that it’s the kind of thing that someone’s eyes don’t glaze over as they’re trying to read through it. You want it to be short and understandable. You want to cover what’s allowed, what’s off-limits. You want to have some rules around sensitive data. You want to make sure that there’s a path for a staff person who, if they want to do something that’s not covered by the policy, who do they go to to either request a special use or to potentially say, “Hey, I think we need to change this in the policy.” And you need to have a plan for revisiting that AI policy on a regular basis. It needs to be a short-time window given all that is happening with AI. We have a forthcoming episode where I talk with Tori Miller Liu, the CEO of AIIM, and they have a very short and sweet AI policy. It’s a good model in terms of having a handful of bullet points about how you can use AI. You’re going to want that AI policy. You’re going to also want a list of safe tools and let your folks know how to access those. What are the approved apps? Some of these might be embedded in systems that you’re already using.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:34] If it’s more of a freestanding AI, then you’re going to make sure that folks know how to access it and sign in and log in and specify any settings that they might need to use in the tool. For example, checking a box that says, “Hey, don’t share my data back with the company that’s creating the AI tool.” You’re going to want to make sure that you are clear on privacy and intellectual property and accessibility issues. What type of content is someone working in your learning business able to share with AI? What sort of consent, if any, do they need? What are the copyright issues? Those sorts of things. And then you’re going to have to have internal training. If you have this policy, if you have the safe tool list, you need to make sure that folks are aware of all of that. In that internal training, you might also get into some things like prompt basics and covering the intellectual property and the personally identifying information do and do-nots. There’s that, and then there’s also the data hygiene issue, which we’ve mentioned before—cleaning up your metadata, making sure that the inputs that AI is going to be using are accurate so that the AI then can make good recommendations because you know that what you’re feeding into it is accurate.

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:57] There are two realities that you always need to plan for. This goes back to being conscious and intentional. First, shadow AI. People are going to use unsanctioned tools unless you provide safe options. To go back to those policies and planning, make sure you’re providing those options. Second, ambient AI. As we’ve already alluded to, vendors are baking AI into the tools that you already own, so you’re probably using AI without necessarily being conscious and intentional about it. You want to raise that up to the conscious and intentional level. And your policy and your safe list should cover both the shadow AI scenario and the ambient AI situation.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:43] We’ll touch on a handful of common pitfalls, things to try to avoid as you’re going further with your use of AI in your learning business. First, doing nothing or the thinking you-can-do-nothing pitfall. We’ve already covered this, but basically doing nothing doesn’t seem viable. AI exists in your organization, so don’t think that you gain anything by not taking the time to create that AI policy and do the other things that we’re talking about.

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:11] Definitely. As much as we encourage people to experiment and to pilot, you need to watch out for what we call pilot purgatory—lots of tiny tests, but nothing gets scaled or institutionalized. This is very easy to fall into because, once you start playing with AI, it’s easy to leap from one thing to another. “Oh, it can do this, and, oh, it can do that.” But you have to be strategic and figure out what is the thing that we need it to do for us right now.

Celisa Steele: [00:31:37] Another pitfall to avoid is feature shopping when it comes to what you might be looking for from platform vendors. If you are in the market for a new technology system, it can be exciting to see those shiny features around AI that a particular platform offers. But what you need to be thinking about is what are we trying to achieve? What are the outcomes that we want? And then how do we get to those outcomes, which may or may not be through those shiny, exciting features? There might be a non-AI way to do it or a better way to do it with AI.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:13] It’s the same thing that occurs repeatedly with technologies. We’ve seen it with learning management systems again and again over the years. You go after the shiny bells and whistles, and you forget about what are those outcomes you were trying to achieve. Another one is basically the garbage in/garbage out data rule. Anybody who’s used any form of AI, mainly the generative ChatGPT-/Claude-type models, knows that you have to be careful about what you feed into it, how you contextualize what you feed into it, or what comes out the other end can be junk or worse.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:50] The last pitfall that I’ll mention is you want to avoid taking a set-and-forget approach or trying to totally offload to AI. You need to make sure that you or someone on your team is reviewing what comes out of these AI tools, that you’re making sure to review for bias or other issues, and that you remain engaged in actively assessing what’s working, how it’s working.

Sequencing

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:17] It’s probably worth saying at least a word about the sequencing of getting AI into your learning business, and we’ll propose a simple order of operations for that. First, start with policy. Make sure you’ve got those policies in place. Second, data. Make sure you’ve got your data in order, anything that’s going to be fed into the AI, that you’ve got that cleaned up, that it is good data, that you know how you’re going to contextualize it going into the AI. Then do those pilots. We said be careful with those, but you do need to do them to get your footing and figure out what the next steps are going to be. Next, review the results that you’re getting. Then, and only then, move on to trying to scale the positive that you’ve achieved out of leveraging AI. And then possibly—and this is not always the end game, but it may be an end game, and it’s something you should definitely keep in mind—productize. If you come up with something as you’re implementing AI that does represent a product that can be put out to your marketplace, you want to be able to go there. Be clear about ownership and responsibility, like anything else you would ever implement. You want clear roles. You want clear measures. You want clear KPIs at each step.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:31] With AI, things move fast, which means plans can age fast. That means you probably want a relatively short window for your AI planning—maybe a 60- or 90-day window. We’re talking months, not years. You’re going to want to revisit any plans or policies that you put in place—maybe that’s even as frequently as on a monthly basis. Just a quick look to see, “Okay, do we need to refresh the scope of what we’re covering or any of the tools in our safe list?” Or “Has anything changed about how we feel about risk related to any of our use of AI?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:08] We haven’t used the term so much here, but it’s being serious about your AI governance. How are you managing AI through your organization over time?

Moving Ahead: This Week and Beyond

Celisa Steele: [00:35:17] We said we would talk about some next steps, both in the shorter term and then the slightly longer term. In terms of what you might do this week, first is identify your learning business’s maturity. You can either use the quick descriptions of the stages that we offered or—and we would love for you to do this—take the online self-assessment that will allow you to see your maturity, both overall and in terms of the five domains covered by the maturity model: Leadership, Strategy, Capacity, Portfolio, and Marketing. Once you know where your maturity is overall and in terms of those domains, you want to pick what’s the domain where you might have the highest amount of leverage if you were to begin using AI or to use AI in a more conscious way in that domain.

Celisa Steele: [00:36:09] This might be where you’re seeing some of your biggest bottlenecks, or it might be the area where you see a promising opportunity. You could also aspire, in the next week, to set up a meeting where you’re going to run through potential use cases that will speak to that high-leverage domain. You’re going to want to get the right folks in the room, you’re going to want to generate some ideas and use cases that AI might help you with, and you’re going to want to then narrow it down to just one. As part of that group meeting, define a KPI of what it looks like to have achieved something meaningful with that use case. Again, you can figure out your maturity, and you could begin to put the mechanics in place of having a 60-minute use-case workshop—get that on the calendar with the right folks.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:03] Once you’ve done that work, you can move into a rolling 60- to 90-day plan to run the pilot that you’ve sketched out. In the first month of that, you’re going to want to get your ducks in a row; make sure you’ve identified all the elements of the situation that you’re trying to improve upon. Go beyond those use cases to flesh out what is the situation here? How are we trying to change things? Whether that’s making something better or filling a gap, or something needs to be created that wasn’t there before. Make sure you’ve got all your data in order, cleaned up—anything that’s going to be used as part of this, whether it’s learner history or meta-tagging. Whatever the case is, get that data cleaned up, and then lock in on those KPIs that you’re going to use to measure the success of the pilot. In your second month or maybe beginning in that first month, you’re going to be running the pilot, going through the necessary motions, collecting the outcome data that you get from it to be able to compare against that baseline situation that you had defined. And make sure all along you’re documenting what you learn in the process.

Jeff Cobb: [00:38:06] Then sometime in month two going into month three, if it’s all working, then you start looking towards scaling. That may mean investing more in it, putting more resources against it. It may mean ramping up marketing and communication around it if you’re going to take it out to a marketplace at that point. Or, if things aren’t working, making that rapid and disciplined decision to sunset. But be sure to recycle what you have learned in the process of that pilot—that’s one of the main reasons for running pilots—and then take that back to any backlog ideas you have and start the process over again with a new pilot. Now, the guiding principle in all this—to borrow a phrase that Mike Moss, who’s the president of the Society for College and University Planning, used—is that you have permission to play. This is something his organization gives to staff and volunteers at SCUP. You’ve got that permission to play, but make sure you’re learning from that play and carrying those learnings forward.

Wrap-Up and Recap

Jeff Cobb: [00:39:11] We’ll wrap up in just a moment with a recap of what we’ve discussed in our look at AI’s place in the Learning Business Maturity Model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:39:34] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share this episode or another episode with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:39:44] AI won’t magically fix an immature learning business, but AI, used thoughtfully, can help a learning business on its path to greater maturity, on that move from Static to Reactive to Proactive to Innovative.

Jeff Cobb: [00:39:57] AI can play a role in all five domains covered in the Learning Business Maturity Model: Leadership, Strategy, Portfolio, Marketing, and Capacity.

Celisa Steele: [00:40:07] We hope that thinking about AI within the context of the Learning Business Maturity Model will help you think about where AI might responsibly help you progress in the near term.

Jeff Cobb: [00:40:17] Give that question some thought on your own and with your team: Where can AI amplify your maturity in the next 30 to 90 days?

Celisa Steele: [00:40:26] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• Learning Business Maturity Model
• Learning Business Maturity Assessment
• Becoming a Learning-Centric Organization with Mike Moss
• Building AI Capacity with Amith Nagarajan

The post AI in the Learning Business Maturity Model appeared first on Leading Learning.

Do you want your learning business to be more than a provider of programs, to truly operate as a learning-centric organization? This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast offers a real-world example of how to do just that.

Mike Moss, president of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), joins co-host Jeff Cobb to talk about how SCUP is reshaping itself around learning. They discuss revising bylaws and governance, deconstructing curriculum, experimenting with membership and communities of practice, and investing in staff and volunteer development. Mike also shares how SCUP balances revenue with risk-taking and why giving people permission to play and experiment is key to fostering curiosity and continuous improvement.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Many organizations say they want to be learning-centric, but making that real requires structural change, cultural change, and a willingness to experiment. 

Celisa Steele: [00:00:26] Our guest in this episode, number 463, is Mike Moss, president of the Society for College and University Planning. Under Mike’s leadership, SCUP has intentionally restructured itself to operate as a learning-centric organization. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:40] In our conversation, Mike shares the journey SCUP has taken, from revising bylaws and governance to committing to staff professional development and giving permission to play. He talks about how the association is experimenting with curriculum, membership models, and communities of practice. 

Celisa Steele: [00:00:56] You and Mike also get into revenue and risk—how SCUP is balancing financial sustainability with its commitment to experimentation. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:05] That’s right, and Mike offers practical advice for leaders who want to start down the path toward becoming more learning-centric. 

Celisa Steele: [00:01:13] If you want inspiration for how to reimagine structure, culture, and revenue around learning, then you’ll want to listen with care and curiosity to this conversation with Mike Moss. 

About the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:29] Can you briefly describe SCUP and the focus of its work and then also how you came to lead it? 

Mike Moss: [00:01:36] Yes, certainly. SCUP is a professional association, so we’re 501(c)(3), and we are a community of practice focused on the integrated planning approach for higher education. The key component of that is this is a new mission statement. Being a community of practice is an intentional design statement in our mission, and being learning-centric and led through learning is an intentional outcome of that mission. This is all put into play with our strategic plan that launched in 2024. We are 4,000 strong as individuals, about 650 campuses with representation, and about half of our members are corporate or other non-campus entities who support both the built environment of learning as well as learning outcomes of students and student success. We have a nice, blended community of both for-profit, nonprofit, practitioner, and those of us that work on the adjacent side of higher ed. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:28] You and I have had a chance to talk at length before, and you’d made the point that SCUP didn’t just adopt that philosophy of being learning-centric. You reshaped the structure, the systems, the talent to make that real. Listeners here would probably love to know what that transformation looked like and what were the tough choices you had to make along the way. 

What It Looks Like to Become Learning-Centric

Mike Moss: [00:02:54] Thanks, Jeff. I think what I would offer to start is that, as you outlined in your question, it was a very intentional journey with structure, then systems, then talent. In doing that—to jump to the non-dramatic ending—it did not mean we had to completely replace and replenish talent. The talent was on the journey of creating a learning-centric structure with systems that support it. By the time we got to talent, it was more about our own professional development as an organization to continue the journey, not to reset the journey. In this community of practice commitment, it’s all about the standard practice of the learning-centric approach—do, reflect, do differently, at the very base level. We wanted to lead with curiosity and experimentation with the community-led learning initiatives. We do not have a credential; I think that’s an important piece to offer. We are a peer-based learning environment and always have been, but we were structured in a more traditional “Committee does this; committee does that; these volunteers are set for this.” It was a very hierarchical if not silo-driven operation, and it worked great. There was nothing dysfunctional about that environment other than we felt that the best way to move the association into the 2030s would be to start now, especially post-pandemic, with peer-driven learning. 

Mike Moss: [00:04:19] Learning is social. Social comes from all the different modalities. Take the modalities out, and it’s just about people doing, reflecting, and doing differently, with both comparable and aspirant peers and institutions. In order to structure that, we had to go back and change our bylaws. We had to give some agility and be agile in our governance to allow the peers in the community to define how they wanted the modalities of learning, what those topics were. We got really good at correlation, and we get the members to work really hard on causation. That balance is how we’ve become learning-centric in operation. The stated goal of this plan is that we will operate as a learning-centric organization. That is a strategic goal. We didn’t have a vote on it, Jeff. The organization decided this was where we were going, so that community of practice actually became the driver as much as any of the specific learning modalities that we put into place over the last year and a half. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:14] What was it about the old structure that was holding you back from where you saw you needed to go as an organization? Was it just a matter of giving more power to the people in a way? Or what happened there?

Mike Moss: [00:05:29] Great question. I do think it was as simple as, in the old governance structure, it said, “Name of committee, these types of roles, this charge,” but it was codified. In the governance, it was codified as to how we structured ourselves for a set of outcomes that were driven from that structure. What we wanted to do was not determine the structure. Let the peer community determine the structure. Obviously, the board has voice. We have a SCUP council, which is a group of volunteers who help us directionally on a year-to-year basis. But the fluidity of what’s needed, particularly in a high-volatile environment that we’re serving in higher education, things shift very quickly, and we didn’t want to end up having to sunset a committee, to create a committee, go through a governance process to be compliant with what we’re supposed to do to run when what we needed to do was allow the peer community to rise and fall with what they needed when they needed it in the modality that served them best. So it’s not unique. This isn’t an innovative practice. But, for us, it was innovative because before we were pretty scripted. 

Mike Moss: [00:06:30] We had a scripted set of outcomes that meant you did integrated planning. What we’ve decided to do with the approach is it is an approach; it is not a script. For that approach to find its enculturation on campuses where you can put in your own culture. If you want to be siloed, and if that works best for you, then go for it. But in the old scripted, it would say, “No, that is a failure to the discipline.” The approach works for what the culture of the campus requires, and that is going to be peer-driven on their campuses, so it should be peer-driven in the learning environment of the association that holds the approach. We flipped the script a little bit and said, “Let’s be really agile with this and see where the community wants to take it.” 

Supporting Professional Development for Staff

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:09] I want to come back to that culture question here in a minute. You mentioned earlier that part of this journey, part of the transformation was a professional development component to it for the talent, for the staff, and, I assume, the volunteers as well. What did that look like? What sort of professional development had to happen to support this kind of change? 

Mike Moss: [00:07:28] The first thing had to do with truth and facts. The fact is we stated truthfully that the professional development budget for staff is not going to be cut, regardless of what the world throws at us. We are committed to a dollar amount per person per year for three years, and it will not be touched. And, after the first year, when we had some financial duress and stayed firm on that commitment, it helped reinforce that cultural value now of do, reflect, do differently, and that requires professional development. We are committed to that budget component. What I would offer is that the only thing we did different than most associations that I’ve worked with in the past is we made the upfront commitment that, no matter what happens, you have professional development dollars for this year. Everything else we will figure out. We flipped that script. We were still service mindset—obviously, we weren’t going to cut things that hurt the service of the membership—but we were really committed to that talent training. What it looked like was a non-negotiable commitment, which it was. 

Mike Moss: [00:08:27] When the board and the management team committed to that, and the staff then saw what we were allowing, which was they’re going to tell us what they need training on, not us telling them that “Mike wants to run this committee structure; therefore, go learn this committee structure,” it was more like, “The organization and its peers require this,” let’s figure out how we want to run that through experimentation, curiosity. Let the curiosity drive your professional development, not some predetermined outcome, because we really don’t know what the outcome is going to be. We were managing a set of inputs for people’s training. The outputs being that they have ideation, and that ideation could drive the outcomes for the service requirements we have for members as opposed to having that predetermined destination. We wanted it to truly, in an agile, waterfall way, let it flow. And that’s some things, some of the experiments have been amazing, and some of them probably “Let’s let that one go and not talk about it again,” but we did it. 

Permission to Play

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:27] What you were just talking about you’ve described as permission to play in SCUP, encouraging the staff and volunteers to do those sorts of experiments. As you just referenced, are there some examples of where that did not work, where it failed? And are there other places where you were surprised by how successful it was? 

Mike Moss: [00:09:45] Yes. I mentioned we didn’t have credentials. We still don’t have credentials, but we have curriculum. It’s not like the approach is completely as loosey-goosey as I may be implying. We have a curriculum by which we’ve done some great training for decades around the integrated planning approach. But, with what’s going on in higher ed, the speed of decision-making required, the talent investment we all have to make so quickly, we’ve deconstructed that. We took the curriculum, as many of us do, and we deconstructed it, and we decided to let member voice decide which components come up. In a four-day course, maybe you only truly need an hour of it because you’ve been tasked with “Jeff, go write a contingency plan for this scenario,” and that’s all the training you need. You’re not going to go pay for a four-day course. But, as we deconstructed it and then had the peers running the courses, they would share experiences on how they deconstructed their own immediate decision-making to that moment. Let them go talk that out. We formed working groups, and some of those working groups on paper, I’m like, “Oh my God, this is everything for SCUP,” and no one signed up. And then there are other ones that were like, “Man, that feels routine; that feels kind of like we didn’t try,” signed up with a waiting list. 

Mike Moss: [00:11:00] We learned quickly that our assumptions based on past learning performance at the organization did not apply to current situations for our members’ needs. The investment cost was low; it’s not zero—there’s time that staff put into it, that volunteers put into it—but it’s a quick rise and a quick fall. That one working group that we spun up, and no one signed up for, we could spin it down quickly. It was time lost on the calendar, but not months. It was a matter of weeks. So we’re trying to get into that cadence of rise quick, fail quick, all those normal things that we do in project management, but doing it at scale and being driven by the members’ voice, not our metrics of how we used to measure learning success. Now, at least one person’s already shook their head and said, “But, Mike, you have to make revenue.” Yes, we have to make revenue. That’s also part of our operational equation. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the driver for all things that we’re testing. 

Mike Moss: [00:11:59] Some things that we’re testing truly go to that whole mysterious box of the undefined member value that they know about that they haven’t told you about. And we are thinking that the successful ones, even if it’s not a financial success, the learning that we get out of that has driven communities of practice that have been formed naturally by the members that we never would have imagined would have been on our radar. The staff, data, and the staff experiences would not have said that was going to happen. The lesson I’ve learned the most, which is probably something I should have learned decades ago, is get out of the way. A lot of our curriculum-based education in the past was very well done. But, in the current higher education needs, we needed to get out of the learners’ way and let them deconstruct it, reconstruct it so that they could solve the problems that were on their campus that we didn’t have exposure to but yet our discipline can help them with. 

The Member Perspective on SCUP Becoming Learning-Centric

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:51] I want to make sure we come back in a minute to the question you raised around revenue, and pricing can be tied to that as well. But, before we get there, you, internally as an organization, had to change a lot and rethink things and change the way that you were doing work. What’s your sense of how your members then experienced that? Was it a change in culture for them? Do they perceive more value from the organization? And how do you know? 

Mike Moss: [00:13:24] We’re still learning that, honestly. The experimentations that we’ve done at conferences would be the most obvious because they have the largest single-moment impact. And so reprogramming how we structure the flow of the conference, introducing active learning versus the more traditional session-session-lunch-session,-session-dinner formats, and trying to experiment a little bit more with active learning but bringing in the social aspect—those things we’ve had immediate reaction to because it’s a large event in a point in time, easily measured. The harder things to measure have been these things where every other week there’s a community of practice call, there’s an emerging leader program that has monthly calls, but those take a minute to find their pulse each year, each cohort. It’s been harder for us to say that all of those have been great or none of them have been great. But all of them have been active. 

Mike Moss: [00:14:11] What we’re tracking is that there’s a more active voice among our members now that we can see in social media. Is that a metric of success? I don’t know, but at least we’re being talked about differently and talked about more collectively as a learning entity as opposed to a modality or a mode entity. It’s great that you mentioned our conference. What’s better is that you mentioned all the amazing things that you met and had happen at that conference. It happened to be a conference. It could have been a virtual Webinar. It could have been a working group. It could have been a coffee shop meeting. We’re having local meetings now; for us, that’s new. We don’t have chapters, but, all of a sudden, we’ve got these local things spinning up by members serving members. Those are the metrics we’re watching. It’s too soon to answer that question definitively, but we can definitely see a new behavior in a set of our members that we were hoping for, but we aren’t quite sure how to capture that for scale yet. 

Monetization and Pricing Under the Learning-Centric Model

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:06] If I’m listening to this as your average listener, I’m probably thinking, “This sounds great. This sounds very dynamic. This sounds like what learning should be. But it also sounds a little bit messy.” When I’m thinking about neatly monetizing education, it’s nice to have courses and conferences and curriculum that you can just put a price tag on and say, “Pay this, and you get this.” It’s a little messier to think about a community of practice. How do you approach the monetization of this? How do you think about factors like pricing in your world? 

Mike Moss: [00:15:39] That’s the everything question. We have six conferences a year. We believe we’re already at a price threshold, and have been for a while, so the price is what it is, and we all know that the operating costs for all these things are going up. We are also mindful of how we can schedule those to make sure that we can at least get close to maximum capacity for the nets that we require. We are anchored by that traditional practice of having these six conferences. We also still have, as I mentioned, that curriculum with a set of courses. Those are still running, but they’re running a lot less frequently because the demand has dropped for having people out of office for three and four days at a time. The market has said, for what they’re dealing with on campuses right now, that may not be the best opportunity for them to leave and then come back. This deconstructing is allowing us to come to them. The monetization of coming to them largely is virtual, and, as we all learned in the pandemic, we can scale those prices accordingly. Our operating costs are lower, but the frequency that we have to run those is higher. That experimentation about do, reflect, do differently is not just about the curriculum. It’s about the curriculum, the user experience, and also the revenue—what’s the net? 

Mike Moss: [00:16:52] What we’ve experimented with in the last six months is taking some of them and making them free to members, and that’s it; nobody else can participate. All that normal A/B testing that you do—other ones that are fee-based for everyone, some that are this, that, and the other thing. Having those A/B tests across those come-to-you moments has helped us find a price range that keeps things in a net, but we aren’t quite at the frequency we want to be at yet to hit the fiscal year goals. So we’re on a path. It’s not going to be a hockey stick moment. I don’t think those happen very often anymore in life—the huge spike in revenue—but we are consistently growing the revenue. More importantly, we’re consistently maintaining an audience. And it’s not just the same 10 people. There’s a consistency of the level of service we’re providing on campus, meaning that type of role on a campus is showing up more frequently. Now it’s on us to figure out how we convert them from a learning moment to a participation moment. Because, to your point, the community of practice comes from it’s not the same 10 people running the courses all the time. That’s what courses are for. The community of practice that we’re monetizing is that more and more peers are willing to participate, share experiences, and it scales from that growth, which is much more organic and in a much lower net than we’re going to get off of a set of courses. The frequency question has to be answered still as we go into the next year. 

The Impact on Membership Structure and Fees

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:21] Is the community of practice approach separate from membership, or has any of this impacted your membership structure and fees at all? Or is it separate from that? 

Mike Moss: [00:18:32] Never one to not be curious, so I love my staff because they’re just as curious as I am. We also are experimenting with a new membership model. We are working on lowering the cost of entry so that we can improve the ability for access to the learning. Because the whole point of the community of practice is not to have a membership community; it’s to have a learning community of practice. Last year we built community by putting programming in place that helped people find their comparables and aspirants in a comfortable environment where they could share. This year, ’25 into ’26, we’re building the learning around that group of peers because that’s the goal: peer-based learning. What we’re doing on the membership side is that, in order to allow that to happen, you can’t spend 50 percent of your PD budget just to get in. You need to be able to have that money available for the experiences of the learning, not just the access to learning. So we’re lowering the paywall. And it’s an experiment. 

Mike Moss: [00:19:30] On our Web site, it’s still very much the same model you’ve seen for decades at SCUP, but, on phone call recruitment and pilot, we have others joining in this new model, which is a much lower cost with much higher access. So we’re running an A/B test on the membership model. A lot of our members prefer the traditional model, and others are experimenting with this new approach, where it’s a learning community of practice that they’re investing in, not a membership in an association. It may sound like semantics, but it’s two completely different programs. Over the next couple of years, we’re going to keep running this experiment and see which of those levers gets pulled the best by the industry, and we’re hoping it moves towards the community of practice more so than the traditional enrollment model that we’ve had for 60 years at SCUP. 

The Board’s Role in SCUP Becoming Learning-Centric

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:17] It occurs to me, behind all of this, you must have a pretty forward-looking board that you’re working with. A lot of boards would resist this kind of thing happening in an organization. How has this been in conversations with your board? 

Mike Moss: [00:20:32] Obviously, I wouldn’t be talking openly on a podcast if this wasn’t supported. This was a part of the strategic journey that the board had put together when they assembled the strategic plan that launched in 2024, and it was mostly born from the experiences that we had as an organization during the pandemic and the few years leading into the pandemic. We had made a commitment in 2018 to become learning-centric. We didn’t codify it into a plan until 2024 because of the pandemic. But, at that point, because of how we learned about how our community responded to volatile times, we needed to codify it so that it is in writing—this is the direction we’re going.

Mike Moss: [00:21:11] The board has been super supportive through several election iterations. And that’s the other piece—I’m never going to undersell how lucky and supported I am by an election process that continues to bring in board members who support and modify. We always are adjusting but modifying a strategic direction and not taking a 180 on it because it’s hard or because it’s a bad numbers year. The board has been very supportive of, to support higher education, we also have to be learning-centric. That is what we ask of them—to serve our students. And so that mindset that the board has, they’ve maintained that themselves. They run the governance. We’re a slate process, so there’s a governance selection committee that does the slate for election every year for board members. It’s attribute-driven. Those attributes keep getting reinforced and adjusted as the strategic direction moves forward by the board. So, to your point, the process by which the board was assembled, and the process that they’re maintaining to stay strategic—their goal is to stay three years out on their work—has reinforced the opportunity for us operationally to do this experimentation. 

SCUP Operates in a Relational Matrix

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:18] One of the points you mentioned in an earlier conversation I had with you is moving SCUP towards what you characterize as a relational matrix in how it operates. I think some of that’s embedded in what you’ve talked about already. But can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that and how that plays out for SCUP? 

Mike Moss: [00:22:36] The more appropriate way to describe it, probably than I did in the past, is that we’re a branded house. We’re SCUP; this is what we do; here’s who we serve. By 2030, we want to be in a house of brands. It doesn’t mean that we’re all under a brand, like a holding company. There are a million ways to do this; there are a bunch of examples out there in the market. This is not innovative; it’ll just be different for SCUP. But what we had imagined in this house of brands is that we all have our independent brand. We have our reasons for being. We have our missions. But we are absolutely interconnected on how we deliver to the campus for student success. In order to do that, it’s not just a random selection of X number of brands to do this—the relational matrix. It’s driven by all of our missions that have that interconnectedness and serve each other’s mission. For simplicity’s sake, if each association is a LEGO, they all fit; they fit the right way at the right time, to come to a campus. 

Mike Moss: [00:23:32] The other part of what we want to do in this house of brands is that it’s not meant to compete with our consultant members. We can’t do our work without our consultant members. This isn’t an either/or; it’s an and. And, with the good work that they do, we can start coming to campuses in this house of brands to really go deep into the enculturation of each discipline that’s represented for hopefully getting out of “new president, new plan,” out of personality-based driven outcomes and helping to do what we all have pledged to do, which is create sustainable systems for student success on campus. In order to do that, we’re imagining a different time here soon, where, if you’re not coming to the campus in this consortium mindset to solve the problems, they’re not going to be able to come to seven different conferences to get that same information. That’s what we’re working through. And it’s partnership. It’s coalition building. There are a million ways to do it. But what we hope for, as a planning entity, is that we’re horizontal to all these vertical disciplines that are important. How can we help connect that into this relational matrix that comes to campuses and helps embed practices for student success? 

Mike’s Take on Organizational Resilience and the Future

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:40] You’ve made the point before that associations need resilience right now. There are a lot of stresses on the system. And even things like mergers and closures should be on the table; there are sectors where there are just too many associations serving that sector. For you, what does association resilience look like in practice, and what do boards and leaders need to be thinking about now and dealing with now about what the 2030s are going to look like? 

Mike Moss: [00:25:07] We’re constantly contingency and scenario planning. What we have to be honest about is—as much as we feel like we’re on solid footing now and as much as our reserves and all the key metrics that we have as associations would say, “We’re going to be fine for a minute”—don’t count on that. The external factors that are facing us now are materially different than they were five years ago, if not five months ago. Depending on what industry you’re in, there’s a lot going on. We are constantly looking at that. We’re planning. What happens if we’re approached? We shouldn’t be surprised if we’re approached. We also shouldn’t be surprising people if we approach disciplines that make the integrated planning approach stronger. Data is a huge part of what we do, but we rely on others for that now; maybe we should bring that inside. We’re constantly having those planning exercises where we’re like, “What would it look like for X, Y, and Z to approach us? And what would be the causation for us to say, ‘Yes, let’s have that conversation’?” So being prepared for the conversations and planning, but not as a plan. 

Mike Moss: [00:26:06] Right now, transparently, SCUP does not have a merger plan or an acquisition plan, but we have scenarios by which we would entertain having those conversations. That’s something that we keep in the forward part of our internal and board-level conversations, that proverbial “What if?” What if we do need to consolidate? What if the three conferences that feed us best go away because of external factors we can’t control? I don’t know if that’s a very good answer to your question because the answer was planning, planning, plan, plan. But I do think there’s an exercise in there for every association to be prepared. I don’t know anybody who’s in such a place of comfort that they shouldn’t be having some version of those conversations. But I would hope that anybody at any level of the association, even on a team-based conversation…. If I’m running a team—I used to be a product manager—I would be having conversations with my team. “What if they decide not to run our product? What can we still offer the association? What skillsets do we need to go get training on so that we still provide value to what’s still here?” Really making it org-down conversations—what if?

The Role of Associations in Lifelong Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:20] You’re obviously very much walking the walk as a learning-centric organization—it’s what you represent. My view is that associations can/should play such critical role in lifelong learning, as the organizations that tend to stay with people throughout their careers. What’s your perspective on the association role in lifelong learning? What role do associations need to be playing, and what do they potentially risk if they’re not playing that role going forward? 

Mike Moss: [00:27:53] Everything you said I strongly support. I think associations are not in our last 50 years of existence. In fact, we’re probably just now figuring out what the next 50 years mean for us. I do think associations are absolutely at the center of education and professional development, and all the things that we’ve said for the last 100 years are more important now. What we didn’t have when we were founded 60 years ago, for example, at SCUP was this technology hockey stick, and technology really is on that hockey stick evolution. Every three months, there’s a year’s worth of AI development or some crazy thing like that. Moore’s Law feels slow now. All those things. And, as we look at those moments, the association community is more powerful than ever to bring people together to have the shared experience of what it means to be a learner. Obviously, I represent higher education. I’m also fortunate enough to have a bachelor’s degree. Many of my colleagues have master’s and beyond. But I also realize that there’s a huge part of my personal life community that was best served by not going to college, and I know a lot of them are getting their professional development for whatever they’ve chosen to do through associations. Sometimes they don’t even know it was an association that they got it from. 

Mike Moss: [00:29:05] There’s an opportunity for us to not just be branded and remind people that “Hey, that association got you that job,” but that we’re available at a community level. It’s what we can do better, I think, as associations and other constructs that exist. We can be at the community level of service with formal education, with formal for-profit business. We are that connective tissue that keeps a community viable. Whether you call it workforce development or professional development, associations are in the mix of all that. What we might need to do differently is get a little more comfortable with being interconnected and not independent. The crowded spaces often are that there are 42 ways in that industry to do something, so there are 42 verticals to support it in the association space. It goes back to your previous question. We may have to configure ourselves a little differently to still support all 42 of those paths, and it may not be all 42 independent associations. But that association structure, the nonprofit service that we can bring in, we need it more now than ever. And because of the speed of change, people need a place with connective tissue. And associations connect the speed of change with opportunity. That’s where we can do some amazing work moving forward. 

The Danger of Viewing Learning As “Just” a Product Line

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:23] What would you say to an association CEO, a peer leader, who is still looking at learning as just a product line of the association, as one function siloed there? What’s the danger of that at this point from your perspective? 

Mike Moss: [00:30:42] As soon as the community shifts to a different learning modality, they won’t remember your name. I don’t mean to sound harsh on that, but I’ve experienced that in my career, where another competitor came in with a better way to be up to speed, and no one remembered the association’s name. To do that is not wrong, but to do that in the absence of exploring and being curious about what’s next is your risk. Running a credential that’s run for 100 years the same way and is still working, why would you stop? But you definitely have thought about “What if I had to stop?” That’s the risk—that you become too comfortable with taking last year’s budget and adding 10 percent. I don’t think we should be doing that sort of thinking anymore is what I would advocate. 

Advice on How to Become More Learning-Centric

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:27] If you could give listeners one practical step that they could make in their organization to make it more learning-centric tomorrow, next week, what would that be? How do you get started with this? 

Mike Moss: [00:31:41] It’s permission to play, as you said earlier, Jeff. And, in that permission to play, don’t count on trust. Trust will be the outcome of what you’ve done. It’s not going to be the input that makes it happen. What will make the permission to play happen is facts, and the fact is, when someone messes up, what is going to be different about their “mess-up” than it was in the past? How do you reinforce the learning moment in that versus the corrective moment? Hopefully, if we do our little sprints that we do here, sometimes they lose money, but they’re not losing a million dollars. There’s calculated risk, and there’s scaled risk. But you give the permission throughout the organization to take those scaled risks as a learning moment, not as an immediate corrective action—“Where are you going to get the money next?”

Mike Moss: [00:32:25] The trust that builds up is born from those facts of “Oh, I got to do this, and I got to learn from it, and I got to do it differently.” As they have that experience with you in leadership of being allowed to be curious, being then given permission to try something different, and then being given the empowerment of learning from it, it starts to take care of itself where then the risk is “Oh my God, there are 17 experiments going on at once.” The scaled risk of everybody being empowered is a risk that I think we should all embrace and see what the outcomes are. I don’t want to oversell it—SCUP’s on a journey too. We’re two years into this. It’s going well now, but external factors can kick in tomorrow that we have to make adjustments on. But what we now have is the permission to make adjustments and not have to make corrections. That’s a huge difference that’s come out of this learning-centric approach. It’s about making adjustments, not transformations. 

Mike’s Approach to His Own Lifelong Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:21] As we’re wrapping up here, I’ll switch gears a little bit but still staying learner- and learning-centric, talking about you as a learner. I like to take the chance when I can to ask guests about their own approaches to lifelong learning—your own habits and practices, maybe favorite resources that you rely on to make sure that you’re learning and evolving and can continue to get what you want to out of life. 

Mike Moss: [00:33:47] Probably not unironically, I listen to a ton of podcasts. I do listen to a lot within our association discipline, but I also listen to a lot that have nothing to do with either my profession or those I serve. I want to learn from all the industries to find those nuggets where I’m like, “Oh, I wonder if that would work with ours.” So a lot of podcasts. A voracious reader. All the things you would expect. But what I’ve learned the most in my learning journey was to give myself permission to do things differently because it didn’t often come from my boss. I do not advocate that anyone be disrespectful or any of that. I’m not asking you to go rogue. But what I learned to do better in my career was go do all that learning, do all that stuff, and then bring in a proposal. Don’t bring in a question. Instead of saying, “Hey, boss, is it okay if I do Lean?,” come in and go, “I think we can do this. Oh, by the way, it’s because you’re going to pay for me to be Lean certified” and getting it back into the application that our supervisors are always looking for, which, is how do we move our mission forward? 

Mike Moss: [00:34:45] That’s been my approach now for a very long time. And, so far, it’s not without mistakes, but I still think it’s a thing I would advocate for my own child to do, which is learn everywhere, but then apply it for the permission to play. Don’t just say, “Hey, I read all these books. I deserve a raise.” Prove it. There are probably some tough moments for all of us to learn when we do lifelong learning because the whole point is what I used to know no longer applies and accepting that has been something I’ve learned from colleagues like Lowell Aplebaum, friends like that in the business. They’ve really helped me understand that, “Yes, you used to be really good at that, but the key word is ‘used to.’ What are you doing differently now because things have changed?” Having that application of movement in learning is something that I’ve learned from my peers. That’s definitely helped me on my journey as well. 

Wrap-Up and Recap

Celisa Steele: [00:35:39] That wraps up our conversation with Mike Moss, president of the Society for College and University Planning. But stay with us another minute to catch our recap. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:48] On the SCUP Web site, you can find Mike’s phone number and an e-mail address if you want to reach out to him. 

Celisa Steele: [00:36:01] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it. That helps more people find the show and benefit from it, and it supports the work that we do. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:10] In our conversation, Mike shared how SCUP is working to be truly learning-centric, changing its bylaws and governance, deconstructing curriculum, experimenting with membership, and supporting staff and volunteer development. 

Celisa Steele: [00:36:23] He emphasized the importance of curiosity and experimentation—giving people permission to play, learn from mistakes, and adjust. 

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:32] He also mentioned that associations and other learning businesses have to balance revenue with risk-taking and that learning should be more than a product line—it needs to be part of the culture. 

Celisa Steele: [00:36:43] Inspirational stuff if you ask me. Thanks for listening—see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast. 

To make sure you catch all future episodes, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

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Related Resources

• Curiosity, Clarity, and Courage with Lowell Aplebaum
• Culture, Mindset, and Money with Erin Pressley
• Tool Talk: Learning Culture and Learning Ecosystem Snapshots

The post Becoming a Learning-Centric Organization with Mike Moss appeared first on Leading Learning.

In our annual learning business landscape survey, “limited marketing resources” shows up as a top challenge, and “enhancing marketing and outreach” is a top planned investment. When we dig in with our consulting clients, the headline “marketing problem” almost always fractures into something more specific: an awareness-conversion problem. And it’s typically weighted far more to one side of the hyphen than the other.

You can’t solve a “marketing problem” in the abstract. You can diagnose—and improve—your awareness and conversion dynamics, product by product, segment by segment. This article lays out how.

What We Mean by Awareness

Awareness is strong when a high percentage of the right people know an offering exists and understand the outcomes it delivers.

• Outcomes
  It’s not enough that people know there’s an offering. They need acute awareness—a clear grasp of how the course, program, or credential advances a specific problem, priority, or goal they have right now.

• Right people
  The right people must include likely learners and the decision-makers and influencers around them—employers, supervisors, credentialing bodies, talent partners, and sometimes the learners’ customers. If these actors don’t know (or can’t easily recall) your offering, you have a practical awareness problem even if your list looks large.

Vague Versus Acute Awareness

Vague awareness manifests as, “I’ve heard of that certificate.” Acute awareness sounds like, “That certificate maps to our Q4 upskilling plan for new supervisors and reduces time to productivity by eight weeks.”

Acute awareness is earned in two places:

1. Offer design
   The product must address a defined, validated need and produce outcomes the audience—and their employers—value.
2. Communication
   Those valued outcomes must be expressed succinctly and repeatedly where the right people already pay attention, following a credible flow from attention to interest to desire to action. (Catch our Leading Learning Podcast episode on the four-part AIDA formula here.)

There’s also a strategic constraint here: How many offerings can you reasonably make any one segment acutely aware of? In a noisy market, the honest answer is not many. That reality pushes you to segment your audience and narrow your catalog and promotional calendar accordingly.

What We Mean by Conversion

Conversion is the set of actions that move someone from awareness to ownership—purchase, enrollment, license, subscription, renewal, or employer adoption. People convert when perceived value meaningfully exceeds the total perceived cost (money, time, effort, and risk).

Five levers matter most:

1. Value equation (including time)
   Price isn’t just dollars; it’s time away from work, cognitive load, administrative hassle, and opportunity cost. Show how the payoff outweighs all of that—and, where you can, reduce those non-monetary costs.
2. Impact and usability
   Will the experience create measurable change in what the learner can do, and will that change be applied? Clear learning objectives, strong practice opportunities, and line-of-sight to workplace application increase conversion and renewal.
3. Signal strength
   What does completion signal to others, especially employers? A recognized badge, alignment to a standard, or integration with internal career steps strengthen conversion long before a prospective learner or organizational purchaser hits “Add to Cart.”
4. Proof
   Specific results, employer testimonials, before-and-after stories, completion and advancement data, and visible alumni outcomes lower perceived risk.
5. Friction (and fit) in the buying path
   Hidden fees, multi-page forms, account creation loops, confusing bundles, unclear dates—all of it depresses conversion. Enterprise buyers also need a different path (procurement, data, terms, etc.) than an individual with a credit card.

Gratification—the personal satisfaction of advancing, belonging, contributing—helps. But in professional learning, it’s rarely decisive without the five items above.

A Practical Awareness-Conversion Diagnostic

Work through the following for each key offering and audience segment, including the employers in your market.

Awareness Checklist

• Segment clarity
  Can you name the one to three highest-value segments for this offering (role, career stage, employer type)?
• Outcome statement
  In one sentence, can you state the specific problem or outcome this offering addresses for the segment?
• Acute awareness assets
  Do you have and use a short “outcomes card” (title, three outcomes in employer terms, time/effort required, evidence of impact) consistently across channels?
• Employer channel
  Have you explicitly equipped managers and HR to understand and advocate for the offering?
• Reach and repetition
  Are you running enough touches in the right places (e.g., owned list, partner lists, member newsletter placements, employer communications, events) to earn recall?
• Catalog focus
  How many offers are you competing with inside your own channels this month for this same segment?

Score each item as either a zero or a one. If you’re below four on an offering, fix your zeros before touching price or revamping the product.

Conversion Checklist

• Value articulation
  Is there a plain-English “why now” and “what changes after” above the fold on the product page?
• Signal
  Is there a recognized signal (credit, badge, alignment to a standard), and is it prominent?
• Proof
  Do you show specific outcomes (metrics, employer quotes, use cases) rather than generic praise?
• Path to purchase
  Can an individual enroll in three or fewer clicks? Is there a clearly labeled employer purchase path (invoice, seat bundles, data terms)?
• Pricing and packaging
  Are options simple (good/better/best or single clear tier) and matched to buyer types?
• Post-purchase clarity
  Is onboarding obvious (dates, access, time commitment, support)?

Again, score each as a zero or a one. A score below four signals conversion issues, and the zeros tell you where to focus.

Common Portfolio Patterns (and What to Do)

You’ll typically find four patterns when you plot your offerings by awareness (low to high) and conversion (low to high).

1. Low awareness and low conversion
   This issue tends to arise with new or neglected products. You either need to sunset or revamp. If these are strategic products, rebuild them, starting with audience need; otherwise, unlist, and stop the drip of internal attention.
2. High awareness but low conversion
   This is the classic “Everyone knows about it, but few buy it” situation. To address this, tighten outcome language and proof; remove jargon; simplify pricing and packaging; fix friction (fewer clicks, clearer dates, enterprise path, etc.); and strengthen the signal (e.g., alignment to a standard or a credible badge).
3. Low awareness but high conversion
   These are your undermarketed gems. Concentrate promotion on one or two segments. Reuse your success proof in your top-of-funnel communications. Add employer channel outreach and partner placements.
4. High awareness and high conversion
   These are your flagship products. You want to protect them and avoid cannibalization. Use them as anchors in your bundles and in employer subscriptions. Build intentional upgrade paths (e.g., from a course to a certificate to renewal).

Narrowing to Win (and Earn Acute Awareness)

If your calendar makes five different asks of the same audience in a month, none of them is likely to achieve acute awareness. Choose the one or two most strategic offerings per core segment per month. Everything else either supports those or waits its turn. Depth beats breadth.

Pragmatically, this means being much more targeted and intentional in what you do.

• Quarterly offer map
  For each core segment, pick no more than two offerings to forefront per quarter and a small set of supporting content or events that point to these forefronted offerings.
• Message discipline
  Maintain one outcome statement and one set of proof (testimonials, outcomes data, etc.) per forefronted offering for the quarter. Repeat. Don’t rewrite every e-mail.
• Partner alignment
  Coordinate placements with chapters, affiliates, and employers around the offerings, using shared outcomes language and proof.

Measuring What Matters

Move beyond global open and click rates to measuring what matters. Track a small, comparable set of metrics for each major offering and segment.

Awareness

For awareness, consider measuring the following:

• Reach to the right-fit segment (percentage of your list that is the target segment for the offering)
• Recall proxy (e.g., direct traffic to product URL, brand-plus-keyword search volume, percentage of segment that reports hearing about the offering at work)
• Partner/employer placements secured (e.g., in employer internal newsletters, chapter social media posts)

In general, you want to know that the people you need to reach are on your e-mail list. If not, make a concerted effort to get them there. You want evidence that people are aware enough of the offering to type it directly into search (rather than clicking a link presented to them), that they recall hearing about it (particularly in highly relevant places, like where they work),  and that others are helping to spread the word.

Conversion

To monitor conversion, you might look at metrics like these:

• The number of product page views compared to the number of checkouts started compared to the number of checks completed (for for sales to individuals)
• The number of employer inquiries compared to the number of purchase orders or contracts (for enterprise sales)
• Abandonment points (e.g., top reasons based on an exit survey or chat logs)
• Time to first meaningful activity (e.g., completion of the first module)

In general, you want a clear view into what happens after people become aware of the offering. Do they purchase? How smooth is the purchase process? What specific barriers do they encounter? Do they then move on to using the offering?

Signal and Impact

To help you with signal and showing the impact of the product, look to metrics like these:

• Completion rate and time to completion
• Comparisons of performance on learner pre- and post-assessments (where relevant)
• Manager-reported behavior change or improvements in performance metrics tracked by employers
• Learner self-reporting of job and/or career impact
• Renewal/upsell rate (e.g., course to certificate or certificate to renewal)

Pick a baseline, then aim for one meaningful improvement per quarter rather than chasing everything at once.

A 30-Day Action Plan

To help you make meaningful progress on an awareness-conversion problem in the short term, you need a plan.

Week 1: Selection and Framing

• Choose two offerings and two segments to focus on.
• Draft or refine the one-sentence outcomes statement for each (learner and employer versions).
• Using language that can be shared with prospective learners and their employers, create a one-page (or shorter) brief for each offering that includes the following information:
  • Outcomes
    Use one to three bullet points to state the expected benefits and results.
  • Time and effort required
    How much time and effort will be required to complete the offering? For example, “This course runs for four weeks total and requires approximately two hours per week. Live sessions are Tuesdays, from 1 to 2 pm Eastern, and learners are expected to spend approximately one hour on homework per week.”
  • Recognition
    What will the learner get that they value and others recognize? This might be credit, a badge, alignment to a standard, or steps in an internal career path.
  • Proof of impact
    Provide evidence that the offering produces results. This might be data on the percent of learners who report career advancement or positive job impact or employer endorsements.

Week 2: Awareness Upgrades

• Use the language from the outcomes brief consistently across Web site, e-mail, partner placements, and employer one-pagers.
• Cut any competing messages in your promotions calendar for those segments this month.
• Secure two employer or partner placements per offering.

Week 3: Conversion Clean-Up

• Rewrite product pages to put outcomes, recognition, and proof of impact above the fold.
• Reduce to three or fewer clicks to enroll
• Add or clarify the employer purchase path.
• Simplify packaging (one default option and a clear enterprise bundle).

Week 4: Proof and Follow-Through

• Collect or surface one employer quote and one outcome metric for each offering.
• Add brief post-purchase orientation e-mails specific to the type of purchaser (individual learner or employer), focused on what to do in the first 15 minutes.
• Set up a simple abandonment survey for anyone who begins but does not complete the purchase process. Within two weeks, identify and address the most common, high-impact barriers that you can realistically fix quickly (e.g., unclear dates or missing price information).

Pitfalls to Avoid

As you work on an awareness-conversion problem, beware of common missteps.

• Trying to solve awareness with more volume
  If the message isn’t specific and the catalog is too broad, more e-mails and posts won’t fix it.
• Treating employers as an afterthought
  Employer awareness and an enterprise path often move the needle faster than more consumer traffic.
• Pricing in isolation
  If the value story, signal, or proof is weak, discounting just burns margin.
• Redesigning before diagnosing
  Fix the bottleneck you actually have. Don’t rewrite everything because a metric looks bad somewhere else.

What All This Means

“Marketing” only becomes tractable when you diagnose the awareness-conversion mechanics of specific offerings for specific segments, especially employers. Most learning businesses can materially improve results within a quarter by narrowing their catalog focus, moving from vague to acute awareness, and removing obvious conversion friction. Do that consistently, and you’ll reclaim capacity for the deeper work—offer design, credential signaling, and employer partnerships—that makes growth durable.

About the Author

Jeff Cobb is a co-founder of Leading Learning and a co-founder and managing director of Tagoras, the company behind Leading Learning. He has nearly three decades of experience working as a consultant, researcher, author, and entrepreneur in the market for adult lifelong learning and has witnessed first hand how it has evolved over that time period. Jeff is also the founder and host of Learning Revolution, a site that supports entrepreneurial subject matter experts. You can find out more about him on the Tagoras and Learning Revolution Web sites.

The post Awareness and Conversion: Diagnosing the Real Marketing Problem in Your Learning Business appeared first on Leading Learning.

If you’re concerned about how your learning business can keep pace with rapid change—AI, growing risks, shifting learner expectations—this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast can help. Associations, credentialing bodies, and other learning businesses face mounting pressure to do fewer things of greater value, and success requires both courage and careful risk management.

Glenn Tecker, chair and co-CEO of Tecker International, joins co-host Jeff Cobb to talk about the forces reshaping continuing education and credentialing. They discuss how adaptive learning platforms are blurring the lines between education and assessment, why it’s essential to shift from an education mindset focused on information delivery to a learning mindset focused on application, the governance structures and culture of inquiry needed for innovation, the role of boards and staff in managing experimentation, and what it looks like to anticipate future competencies rather than react to the past.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] Learning businesses are facing tremendous pressure to adapt. Technology, shifting learner expectations, and crowded markets are challenging the long-standing models of education, certification, and governance.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:29] Our guest in this episode, number 462, is Glenn Tecker, chair and co-CEO of Tecker International, a multinational consulting practice that has worked with associations around the world for more than 40 years, primarily on strategy. Glenn is also co-author of three textbooks published by ASAE (the American Society of Association Executives), and those textbooks are required reading for the CAE (Certified Association Executive) credential. And he’s a long-time advisor to association CEOs and boards.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:01] Glenn and I talk about major forces he sees reshaping continuing education and credentialing—from adaptive learning platforms powered by AI to new security risks to the accelerating pace of change for knowledge and competencies.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:16] You and Glenn also dig into governance and culture and talk about why a culture of inquiry matters, what enables and blocks innovation, and how boards can be more effective partners to staff.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:28] And Glenn emphasizes the role of risk management and experimentation, showing how organizations can move forward with confidence even in uncertain times.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] This conversation can help you, dear listener, develop a clearer picture of the forces shaping the future of learning in associations and other learning businesses. And that clearer picture can help you act more effectively.

The Future of Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:56] Glenn, you’re somebody that I’ve wanted to talk to for a very long time now because of all that experience you have with organizations in the association world in areas like leadership and strategy. But, of course, my interest is primarily in learning. Serendipitously, I’d seen you weigh in on some learning topics recently, and I think we’ll be able to dive into a few of them here. Specifically, you had commented on a post in an ASAE forum, and the post was about AI and learning. You said, and I’ll quote you here, “The future of much adult learning will be adaptive, curated by AI, and integrated with peer and mentor interaction.” I agree completely, but I’m interested in what led you to that conclusion. What are you seeing that makes you feel like that is definitely the direction we’re going in?

Glenn Tecker: [00:02:48] The evolution of adaptive learning platforms, particularly with a kick from AI, is moving to the point where continuing education, assessment of the education, assessment of the learning, and provision of the credential are blending into a single place. The traditional barrier that existed between membership organizations who provided continuing ed and credentialing organizations who provided certificates and certifications is melting away. There’s law and procedure. ANSI [the American National Standards Institute] and a variety of other accrediting agencies still require a degree of insulation so that the politics and economics of a membership organization do not influence the delta weights, validity, and reliability of assessment methodologies, but technology is about to drive significant change in that area. What led us to understand that is we have been involved with adaptive learning technologies that are being used already, primarily by the medical community. A significant one is available for internal medicine. A significant one has been created, interestingly enough, by The New England Journal of Medicine, which is owned by the Massachusetts Medical Society—not a lot of people know that. It’s also being used in engineering.

Glenn Tecker: [00:04:15] What’s fascinating about it is that it recognizes that the wall that used to exist between teaching and learning has now come down. And, when you move from viewing what you do from teaching (the provision of information) to learning (access to information), the modalities that are available for learning and adaptive learning platforms are unlimited. It could send me to printed copy. It could send me to a simulation. It could send me to a group of mentors that would talk to me about an issue. It could send me to a project that a small community of learners would engage in. All of those things are possible. In the adaptive learning platform, what they’re also doing is assessing the preference of learning strategy that works for you. When it gets to the point where you’re having a difficulty, it will give the learner advice on which learning modality would work the best for them in that situation. What it also does is it has identified the fact that when people fail on something three times, they’re done. It never takes you back the third time to the same thing you failed on last time; it gives you another methodology to use so that you don’t click off.

Glenn Tecker: [00:05:38] That, along with the other two things that we’re seeing, one of which is the blending of AI and what’s often referred to as “quantum computing”—there are many names for it—is going to create major security issues for certification bodies because nothing will be secure. Not even blockchain and encryption will work. The third is the fact that the body of knowledge of most areas is progressing so rapidly, mainly because of AI but not only. What we are seeing is the need to figure out how to anticipate what the necessary skills, competencies, and understandings will be that may not show up in a traditional practice analysis, which looks at what people are doing now. It’s really the issue of how can you begin to think about how you will prepare for these circumstances?

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:42] We’ve been seeing something similar, and not necessarily AI-driven all the time, but those walls between the learning function and the credentialing function are getting harder to maintain because of the way that learning happens now and needs to happen now.

Adaptive Learning and Being-Able-to-Do

Glenn Tecker: [00:06:58] What’s interesting to us is the depth and breadth of potential assessment mechanisms that are available in the adaptive learning platform are superior to the scope of assessment mechanisms that tend to be available for most of the current credentialing programs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:20] Yes, that’s true. We want to have these neat little boxes—you do your learning here; you do your testing here—but it just doesn’t work as well that way anymore.

Glenn Tecker: [00:07:28] Yes, particularly if you’re moving to the ultimate level of learning. You move through what they need to know to what they need to understand to what they value and appreciate to the level of be-able-to. And, if you’re going to assess the level of be-able-to, you’re going to need some sort of application or simulation. That’s highly potential within the adaptive learning platform whereas, up to now, it’s only been possible if you’ve been face-to-face demonstration.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:58] You’re not just speaking theoretically here, I know because you’ve had a platform in place for a number of years now, which you call Howspace.

Glenn Tecker: [00:08:07] We have been using it, yes. It is an online platform specifically designed for group work and decision-making. Its value is that it can be used synchronously and asynchronously. It also has the ability to engage in polling, assessment, and testing. It’s integrated into it. We use it now in face-to-face meetings, hybrid meetings, and fully virtual meetings. We’ve used it for strategic planning. We’ve used it for education. We have used it for a membership meeting. We’ve used it for what we call Critical Issue Summits. We’ve used it now with over 150 associations, not even counting our private sector clients. And we’ve been using it over three years. Every year it gets better.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:00] How have you seen it change the trajectory of a group’s work when they’re using that as the basis for moving forward?

Glenn Tecker: [00:09:08] Good news and bad news. The good news is, in terms of engagement, we see it dramatically increased. Even when it’s entirely virtual, we will use Zoom, create small groups to do work together, and document their work and be able to interact with each other in the workspace. It essentially has gotten rid of flip charts forever. The second thing that we see is, sometimes in the asynchronous work, if we haven’t done a good job in moderating the conversation and focusing on critical content, we get a signal for that because the participation in the asynchronous work tends to reduce a little bit. We’ve learned how to pump that up still. The other thing that we see that’s of great value, particularly in virtual groups, [is that] participation using the workspace has made the experience and level of contribution of individuals, regardless of whether they are in the room or participating virtually, much more equal. An organization is able to get a much wider array of differentiated perspectives involved in the conversations and the thinking.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:23] This requires a different mindset on the part of the learner and on the part of the facilitator, and maybe a little bit of a different skillset too, to really take advantage of working in this way.

Glenn Tecker: [00:10:34] What we’ve found is the skillset is pretty much already obtained by participants. If you use Facebook, if you use any of the social media platforms, even e-mail, then this is easy to use. It doesn’t require loading any application. You simply get an e-mail with a link, you click on it, and you’re there. We are finding more and more folks, particularly in the scientific communities but not only, completely comfortable with this kind of sharing of information. What’s different is the AI that is integrated into it, which is mostly but not entirely a large language model, allows for near-instant curation of the ideas that are being generated. It facilitates the group being able to build on and build from what they’ve already learned or what they’ve already been suggesting. Interestingly enough, this platform was originally created in Europe. It began in Finland. Its primary use in Europe is in companies who use it for ongoing continuing education targeted to the particular needs of their staff cohort. We’ve adapted it for our uses in associations, primarily with strategic planning and problem-solving.

Where Learning Businesses Need to Move

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:59] If what you’re describing is the future—and I believe it is along with you—what does that look like for your average association who’s still basically relying on conferences and Webinars? They see that as what’s manageable, what’s easy, and what scales, but they need to shift in this direction. What does that look like, and what happens if they don’t, from your perspective?

Glenn Tecker: [00:12:22] If you are driven by revenue and not by learning, then the traditional online Webinars and traditional sit-in-a-room-and-listen, maybe with a Q&A, are probably going to be your best bet. If, however, you want to position yourself to continue to thrive in an environment where folks now are demonstrating less ability to find the dollars and the time to participate, then you’re going to need to move to more interactive programming and a commitment to folks actually learning rather than simply being exposed. What we know, for example, is that traditional online learning reaches the levels of awareness and understanding, but it never reaches the levels of be-able-to. If your learners are looking to be able to execute something as a result of the investment in what you’re providing, and you’re not giving that opportunity, they’re going to go somewhere else.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:26] And you’re seeing it as a hard tradeoff from a revenue standpoint? Are there revenue models in your mind that would support this type of learning approach?

Glenn Tecker: [00:13:36] Yes, there are. The reason being the savings of online environment are not that greater than the savings of the use of this technology, which is far more interactive. Again, it can be used in face-to-face. We use it that way. It can be used in hybrid. It can be used in fully virtual. But this platform is not the only one that’s emerging. What I believe is that, in the future, most associations are going to have to do fewer things of greater value for more targeted groups of people. And, if that’s the case, then what we’re going to find is that their employers and their constituents are going to demand that investment of time and money, whatever it is, enable them to do something different or better—not that they can just go to the staff meeting and talk about what they learned about, but, in fact, they’re able to execute something well. People will take that risk when they previously had an opportunity to try their hand at executing it so that, when they are doing it for real, it’s not the first time they’ve done it. That’s a fundamental tenet of adult education as it’s been discussed for the last 25 years. Now there is an economic driver behind the need to attend to that.

Learning As a Strategic Driver for Associations

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:10] How engaged are you seeing associations’ CEOs and boards with this sort of shift that’s happening? Do they really engage with learning as a strategic driver, in your experience?

Glenn Tecker: [00:15:22] I’ll draw a distinction now between the credentialing organizations and continuing education organizations. Unless the continuing education organization is what we call well heeled—it has substantial revenue and participation—it’s lagging. The credentialing organizations are either already moving in this direction or thinking seriously about it. That’s occurring at the governance level. My suspicion is that the membership organizations, which are primarily continuing ed and maybe offer certificates but not necessarily an accredited credential, are increasingly going to find board members—if they are composing their board members of individuals with some expertise in the business lines of the association and not political representatives of the various components of the organization—they’re going to find their boards asking questions along these lines, and their ability to provide alternative answers to those questions is what’s going to position them for success. “If this is the issue that the board is raising, then here are some of the alternatives. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative, and here’s the one that may work best for us.”

Glenn Tecker: [00:16:41] That provides the board with knowledgeable information upon which to make a decision that they can feel comfortable with. Some of these things some boards think are high-risk. The critical ingredient here is that staff provide a risk management process along with a commitment to experiment so that each step in the development of this new way of doing things is accompanied by a set of criteria that you have to get a yes to before you move to the next step so that, if it’s not working, you’re able either to abandon or to adapt before it becomes a sunk course. For staff being able to provide that—a laddered or sequenced risk management process—tends to allow governance to be willing to take the risk because they know if it’s not working, we’re going to get it early on, we’re either going to fix it, or we’re going to try something else.

The Role of Governance in Enabling (or Blocking) Innovation

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:47] What governance structures do you find either enable or block the adoption of these types of new approaches to anything? (But we’re talking about learning, obviously.)

Glenn Tecker: [00:17:56] What we are finding in common is increasingly a movement to ensure that, on the board, there are some individuals with experience and expertise in the business lines that the association is involved in—not necessarily instead of representation from the “owners” of the association, whether it’s chapters or components or multiple associations, but along with. What’s interesting to us is this is a metaphor for what for-profit companies have been doing for decades. On the for-profit boards on which I’ve served, we’ve got two kinds of directors. We’ve got inside directors, who are the staff and representatives of the major stockholder groups, and outside directors, who are there because they possess independent expertise in particular areas of importance to the organization. The differentiation in perspectives and experience creates a more holistic view of the possibilities and the challenges. Those are the boards that we find are most able, at the governance level, in consultation and partnership with staff, to engage in the three purposes of a board: to set direction, to establish strategy, to provide oversight, including making sure that the allocation of investments matches what it is they’re trying to accomplish in the strategy. That’s a trend we are seeing in composition in all three or four of those kinds of nonprofit organizations.

Glenn Tecker: [00:19:42] It’s a movement to creating a knowledge base so you can have additional confidence in the judgments that you’re making. We’re seeing some transition strategies being used. A lot of organizations do not understand that a board has the authority to invite anyone to participate in its meetings it wants to. Even if you’re using Robert’s, O. Garfield Jones, or Sturgis, the board has that authority. They can participate as equals in the conversation. You just can’t give them a vote. Having that kind of expertise available in the conversation is possible without necessarily fighting a bylaws change. Some groups are moving to do this either in policy or simply in practice. And then, once the organization becomes comfortable and enamored of what it enables decision-making to do, then it may move to memorialize it in a bylaws change. Now, associations have always asked advisors to come or contracted with consultants for particular activities. This is different because this is asking for an individual, like all board members, to stay apprised of the theme and direction. That’s strategic thoughtfulness. Strategy is about seeing patterns. Strategy is about looking at alternatives and being able to see the pros and cons in each, given what you anticipate current and future circumstances will be.

Glenn Tecker: [00:21:15] If you have someone who’s able to do that relative to the major business lines you’re involved in, particularly education because it is changing so rapidly and under such duress, it is essential. I say “under duress” because the primary problem that adult education is facing at the moment is too much. Literally, the field is saturated. There are so many alternatives of huge variance in terms of quality, price, and acceptance that the very choice of where to go is increasingly a question that people are asking Copilot, ChatGPT, or whatever AI system they are using. Now, what AI does here is, in those cases where you’re asked for recommendations, its choice tends to be based on what it harvests from that body of information based upon what’s there the most. Unfortunately, in the continuing ed area, most of the stuff there are promotions by people who are offering or selling it, so it has little to do with quality.

Academic-Style Distance Learning and Cohort-Based Learning

Glenn Tecker: [00:22:33] The last observation I would make in regard to this, we are seeing more and more not-for-profit organizations recognizing the value of distance learning as it’s been practiced by higher education for over a decade. If you are looking for the objective of your learning to be people not just being aware of and understanding but being able to, then what we are seeing and what our market research continues to affirm is that what most folks are looking for is access to learning that is affordable, that is reasonably accessible (online), but they also want to be able to spend time with their peers and with the experts from whom they are learning. In most cases, they would prefer that that time be face-to-face. If it cannot be face-to-face, then the technology of the distance learning classroom—which is a series of periodic gatherings with work that occurs during the gathering and in between the gatherings, executed by subgroups of the full group as an application of what they’ve learned from each other or the expertise—tends to be what most folks are looking for.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:00] Yes, we’ve felt for years that there’s not been enough focus on cohort-based learning going on in the association world. As you’re saying, the academic world got that a long time ago, probably because it’s built off their traditional models so well, but they’ve gotten good at it. In many cases, we’re seeing that academic continuing education departments are booming right now. The rest of academia is under fire, but continuing education is doing great, and they’re in a position to eat the lunch of many associations in different markets.

Glenn Tecker: [00:24:30] Yes. If associations don’t abandon the old habit of simply providing Webinars in response to one of the three demands, which is easy access and affordability, they’re going to be, I believe, left in the dust by the other providers of learning. Associations are still in the information provision business. They have not yet, many of them, graduated into the business of creating opportunity for learning. We’re seeing, for example, some movement towards things like open space learning, where folks can get together online or face-to-face and ask questions of each other, and there are major caveats there. The major caveat is, if there’s no one in the group with experience and expertise in the area, then essentially what they’re sharing are common practices, and common practices are not effective practices. It’s the old expression that used to say, “Practice makes perfect.” Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes consistent. If you’re doing the wrong thing 100 times, I’m fairly certain you’re going to do the wrong thing again the 101st time. That’s the dilemma, the caveat that exists with the movement towards not exemplary but innovative methodologies that are attractive. They’re innovative because they’re different, but they don’t meet our definition of innovative.

Glenn Tecker: [00:26:00] For us, an innovation is a change that makes something better. If it doesn’t make it better, it’s not an innovation; it’s an experiment. You can learn from it, you can grow from it, but it’s not an innovation. What we’re really seeing is those places that are succeeding in continuing ed, in certification, in credentialing—whether it’s certificates or certification—are those organizations that are recognizing that an innovation requires that the change makes something better. Assessment and evaluation at the level of the individual’s ability to effectively apply what they have learned becomes increasingly important. Now, if you tie this back to the history of associations, associations that provide certificates carefully warrant that the certificate does not guarantee that the individual’s performance will be any better as a result of attendance. It warrants they’ve been exposed to the information. Credentials even don’t warrant that it guarantees the individual’s performance will be improved. The warrant in a credential is the individual has demonstrated mastery of the body of knowledge they’ve been exposed to. But that’s different than assessing the ability to apply.

Shifting to a Culture of Inquiry

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:32] What role does culture play in all of this? Because everything we’re talking about is going to require overcoming a lot of “We’ve always done it this way.” I’m not sure associations are more susceptible to that than other organizations, but they certainly are susceptible. They’ve got to break through culturally to make the shift that we’re talking about.

Glenn Tecker: [00:27:52] The culture change is to move to what we refer to as a culture of inquiry, where the expectation is that hard questions will be asked about what we’re doing or anything that’s proposed. It’s the individuals who are known for saying, “Is there a downside here? Can you imagine if…? I wonder what would occur when…. Have we considered alternatives?” The process of thinking strategically is the application of the discipline of strategy at all levels of the organization. Strategy is a discipline, not an event that produces a product. The culture change is to move to a strategic mindset from an analytical mindset, even from a creative mindset. That tends to address the issue of “We’ve always done it this way.” Being willing to experiment. Here again what we observe is many boards have policies that commit them to innovation, but that policy also needs to commit the organization to experimentation—not many associations have done that. They will commit to experimentation if part of that commitment is requiring that risk management process be part of any proposal of a new initiative or experiment. That gives them a level of comfort. The simple way to put it is, if you say to the board, “We want to try something new,” what’s the first question the treasurer is going to ask?

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:29] What’s it going to cost? What’s the downside?

Glenn Tecker: [00:29:31] And, if you say to the board, “We’ve tried it; we tried something, and it didn’t work,” what’s the first comment the treasurer is going to make?

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:40] How much did that cost?

Glenn Tecker: [00:29:41] Exactly. What we’re looking for is a methodology that allows folks to be able to track that potential problem before it occurs. That tends to create the willingness to take the risk.

Remaining Relevant

Jeff Cobb: [00:29:55] Yes, I like that focus on the risk assessment component. You mentioned that earlier in the conversation as well. That does get overlooked so much. If you get the pieces in place, if you’re an organization that is forward-looking, what should it look like, say, five to ten years out? What should the learning function of a successful organization, an organization that wants to stay relevant, what’s that going to look like in your mind?

Glenn Tecker: [00:30:19] Jeff, you just hit what we find to be the most frequent and egregious error of thinking groups, planning groups, design groups within association communities. It’s the failure to take the time to agree on the outcome we are trying to achieve before we end up in debate about what paths to take. It’s the failure to create an envisioned future of what would constitute success before we begin to assess, “What are the potential paths to get there?” And when you fail to agree on the outcome first, two things happen. One, anybody can be right or wrong because you have no benchmark against which to make the judgment. Second, you usually end up saying yes to the idea that’s presented by the loudest mouth that talks the longest or the idea that is supported by the individual who talks last before we have to adjourn so we can make a decision and get home. What we are teaching organizations to do, particularly as it relates to these issues of evolution within continuing education, is to make sure that you agree on what will constitute success before you begin the conversation about what paths you should take to get there.

How Learning Leaders Can Drive Innovation and Strategic Thinking

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:45] If you’re somebody in an organization—this is going to describe probably a lot of our listeners—where you’ve got some authority, maybe you’re a senior leader, but you’re not yet the CEO, you’re not in the C-suite yet, and you’re trying to drive innovation, strategic thinking through the organization to get people to buy into that outcome that you’re ultimately going to try to get to, what’s your advice to that person? How can they help to drive that sort of innovation and strategic thinking in the organization?

Glenn Tecker: [00:32:16] It’s traditional and classic advice. One, identify what would constitute a benefit or accomplishment for the individuals whose influence or participation you’re trying to seek. Make sure that you are able to identify how the movement you are suggesting will in fact add to the things that are important to them. Second, you want to use incremental success. You want to demonstrate what’s possible by taking small steps to get there. Once you’ve taken a couple of small steps and earned the reputation for being able to achieve the promise that you’re making, then it’s much more likely that you’ll be given the opportunity to increasingly take larger steps. What you want to avoid is making a promise that you can’t keep. Honesty is critical here. If there are risks involved, make sure you identify them. If there are bumps along the way, make sure that, when they occur, you have a methodology for figuring out how to overcome them. Demonstrating that you have in place a plan—a plan that’s sufficiently flexible and nimble to be altered based upon changes and circumstances—is absolutely critical. This is a point in time where assuring that you have the core competencies involved in being nimble is an essential ingredient for any organization or unit that wants to commit to an innovative approach.

Glenn’s Approach to His Own Lifelong Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:58] I like to ask guests, whenever I can, about their own lifelong learning and what their habits, what their practices are for staying sharp and continuing to grow. What are some of yours?

Glenn Tecker: [00:34:12] I am a sponge for information. A significant portion of my time is spent taking a look at thinking that other people are doing. A large portion of my time, and the reason I so much enjoy what we do as a firm, is that we are constantly learning from our interactions with the folks that we serve. We work with our clients in a partnership. We’re not a group that flies overhead as a helicopter, takes a picture, and tells you what to do. Our process is one where we’re in partnership. We consider what the choices are—and sometimes we know more about them than our clients—and then, with our clients, make the choice about what the best paths are to get there. That process itself is an immensely rewarding process for learning. I have the neurodivergent attributes of being dyslexic and ADHD. My dyslexia has required me to learn from context, so I tend to be very sensitive to things that are occurring around me, and my ADHD has made it uncomfortable for me to spend the same time anywhere, one place at once. So I’m always moving and active. Being sensitive to what’s going on around me and being constantly active in interacting with others, those are my primary learning strategies.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:35:45] That wraps up our conversation with Glenn Tecker, chair and co-CEO of Tecker International, but hang around for our recap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:53] Visit Tecker International to learn more about Glenn’s work.

Celisa Steele: [00:36:10] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it with a colleague. That helps more people find the show and benefit from it, and it supports the work that we do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:19] In the conversation, Glenn highlighted the powerful forces reshaping learning and credentialing: adaptive platforms powered by AI, looming security risks, and the accelerating pace of change in knowledge and competencies.

Celisa Steele: [00:36:33] He reminded us that thriving in this environment requires not just new tools and structures but a culture of inquiry at the governance level and a willingness to experiment.

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:43] And to make experimentation possible, staff need to provide clear risk management processes. That way, boards can move forward with confidence, knowing they’ll learn quickly from what works and what doesn’t.

Celisa Steele: [00:36:56] Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• External Innovation and Learning Businesses
• Curiosity, Clarity, and Courage with Lowell Aplebaum
• Evolving Through Innovation with Mary Byers
• Modern Learning with Sae Schatz

The post Governance, Risk, and the Future of Learning with Glenn Tecker appeared first on Leading Learning.

In our 2025 survey of the learning business landscape, association respondents ranked “increasing revenue” as #1 for both their primary and secondary strategic goals for the year ahead. Early returns for our 2026 survey show similar results.

We have consulted with organizations over many years, and we have seen the pressure to grow education revenue increase significantly. Boards expect it. Staff want it. Vendors promise it. And yet most education portfolios continue to underperform. Market dynamics and poor execution are only partly to blame.

In this article, we’ll look at seven key issues that hinder education revenue performance in associations. This underperformance stems from deep structural and strategic issues which, in turn, lead to failures in the market and, ultimately, an erosion of value.

Structural Issues

Association education is impacted by three key structural blind spots. Together, these weaken education’s footing before it ever faces the market.

Lack of Organizational Focus

The education function in associations suffers from the same “Be all things to all members” mentality that afflicts associations generally. Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers highlighted this issue more than a decade ago in Race for Relevance, noting that “‘The bigger, the better’ and ‘The more, the merrier’ seem to describe the common bias” among association leadership and management.

This bias cascades down to education, where we hear repeatedly that organizations want to be the “one-stop shop” or, better yet, the “Amazon.com” of their markets, seemingly ignoring the vast amount of resources and decades of losses it took for Amazon to achieve its unique positioning in the retail world (or the fact that there is little indication anyone is looking for an “Amazon of education”).

Most associations in our experience try to serve too many audiences with too many products, resulting in a smorgasbord of courses, conference sessions, and other offerings that are difficult to manage and maintain effectively and for which quality levels often vary dramatically from product to product. As I have argued before, associations have a responsibility to support learning across their member bases, but that is very different from providing a comprehensive set of formal education products for every segment of membership.

The Nonprofit Versus For-Profit Tension

The second issue often goes hand in hand with the first. Most associations are mission-driven nonprofits, which contributes to the compulsion to provide education for everyone. But most education departments, based on our experience and research, are expected to break even, and many are expected to generate a surplus to contribute towards fulfilling the broader mission.

Basically, associations want it both ways, but the education-for-everyone mentality tends to maintain an upper hand. Governance structures and leadership pipelines are rarely designed for true entrepreneurial risk-taking or driving profitability. Without clarity, education gets caught in the middle—not subsidized enough to serve mission in a clear, compelling way but also not invested in sufficiently to stand on its own commercially in the face of growing competition and heightened customer expectations.

It’s rare, in our experience, for associations to have modeled out, on a product line by product line bases, what the true profit-and-loss numbers are on their educational offerings. Even rarer is visibility into metrics like expected cashflow from specific products. Arguably, this is visibility an organization should have even if education is treated purely as a member benefit that supports mission. If the aim is profitability, this kind of visibility isn’t optional—and commercial competitors most definitely do not ignore it.

Non-Dues Revenue Marginalization

Associations talk a lot about non-dues revenue, but, in our experience, education is rarely at the center of that discussion. Sponsorship and advertising dominate. You can see this, for example, in the agendas and typical attendees for major non-dues revenue events or in social media postings on the topic.

Some of this marginalization is no doubt owing to the background of the people who tend to drive non-dues revenue discussions and organize related events. They tend to come from the events and tech sides of associations. Arguably, another key cause for this marginalization is the muddled state of education focus suggested earlier (mission? profit?) and the shortage of educational leaders with a business orientation and corresponding capabilities.

The disconnect, of course, is that education is quite clearly central to non-dues revenue. ASAE, citing its own Operating Ratio Report, says that educational programming fees are one of the sources on which associations rely most heavily for non-dues revenue. And that accounts only for education as a direct source of revenue. Education is very often a driver for sponsorship, whether for discrete offerings like Webinars or as a critical part of the overall value proposition for events.

Associations talk a lot about non-dues revenue, but, in our experience, education is rarely at the center of that discussion.

Market Failures

Compounding the structural issues are key weaknesses that tend to characterize association education in the broader market for adult learning. When the market compares association education to other providers, these weaknesses become glaring.

Declining Perception of Competitiveness

Learners often compare association offerings—whether consciously or not—to LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Duolingo, and similar “Big Learning” providers, even if associations tell themselves they’re in a different category. For some of the reasons already cited, associations cannot match those platforms on scale or polish. Even an organization that is fully focused, has resolved the nonprofit/for-profit tension, and takes education seriously as a source of non-dues revenue is unlikely to ever have the resources needed to compete as a large catalog player.

This doesn’t mean associations can’t be competitive, only that they are unlikely to be seen that way if they allow the yardstick against which they are measured to be Big Learning providers. As already suggested, most associations would benefit by greatly narrowing their catalogs and focusing on a few high-priority segments of their audience. Additionally, they need to tightly align their educational offerings to the authority assets that differentiate them from commercial providers—things like standards, credentials, research, and advocacy.

Worn-Out Business Models

The “one course, one learner” model is exhausted, but too many associations still rely on it as their main, if not their only, way of selling their educational offerings.

Subscriptions, bundles, and cohort-based approaches are proven ways to generate higher sales volumes and more predictable revenue. To the extent they serve to keep learners more engaged over time, these approaches can also contribute significantly to learning effectiveness—i.e., making learning stick. Still, associations have been slow to adopt such approaches and/or to leverage them to their full potential. Our survey of the 2025 learning business landscape found that only 31 percent of respondents had introduced a subscription for all or part of their catalog, and less than half of respondents were leveraging bundling as a revenue model.

Associations, particularly those with individual members, have also been relatively slow to embrace business-to-business, or B2B, selling. The obvious advantage of selling to companies, organization, and other institutional purchasers is that you can sell many offerings to many learners in one fell swoop, substantially increasing revenue. Combine this type of selling with models like subscriptions and bundling, and you can amplify the revenue impact while simultaneously building valuable long-term relationships with both learners and employers.

Waning Product Formats

Webinars remain the workhorse of association online education, and most conferences still look much as they did decades ago. Neither Webinars nor conferences are likely to disappear overnight, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be significantly revamped and that associations can’t simultaneously be moving toward other models.

The issue is not technology adoption—it’s the lack of design discipline. Low-tech improvements in how content and experiences are structured could dramatically improve learning outcomes and perceived value but are ignored too often. Simple changes to learning experiences like factoring in time for reflection, incorporating opportunities for self-testing, and providing simple resources to help learners more easily apply what they have learned back at the office can make a huge difference. And approaches like coaching and cohort-based learning can provide a high degree of personalization and interactivity without requiring a heavy investment in technology.

All these suggestions require subject matter experts who are prepared to deliver on them. As we have argued many times before, investing in training subject matter experts and presenters to be better educators is one of the highest-leverage actions learning businesses can take.

Erosion of Value Perception

The cumulative, highly damaging consequence of the preceding factors is that association education sends weak signals of value to both learners and employers.

Weak Signaling

There’s a well-established—indeed, Nobel-prize-winning—body of economic theory that the value of education often lies less in direct skill transfer and more in the signals it sends, particularly to employers. While this theory is mainly associated with secondary and higher education, it can be applied to associations.

Very often, the education that associations offer is seen as a grudging necessity (e.g., for compliance) or a nice-to-have perk (e.g., much professional development). If it is associated with a credential of some sort, it is possible—though far from a given—that the credential is seen as having economic value, but association educational offerings rarely signal strong value in their own right. The fact that associations often do not market their offerings effectively and frequently underprice or give away education only serves to reinforce this situation.

Very often, the education that associations offer is seen as a grudging necessity (e.g., for compliance) or a nice-to-have perk (e.g., much professional development).

Economist Bryan Kaplan has suggested three key elements of signaling: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. Associations tend to come up weak in all three:

• Few measure learning outcomes, resulting in a weak intelligence signal.
• Few impose rigor (e.g., tests, projects, renewals), creating a weak conscientiousness signal.
• Few build coherent pathways or standardize content, leading to a weak conformity signal.

The result is the education is perceived as hours of credit rather than serious professional formation.

The Way Forward

The problems outlined here are not new. What is new is the urgency. Learners have more choices than ever, and commercial competitors are raising expectations for value, convenience, and quality. If associations continue to underinvest or to straddle the line between mission and margin, they will see their education portfolios decline in both relevance and revenue.

The path forward requires clarity and discipline in multiple areas.

1. Make an explicit strategic choice.
Decide whether education will function primarily as a subsidized mission multiplier or a commercial business line. You can make that choice for the portfolio as a whole or vary it by product or product line—positioning some offerings as mission multipliers and others as profit-driven. What matters is clarity. Either model is viable, but drifting between them is not. A clear stance enables offerings, investments, and measures of success to align with the chosen model.

2. Align education with authority assets.
Associations cannot win by trying to be Coursera or LinkedIn Learning. They can win by tying education directly to what differentiates them: standards, credentials, research, and advocacy. Education that extends and amplifies these authority assets is harder to displace and easier to monetize.

3. Modernize the business model.
Move beyond “one course, one learner.” Subscriptions, bundles, B2B licensing, and cohort-based learning are proven models that increase both engagement and revenue predictability. Microlearning and coaching, when integrated into broader pathways, can provide ongoing touchpoints that build loyalty and impact.

4. Strengthen the signal.
Education that sends weak signals of rigor, relevance, and achievement will always be undervalued. Associations must invest in assessments, pathways, and marketing that communicate intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. Strong signals not only attract learners but also employers and sponsors who want to be associated with high quality.

5. Invest in capacity.
Revenue growth is not just about models and products; it’s about people and process. Training subject matter experts to teach well, building pricing and marketing capability, and developing partnerships with employers are all necessary steps. Associations that treat education as a core business will invest accordingly.

Taken together, these moves require clarity and courage, not just more effort. They challenge long-held habits—of trying to serve everyone, of underpricing to avoid criticism, of treating education as ancillary. But associations that are willing to make these shifts will find themselves not only with stronger education revenue but with a renewed role as essential leaders in the professional development of their fields.

About the Author

Jeff Cobb is a co-founder of Leading Learning and a co-founder and managing director of Tagoras, the company behind Leading Learning. He has nearly three decades of experience working as a consultant, researcher, author, and entrepreneur in the market for adult lifelong learning and has witnessed first hand how it has evolved over that time period. Jeff is also the founder and host of Learning Revolution, a site that supports entrepreneurial subject matter experts. You can find out more about him on the Tagoras and Learning Revolution Web sites.

The post What’s Broken with Association Education Revenue? appeared first on Leading Learning.

If you’re wondering what role artificial intelligence should play in your learning business—or how to prepare your people and processes to use it effectively—this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast is for you. Many learning businesses are just beginning to grapple with AI’s implications, and the gap between the potential and the current reality is big.

Amith Nagarajan, chairman of Blue Cypress and founder of Sidecar, joins co-host Jeff Cobb to talk about how learning businesses can build the capacity they need to thrive in an AI-driven future. They discuss patterns from past waves of technological change, where associations stand today with AI adoption, and the risks of standing still. Amith also shares practical steps for leaders to get hands-on with AI, the importance of reducing friction, and how AI tools are reshaping knowledge, insights, and personalization.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] Technology is always reshaping the world and therefore how learning businesses operate—from the early days of the Web, through mobile and social, and now with the rise of artificial intelligence. These shifts create both opportunities and challenges for learning providers.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] Our guest in this episode, number 461, is Amith Nagarajan. Amith is the chairman of Blue Cypress, a family of companies that help associations embrace AI and transform how they deliver value. He’s also behind Sidecar, which aims to educate a million association professionals in AI by the end of the decade.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:54] Amith and I talk about patterns he’s seen across multiple waves of technological disruption, where associations stand today with AI adoption, and what leaders need to do to be prepared for the future.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:06] You and Amith also get into some of the applications his companies are building and what those tools reveal about how associations can use AI for knowledge, insight, and personalization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:18] And we close with a focus on the human side of all this—how learning businesses can lean into the distinctly human opportunities that AI won’t replace.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:28] If you want to better understand the implications of AI for your learning business, then this episode is for you. The conversation kicks off with Amith talking about what he’s done and is now doing with his companies.

Amith’s Background in Tech and with Associations, from Aptify to Blue Cypress and Sidecar

Amith Nagarajan: [00:01:45] I’m probably known originally, or perhaps best known, for having started an AMS company in this space back in the ‘90s called Aptify, which I sold about 10 years ago. Since then I’ve been focused on a family of companies called Blue Cypress, an AI-oriented shop. Essentially, we have a number of different brands within our family that provide a combination of AI learning, AI services, and also AI software to the association sector very, very specifically, and we’ve been doing that for about 10 years. We’ve been in AI for a long, long time (in AI speak) and are very deep in it. That is the focus for me—how do we take AI and help associations not just incrementally improve but radically transform their business models, their value delivery, and how they operate internally as well?

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:37] We’re going to talk about AI more. You’re definitely somebody to be talking to about AI. But I was struck, as you were talking, that it’s already been a decade since you sold Aptify. I know you were in the association world for years before that. I believe Aptify was your first company, if I’m correct.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:02:55] Yes. I’m from California, grew up in Silicon Valley, have been programming computers since I was in single-digit years, and started my first company at the age of 17, which was Aptify. It did not start out in the association market. I didn’t know what an association was back in ’93, when I started it. But, back in those days, I had a knack for software development, and I decided to build a toolset that would help people build database apps. That turned into a robust platform in the early and mid ’90s. And then I happened upon the association market in the mid ’90s and just fell in love with it over time and focused exclusively on it for quite a while.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:33] So you have been doing it for quite a while. As you said, it wasn’t your original intent, but Aptify took you there, and you’ve been there all the way through Blue Cypress, which has a portfolio of companies that serve associations. What’s kept you engaged with this sector over that period of time?

Amith Nagarajan: [00:03:52] The purpose-driven nature of the people. The community is fantastic. The people in this market are focused on trying to have an impact in the world. By helping associations do what they do better, we feel like we’re making an impact. I feel like I’m having an impact. There are lots of different sectors, lots of different niche markets that you can focus on as an entrepreneur. I happened to find this one by accident. It wasn’t an intention. I just happened upon an association once upon a time back in the ‘90s and then found another one and then found another one, and I said, “Oh, well, this is actually like a whole market.” I stayed because it’s a great business opportunity. It’s a robust marketplace. Once you get to know the market, you realize it’s quite substantial, especially when you look at it globally.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:04:37] But I stayed, and I came back to it after selling Aptify because I felt a really deep connection with the space and wanted to help people in this space not just survive or stay relevant but rather thrive—drive aggressive, transformative change. That’s what I’ve always been about. It’s always been exciting to me to help people do big things, and that’s what we’re trying to do at Blue Cypress. I’ve been doing AI stuff since the early 2010s. We started getting into AI at Aptify in the years preceding the sale of it. We started getting pretty heavily into AI and then ended up spinning out those technologies into what became rasa.io, which was our first AI software company way back in the day. We still own that company and are growing it. It’s doing well. It’s been a while, but we’ve seen AI from lots of different stages of development and applicability to the market.

Amith’s Take on the Big Shifts: The Internet, E-commerce, Mobile, Social, and AI

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:27] I’d forgotten you had gotten into it that early. In some ways, our stories are similar because I too was building a piece of software that was not intended for the association world and found myself in the association world and have been there ever since. But you were there a little earlier than I was. You’ve seen some pretty big shifts from the rise of the Web. You started out in the early ‘90s; the Web was still in its infancy then. Then into the social media craze. I remember that hitting associations, and everybody thought it was going to put associations out of business. And now AI. As somebody who’s observed all of that, are there patterns you see repeating or lessons that you think leaders should draw, particularly right now, if they’re thinking about “Oh, AI is hitting. What do I do with that?”

Amith Nagarajan: [00:06:11] Yes, there are definitely patterns. Going through those major transitions—obviously the Internet and the Web, e-commerce, mobile, social, all these big shifts, and now AI, as you mentioned. Common patterns are, first of all, that people tend to overestimate the near-term impact but radically underestimate the long-term impact of technologies that are truly representative of phase changes. They’re not just an incremental innovation, where you went from the iPhone 15 to the iPhone 16, and you got some new widgets on your screen, but rather something that can fundamentally transform the economic relationship between buyers and sellers. And I mean that in the broadest possible sense. If you think about what happened in each of those transitions over the last 30+ years, you’ve had a significant shift in terms of information, information advantage or disadvantage on the demand side or the supply side of the curve. You look at distribution.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:07:09] I talk a lot about AI as being the third exponential curve following two others. One is the compute curve, which everyone talks about, often known as Moore’s Law, the exponential rise in compute power relative to cost. And then what ended up happening with the Internet was the distribution curve. We flattened out the cost of distributing nearly anything that can be digitized down to essentially zero. But now what’s happening with AI is the cost of reasoning, the core component of what we consider intelligence, is going to zero. We don’t know what to do with that. But coming back to the question of pattern recognition, as costs approach zero for something that was once scarce and is now becoming abundant, it reframes the relationship between consumers of value and producers of value—or buyers and sellers, to put it another way. People often don’t anticipate the magnitude of the impact long term, but they think about the hype cycle, and they’re like, “Oh my God, this is going to change everything.” And then they wake up a year later like, “Well, actually things haven’t changed that much.” It’s a false sense of safety in the status quo that it gives people.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:08:12] I’ll come back to my thoughts on AI on that at some point in this discussion, specifically because it is moving faster than these other curves. As crazy as the Internet and mobile and all that was, it’s nothing compared to AI in terms of speed. My main point that I’m trying to underscore in terms of the trend line across these various changes over time is that, when people get this sense of security, that it didn’t really change that much, and then the bigger tail on the change, the transformative impact comes along, that’s when they get caught off guard. Back in the ‘90s, people were saying, “Oh, associations are going to be out of business pretty soon. There are all these companies that are going to be coming out with verticalized Web sites that are going to take over associations.” Associations were still there in the early 2000s, and they’re like, “Well, that didn’t happen.” But, sure enough, the Internet has displaced the activities that associations have historically done in many ways, and AI will do that as well.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:09:08] My general observation is that people tend to not move quickly enough because they get…. Associations are generally not the first adopters of anything. We’ve talked about that before in our conversations before this pod. It’s a frustration to technologists and to people who are trying to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Some associations move a little bit faster than others, but generally they’re slow movers for the most part. Slow movers tend to have their perspectives reinforced by the initial hype cycle being greater than the initial return, and then they get totally caught off guard because the bigger wave is coming on the back end of it—that underestimation of the long-term impact that I’m referring to. We can’t afford to do that with AI is the bottom line.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:52] What are examples of organizations in those earlier waves that either got it right—they timed it correctly; they saw what was going on and reaped huge benefits by what was happening with the Web, social, or whatever—or, conversely, maybe one or two that didn’t and got clobbered by it?

Amith Nagarajan: [00:10:14] There was a pretty big shift to the world of education delivery online back in the whole phase of Internet and mobile. You know that world far better than I do, Jeff. But the concept of people delivering traditional classroom-based, synchronous training when asynchronous was getting better and better and better, more dynamic, more capable, the learning outcomes were increasingly achieving the goal of the student. And so a lot of associations back in the ‘90s were like, “No, distance learning, remote learning,” as we used to call it back then, “is just not as effective.” Of course there are definitely, still to this day, tremendous advantages of synchronous, in-classroom, face-to-face learning, but the modalities have improved so much that many of the people who were thinking the old way—they weren’t even willing to dabble in online asynchronous learning—got crushed. You see associations where they had significant revenue declines, where they weren’t focused on that yet. You see, for example, medical specialty societies. There’s a number of them that I’m quite familiar with that have thrived in this era because they’ve invested in making it possible to do distributed learning well through the Internet, through mobile, but embracing the modality for what it is.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:11:20] You can say to me, “Oh, well, AI will never replace humans for X, just like the Internet will never replace face-to-face for X.” That’s true to some extent. Maybe eventually it’s not. People might say, “Oh, you’ll never stream video on the Internet. It’s far too slow.” That’s just a matter of time. But that’s just an example. There are certain things that are fair to say, like our biology mandates that we have connection, that we are in close proximity with others in our species. It’s not psychology; it’s biology that dictates that. We’re always going to crave elements that technology doesn’t displace. And that’s good, I think. That’s really, really good. The point would be that people forget about the new. They’re saying it won’t displace the old, but what is it going to do that’s different, that’s either complementary or, in some cases, crowds out the need for the old, even if it’s not exactly the same? It’s still a substitute good if people buy X instead of Y even if X is not an exact substitute in terms of its functionality if people stop buying the other product.

Where Associations Stand with AI Adoption—and Where They Should Be

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:27] Where do associations stand right now with AI adoption, and where do you think they should be?

Amith Nagarajan: [00:12:35] If I were to use a report card type of metaphor, I’d say it’s not looking so great today, but I’m optimistic about the future. The way I would look at the current state of affairs is that I think about education as the leading indicator for associations’ ability to adopt AI. You can go to vendors like ourselves or any other company and buy software, get help with services, et cetera. There are lots of great things you can do that way, but that doesn’t improve you. What we are always focused on—and we do some surveys around this—is how much education are people taking in, whether they’re the CEO or a first-year grad coming into the workforce? What level of investment, in terms of time and dollars, are people putting into learning? And it’s very minimal right now. It’s very, very minimal. People are doing almost nothing on average. Now, there are some associations that are putting some effort into this, and that’s fantastic. They’re going to see tons of dividends from that. The bottom line is that no vendor, no vendor at all, can solve your problem for you. You have to be knowledgeable about this stuff.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:13:38] The way I describe it is, let’s say we’re off to a board retreat, you and I, along with our board, and we’re association execs. You’re the CEO. I’m the COO of some association. We’ve got 10, 20, 50 board members coming, depending on the size of the association’s group. We’re going to figure out what the next year [or] two, three years looks like. How in the world can you and I possibly stand a chance at doing a good job in building a strategic plan if we don’t understand AI quite deeply? Maybe not down to the bits and bytes, but we need to understand its capabilities. And the way you understand its capabilities is by unpacking it, working with it, learning it, and you can’t delegate that. You can’t delegate that to a technologist. You can’t delegate that to an outside vendor. You have to make the investment in time.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:14:26] The good news is it’s not a PhD. You don’t have to go to school formally. You don’t have to spend months or years doing nothing but AI learning. That’s impractical. When I speak on the subject, Jeff, I always tell people block off 15 minutes a day every day. Listen to a podcast. Watch a video. Play with a particular tool. Read a book. Whatever makes sense. Hopefully a mix of those things. There’s nothing quite like hands-on. Use the mix of learning resources, but do it every day. Just like working out, just like anything else you practice, you get better and better. If you practice with AI at least 15 minutes a day every single day for the rest of this year, by the end of the year, I would be willing to bet you’d be amongst the top 10 percent of the knowledgeable people in AI. We’re recording this in the late summer timeframe, so you don’t have a ton of time. But, if you get started now and spend 15 minutes a day, you’ll be further along.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:15:17] There are lots of free resources. There are resources like Sidecar’s (my main focus these days), which try to help associations learn AI at scale. In fact, our mission for the next four and a half years, by the end of the decade, is to educate a million association professionals in AI. Whether it’s at the top tier of our AAiP [Association Artificial Intelligence Professional] certification or if it’s attending a free Webinar or downloading a free book, we don’t really care. Our goal is to touch a million+ association folks in that time. But that’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people that work in the space, both as paid staff and volunteers. To me, the report card—going back to that—is not great today, but the good news is we can change it quite easily.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:15:57] My bottom line for the prognosis for the future is, if associations make that investment in education and put on their creative thinking hats, they have all the opportunity in the world. AI has lowered the cost of everything. It’s lowered the cost of software development, of writing, of building anything from scratch. The barriers to entry for associations to get into completely new lines of business with completely different ways of thinking in order to solve the problems that their members will have in one, two, or three years are better than ever. If you’re willing to think creatively, take a little bit of risk, do some experiments, to, most importantly, invest some time, I think the future is extremely bright for any association that wants to play in the game. But a lot of people aren’t playing in the game at all. A lot of them are sitting on the sidelines.

The Opportunity Cost of Not Embracing AI

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:42] What do you see as the cost? I’m looking at it from the standpoint of the learning business and organizations that provide educational learning, what AI is doing there in terms of providing adaptive learning experiences, personalization. If you’re not getting on board with that, somebody is going to outpace you in your market. What about more generally for associations? What’s the opportunity cost if they don’t do what you’re talking about?

Amith Nagarajan: [00:17:06] You become obsolete pretty quickly. Many associations have the most reputable brand, the best content, and the strongest community in their vertical. Let’s say your vertical is a particular profession, maybe bounded by a particular geography, where you are still the number one game in town for, let’s say, a given state and a given field, or maybe nationally, maybe internationally. And so, in your niche, whatever that is, your brand and your content are very strong. Yet you decide intentionally—even though it may not be because of any malicious intent, but it is intentional—that you’re going to make it really hard for people to get your content, to find what they need. To gain actual value from your organization is going to be tough because you’re going to make your Web site a Byzantine structure. You’re going to make it so that your Web content for learning isn’t particularly up to date. I say it in this very directed manner that it’s a choice because all things in life are a choice in terms of where you invest your energy and your dollars.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:18:10] Part of the problem is associations try to do too many things. They try to solve 15 problems. Of course, that goes back to governance, where, in these strategy retreats, everyone wants to have their little pet project on the table, and they don’t want it to die. But you have to go pick two or three things and do them well. So there are some tough choices that have to be made. My view is associations create a lot of friction, and friction is an enemy—number one enemy perhaps in some contexts—to helping your audience gain value from you. If I say, hey, Jeff, I know you guys have unbelievable expertise in education and learning. In fact, for us, that’s super relevant because we run a certification program on AI for associations. I’d love to learn from you. You make it quite easy because your content is pretty easy to access. It’s pretty well organized. You have podcasts. You have written-format material. So I can find you easily. I can find your content easily.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:19:08] Even if you had great content, but you made it really, really hard for me to get to it, I’m not going to come to you as an authority on the subject, even if I know you and respect you and think you’re the greatest source of information on it. Same thing with an association. There’s a certain tolerance people have for friction. Think about it this way—why did Google completely freak out? They lost it when ChatGPT started rising because they realized that is a displacement of their business if they don’t catch up and do something. They put some serious horsepower into it now, and I think they’re doing some good stuff. But, when you see a momentous shift like that, you have to pay attention to it. Associations have this issue that their stuff is hard to get access to. It’s hard to find things. Almost every association CEO I talk to says, “Yes, the number one complaint I get from my board or from close-in volunteers is that it’s hard to navigate our Web site.” They’re like, “Oh, let’s go spend half a million dollars on a new Web site with some vendor.” And then six months after that Web site goes live, they’re like, “Yes, it’s like glossier and shinier and smells better,” but it still basically sucks in terms of being able to access the content they need.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:20:12] You’re not going to solve it with a new version of a horse and cart. You need different approaches to solve the problem. Because the problem isn’t that anyone has anything but the best of intentions; it’s that it’s a really complicated problem. You have a lot of content, you have a lot of different people to serve, so you need AI to personalize. You need AI to curate. You need AI to make things conversational. And that’s the opportunity in front of you. Five years ago, it would have cost you a fortune to do any of this, and it would have been pretty low quality. Now it’s extraordinary quality, and it’s very accessible even to very small associations. But you have to start by understanding what it can do. You can buy things and start slapping them on your Web site, but it’s much better if you spend some time learning first.

Hopes, Fears, and Blind Spots When It Comes to AI

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:00] You run a lot of programs to help people in associations with AI. What have you learned from that around what hangs people up around AI? What are their hopes, fears, blind spots?

Amith Nagarajan: [00:21:13] With Sidecar, we’ve got an audience of about 30,000 people that consume our content on a regular basis, whether it’s our three-times-a-week newsletter, which is totally free. We also run a weekly podcast called the Sidecar Sync. A lot of listeners tune in there regularly to learn and get updates. We’ve got a free book called Ascend, which is an AI book—full-length business book about AI for associations—totally free to download, and a ton of other stuff. So we put it out there. We’ve got about 30,000 people who regularly consume this stuff, and it’s growing quite rapidly. That’s almost double in size from this time last year. Clearly, there’s a lot of demand there.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:21:47] What I’ve learned from it on my end personally is that people are hungry for this, but that it’s unbelievable how fast people become experts. We have people that we’ve brought into our ecosystem that started off going, “I don’t know which way is up when it comes to AI,” and now these are people that are writing blogs. They’re leading sessions. They’re connecting with others. Part of what we do is help folks do that, and it’s amazing. It’s so incredibly rewarding to help people in their journey. They’re doing things in their organization, punching way above their weight class, and some of these are from very small associations. There is a perception that we can’t do it because of X, whether it’s “Oh, we’re not that technical” or “We don’t have a big budget” or “We’re a very small association.” There are all these obstacles. Those are all psychological. The reality is that the tools are accessible, fairly easy to use if you’re willing to put the time in. You don’t need to be a technician to be fairly good at this stuff fairly quickly, which is the exciting part.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:22:43] One thing I would share with your listeners, Jeff, is that a big impediment is fear of the organization not wanting the staff to do stuff with AI. There are still a lot of associations who have outright banned AI. There are still people who’ve done that. Good luck with that one because your people are using AI, FYI. They’re just doing it with personal accounts, most likely free personal accounts, which have zero security, and your content is being fed to those free accounts. If you are banning AI, you’re essentially saying, “Hey, would you like to use DeepSeek and send all of your association’s content across the Pacific Ocean? Cool. Go for it.” The reality is that, if you don’t set policy, people will just do whatever they want to. There are some people who will do nothing. Don’t get me wrong—some people who are the rule followers will say, “Well, my organization said, ‘Thou shalt not do AI,’ so I won’t.” But there’s a large number of people who will. And it’s stressful too. It’s super anxiety-inducing if you want to use a tool that you know could potentially help you.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:23:45] Then there are the people out there who don’t want to change anything, but they don’t necessarily like drudgery either. They might be afraid of losing their job. There are all those kinds of issues where people are thinking, “Well, if you’re so good with AI, then I don’t need to do my manual job anymore, which is repetitive.” It might be white-collar labor, but it’s very repetitive, and there are a lot of jobs like that. It’s your job as a leader to envision that future, to find the roles where people’s experience, knowledge, and unique contributions to your culture can add value. Most associations aren’t looking to cut tons of jobs or any jobs, but people assume that that’s what they’re going to do. That’s another obstacle. There’s a big leadership gap here, both in terms of basics, like figuring out what your AI policy is going to be. We’ve got templates for that, by the way, on our Web site that are free—you can download them on Sidecar—that will help you figure out what your policy should be.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:24:33] It’s basic stuff, by the way. It doesn’t require a lawyer. It doesn’t require tons of work. But it’s, hey, is ChatGPT allowed? Is Claude allowed? Are you going to allow meeting notetakers? In this Zoom call, you have a meeting notetaker that’s helping you record the notes for the pod, and it’s going to help you put together all that kind of stuff, which is great. But do you want to allow that in general when you have a Zoom call or Teams call, especially if the notetaker is one you’ve never heard of? Because a notetaker can show up from any company that anyone happens to use, and where’s that content going? There are all these things you need to think through. Again, it’s not a gargantuan task, but the absence of such policy is an impediment to adoption, and it’s also a major stress point for your team. Fix that. You can do that in the next 30 days easily.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:15] Your comment about how quickly some people learned and became experts just by participating, I find totally true. You mentioned later making that 15 minutes a day. I’m sure you’re familiar with Ethan Mollick, who says, “Just roll up your sleeves, and do that 10 hours.” Once you do that, you start to realize this is doable, and you can get so much out of it. I was in a mastermind group we run just the other day, and somebody was lamenting the fact that their organization won’t pay the $20 for the ChatGPT subscription each month. If you look at how much that adds up to in terms of cost annually, it’s trivial compared to most other things they’re doing with software, and the potential returns are huge. But the organization hasn’t made the kind of decisions that you’re talking about and put the structure in place.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:05] I did want to also dive in, in addition to Sidecar, to two of the applications that are part of the Blue Cypress family. And you’re welcome to talk about others if you’d like. These two jumped out at me, partly because I was at ASAE recently and noticed them there. But also one of them we’ve referenced in our work recently, and that’s Betty, which is the chatbot-type application.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:27] We’re now at a point where I believe that traditional, formal, structured courses are going to decline significantly. There is certainly a role for them. They will not go away. But these unstructured learning activities, where the learner is able to engage how they need to engage at that point in time to solve the problem, learn what they need to learn, a chatbot is a great vehicle for that. We recommended it as one of the solutions in an engagement recently. We’re also very big on data these days. Traditionally, the folks in our audience (the learning business audience) have not done enough with data, either to understand their market or to make learning that adapts to their market. Betty is one of your applications; Skip is another, which I know does data analysis. Can you talk a little bit about what those two applications do? And, again, if there are others you feel it’s relevant to mention to our audience, feel free to do that.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:27:27] I’ll talk about three categories, and I’ll mention our offerings in this space, which we know better than we know anything else; I can speak to them the best. The three categories I think are critical for all associations are knowledge, insights, and personalization. We have a knowledge agent in Betty, we have a data analytics agent in Skip, and we have a personalization engine in a product called rasa.io. I’ll talk about each of those briefly. Associations have, for hundreds of years in some cases, been the center of knowledge for their community. A knowledge agent—imagine a being. In this case, it’s a computer, but it’s an entity that has the deepest and best, most contextualized knowledge in your field of anyone on the planet and is available all day, every day, and can be available as an assistant, as a tutor, as a writing partner. That’s exactly what Betty is. Betty has been around since late 2022. We’ve been working, as I mentioned, with AI for a lot longer than that, but we knew this moment in time would be coming because we’d been working with both predictive AI and generative AI for years prior to the ChatGPT moment.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:28:44] But when ChatGPT launched, we said, “Okay, we need to pull the trigger on doing this knowledge agent/knowledge assistant concept now.” So we did. Betty has over 100 enterprise associations using the product. It’s growing extremely fast. Basically, what happens is this—an association says, “We want to train Betty,” and so Betty will learn your content. Your content could be all of your past journal articles. Your Web site might be all of your online courses. It could be all of that. It could be lots of different things. Betty learns that, and Betty stays up to date on all that material as it continues to change. Betty provides grounded answers to your community. “Grounded” is a very important term. You’ve probably heard the term “hallucination” in the world of AI, and that’s when the AI essentially makes something up—that’s both a bug and a feature in some respects. Not in this context. It’s not a feature to make something up when someone’s looking for answers. It can be a feature when you’re doing brainstorming and being creative about “What kind of business ideas could I come up with? How can I possibly do a better marketing campaign?” That’s where the AI’s creativity is helpful.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:29:50] Context, knowledge retrieval, and answering particularly mission-critical questions—it’s completely unacceptable, and, unfortunately, there are many AI solutions out there that still allow for this concept of hallucinations to seep through. At Betty, our number one priority has been accuracy of the knowledge because associations—especially in medical or engineering—cannot tolerate inaccuracies. Every answer that Betty provides, whether it’s through chat or through agentic AI, which is when you connect Betty to other systems—this is not just the chatbot; that’s one way to surface Betty, but you can connect Betty to the rest of your critical business infrastructure—Betty always cites her sources and is always able to refer back to the knowledge retrieved and the thinking process that went into formulating the response. It’s not some black box where you’re hoping and praying that it’s going to answer your members’ questions correctly. It’s grounded on your content, only your content. It’s not using the Internet. It’s not using random Web sites. It’s a very powerful solution, and it’s purpose-built for this sector, where fault tolerance is critical in terms of availability, where the tolerance for any risk is very low, for good reason.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:30:57] Betty’s been an incredible hit. We expect to see Betty grow for years to come because the problems she solves are ultimately different than the problems you can solve through classical means. I mentioned earlier the difficulty of accessing the information people want. Well, Betty completely solves that. Rather than having to put in the right keyword into some search tool—even if it’s a great search tool, and you get 50 articles back, that’s not necessarily helpful—you go to Betty and say, “I’m working on this problem,” and Betty gives you an unbelievable answer. You’re going to come back to that. If you’re a member and you have that experience, you’re going to come back to that. Some people say, “Well, how can the association compete with ChatGPT?” The answer is two things. Number one, your private content, and number two is your brand. People will trust your brand, for good reason, if you are grounding your answers on the basis of your proprietary and uniquely high-quality knowledge base.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:31:55] You asked about data and insights, so I will pivot to that next. We also identified what we consider one of the grand challenges of association management: insights into really anything. It can be classical database questions like, “How many members did I lose in the last month?” or “What’s my renewal rate?” or reports from events, where it’s like, “How many attendees do I have that were an attendee at some prior year, but not this year?” All those kinds of things. Those are fairly straightforward to do traditionally. Part of the problem is that people have this explosion of systems. It’s not just an AMS, LMS, or CMS; it’s those things, but it’s also probably 5, 10, or 50 other systems that are used for different specialty things. That’s not going to go away. People have been trying to fight this since the beginning of computing. There have always been specialty systems because they do the job really well. So the question is then how do you solve for a widely distributed source of truth in terms of data? How do you make it so that people can ask any question—like with Betty—and have a rapid response with a well-thought-out, reasoned answer? It’s not just for technicians; it’s specifically for business users.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:33:07] Think of Skip essentially as like Claude or ChatGPT, where you have a conversational interface, and Skip is living, though, in a secure data platform. It’s an AI data platform that we have in the market called MemberJunction, which is a totally free open-source data platform we publish and maintain. What it allows you to do is to easily ingest data from all your different data sources. If you’re using Salesforce, and let’s say you also have an AMS, and you have a financial management system, and you have 10 other SaaS products that are out there, maybe some spreadsheets and other things to throw into the mix to round it out, you can ingest all of that data very easily into MemberJunction and keep it up to date. Skip lives on top of that and has secure access to all that data and is smart enough to figure it out. The problem for us humans is that that many systems are too complex for us to know, “Oh, well, this data lives over here, and this data lives over here, and how do I connect it and make sense of it?”

Amith Nagarajan: [00:34:04] Skip’s an incredibly powerful AI and has the ability to look across any complexity of schemas and then write queries, write code, and ultimately come back to you with what we call components—reports and dashboards—that, if you like them, you can save and rerun them however often you want, or you can ask for new ones each time you use it. Skip typically takes anywhere from two to five minutes to produce an answer, sometimes a little faster, sometimes slower, depending on how much code Skip has to write. Think of Skip essentially as a software development team coupled with an MBA-level person. You take a brilliant business strategist and analyst coupled with a data scientist and a great programmer, combine them all together in a team, and make them available 24/7 and able to respond to you within a handful of minutes. It’s pretty amazing. You can start to get insights. What I love about Skip is that we’re trying to reignite curiosity. We have all been conditioned to not expect much in terms of data because it’s hard; we have to go to a vendor, or we have to go to IT, and we’ve got to wait. By the time we get an answer—because some custom query or report has to be created—even if you have the dollars to spend, typically, you wait two weeks, four weeks, eight weeks. You don’t ask the question because you’re like, “Well, I need to know now. And, if I don’t know the answer now, I’m not going to wait in my own workflow for two weeks to get the answer.” As a result of that, many of the curiosities people have about their data to gain insights and to leverage insights are stamped out over time. That’s what we’re excited about with Skip.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:35:39] Finally, one of the most important things to get right is this idea of getting the right piece of information to the right member through the right channel at the right time. That’s this idea of personalization. This is the original problem we’ve been working on solving in the AI realm, going back to the early 2010s. This is before rasa was an official company. But, back at Aptify (the AMS business I used to own), we were sitting on top of these massive, large-scale databases of information, and our belief was, “Oh, well, we could make these Web sites better and make online communities better and make the education process better if we could personalize. So let’s use all the information in the AMS to do that.” That was the original idea in 2013, 2014, 2015.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:36:23] By 2016, when I sold the company, we had spun out the technology assets that became rasa and ended up focusing in one particular narrow category at first, which was e-mail newsletters. It’s almost like an afterthought, but people forget about the fact that the newsletter is one of the most valuable things many associations provide. The lowly newsletter, which goes out maybe to 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 people a week or even daily, is your most frequent point of interaction oftentimes. How often do people come to your Web site? Even a wonderful Web site? Maybe once a week. Probably once a month would be extremely high. Most of the time people come to your Web site when they want to register for your annual conference or renew their membership or something like that. Maybe they do a lookup to try to find an article and go away after they’re frustrated. That’s happening three, four, five, six times a year. But your newsletter hits their inbox every day, perhaps, and it’s an opportunity to deliver value or an opportunity to frustrate.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:37:21] The problem is, if I have 30,000 people at Sidecar, for example, and, yes, they’re all association people, mostly association people, and mostly they’re interested in AI because they wouldn’t be part of Sidecar if they’re not, how do I then make it relevant to them? How technical are they? How far along in the journey are they? What’s their level of proficiency in different tools? What’s their area of interest? Are they a finance person, a marketing person, or a CEO? Are they entry-level? There are all these dimensions of what makes you and me individuals. This goes way beyond the idea of segmentation. This is infinite segments, essentially, and it’s dynamic. The idea was to say, “Hey, can we really target the individual?” That’s what we’ve proven with rasa for a decade now. If you send e-mails that are deeply personalized, the funny thing that happens is people ask for more of them. Associations often say, “Oh, we can only do a weekly newsletter because we send too many e-mails.” That’s true if your e-mails annoy people. If people are getting something that isn’t value-additive to them, they say, “No more.” But, if you give people something that’s improving their life, they’re going to want more of it.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:38:30] Of course, I want more free ice cream. Of course, I want more free whatever. It’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s utility. If it’s negative utility, they say, “No more.” If it’s positive, it’s very simple. Sure enough, with rasa-based e-mail newsletters—and this is over 10 years with hundreds and hundreds of association customers and non-associations as well—we’ve shown a couple things. Number one is your unsubscribe rate is cut down by an order of magnitude, literally a 10x decrease in unsubscribe rate because we’re sending relevant content every single touch. Number two, your open rates go up by about 2x. And, number three, your click rates go up between 5x and 10x. That’s an enormous improvement in engagement. Many people have quoted that they value the newsletter as the number one benefit of membership after they implement a personalized newsletter. It’s a tremendous, easy thing to do. And that’s why I like to talk about it because it’s proven. Hundreds of associations use it. Many of them make a lot of money because of it.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:39:25] If you sell ads in your newsletter and all of a sudden you have five times as many clicks and two or three times as many opens and a bigger audience because there are fewer unsubscribes, it’s really good for your advertising metrics, and you’re going to make more money. But, ultimately, you serve the member better. Most recently—last thing about rasa—we broadened the technology. We’ve had a 98-percent retention rate year over year for a decade now. The number one complaint people have had is “Well, I wish you could send more e-mails, not just the newsletter.” And that’s the thing we’ve been working on for a couple of years. The AI has gotten powerful enough where it can personalize anything. It’s not just newsletters anymore, but now you can send any e-mail through rasa. It’s a product called rasa Campaigns. There are two different things: rasa Newsletters and rasa Campaigns. Rasa Campaigns is a direct replacement for old-school e-mail blast software that doesn’t personalize or doesn’t personalize well. It’s cost-comparable to those kinds of packages, and it allows you to do any kind of campaign, sequence-based campaigns. But the key to it is personalization, deep personalization.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:40:29] A couple quick examples. In your world of learning, rather than promoting a course and saying, “Hey, Jeff, you should attend my upcoming course,” I can specifically tell you why. I can give you a subject line that’s handwritten for you by AI. I can give you three bullets about lessons in the course that are going to be super, super relevant to you. Same thing for annual meetings, same thing for volunteer opportunities, and on and on and on. I actually get excited. I love all these products. They’re all my children, essentially, so it’s hard to say which is a favorite. I don’t have a favorite. But the idea of personalization doesn’t quite have as much sizzle, but the value creation is absolutely enormous.

How AI Impacts What Humans Do and Need

Jeff Cobb: [00:41:14] Many people are worried that as AI becomes more and more powerful, the human role starts to shrink, and we’re going to have issues with that. But, of course, associations and learning businesses are supposed to be fostering human growth. That’s what they’re about. Where do you see the uniquely human opportunities that AI is never going to replace? Certainly I’ve got learning in my mind, but, more broadly, how should organizations lean into the human opportunity that is still there with AI?

Amith Nagarajan: [00:41:46] You lead the thought process with where will the customer naturally go? Do customers still go to Blockbuster, or do they stream on Netflix? It’s the latter because it’s more convenient, and the value is better. There’s more choice. It’s faster, easier, cheaper, better. No matter how great your video rental store is, doesn’t matter. The flip side of that is what would people continue to do with people? Connecting in person, synchronous learning. Even if you can automate almost all of asynchronous with AI tutors and AI-generated content, synchronous experiences with experts are deeply valuable. You mentioned a mastermind that you guys run; we do one as well. That kind of cohort-based learning is incredibly powerful, deeply human connections. There’s more opportunity to do that. At Sidecar, for example, with our audience of association AI professionals and people who are going through the certification process, we get a lot of customer service inquiries—very similar to member service, same idea. We’re working on automating all of that. We love our team, and we’re not planning on letting anyone go. In fact, we’re going to add more team members.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:42:44] But what these people are going to be doing, instead of answering rote e-mails, as we get more of this agentic AI up and running, is to make proactive outreach part of what they do. They’re going to call customers and say, “How can I help you improve engagement amongst your team? How can I help you get everyone in your association staff and your close-in volunteers up to speed on AI? How can we increase that level of service?” In the world of education—again, this is your domain far more than mine—we’ve known for a long, long time, for thousands of years, that one-to-one tutoring has been the gold standard for the ultimate way of achieving outcomes in terms of learning, knowledge transfer, skill accretion, and all that. Yet that’s not scalable. Not all of us have an expert we can go sit with and hang out with all day and learn from and have discussions with. But now we can. One of my favorite use cases of Betty, I briefly mentioned, is Betty as a tutor.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:43:39] In fact, if you come to the Sidecar Learning Hub, which is all our asynchronous content, we’ve got the 10, 11 hours of content you mentioned on AI stuff, and, in there, Betty is hanging out. If you have a question, you can talk to Betty, and Betty knows, not a ton about you, but a little bit about you, soon will know everything about you, and Betty does know where you are in the course and what you’ve studied so far and the lesson that you’re on. When you talk to Betty, Betty is also primed to not give you the answer but to take a more Socratic approach to say, “Well, Jeff, let me walk you through it. What do you know about it? How can I help you learn this?” and try to ultimately get you to the right outcome but to be much more of a tutor mindset. AIs don’t get tired, and AIs can scale to every human on earth. We can all have the most incredible tutor in any field that we want. We can’t do that with people. It takes us 25+ years to grow a human into a productive member of the workforce. We do that with AI in no time flat. We can scale it basically to any number.

Amith Nagarajan: [00:44:36] The other thing to remember is the AI we have right now is the worst AI we’re ever going to have. It’s just getting better. It’s on a six-month doubling curve, roughly, in terms of power relative to cost. Coming back to your question, I’m optimistic. If you are one of the people who’s like, “I’m going to learn this stuff. I’m going to figure out how to automate a lot of the drudgery. I’m going to focus on the connection. I’m going to focus on the relationships. I’m going to focus on new ideas.” We’re explorers, right? Built deeply into our DNA is this desire to fan out and figure out what’s around the corner and what’s on the next planet or what’s behind the next business model. And we have that opportunity now. We can go and explore at an unprecedented rate. And that means more discovery. The fixed mindset—that the earth is flat, and there’s nothing past the known universe—is very limited. Every time there’s been any era of scientific progress or philosophical discovery, we quite regularly find out that, in fact, the last generation’s thinking, as novel as it was at the time, was limited, which is, by definition, what makes the world and the universe a giant and amazing mystery. To me, I’m excited. Now, not everyone’s going to share that. People lead with fear, and a lot of times they’re saying, “I don’t know if I can learn this.” I believe that we can bring everyone along.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:45:54] We’re not done just yet—stick around for our recap.

Jeff Cobb: [00:45:57] Learn more about the work that Amith Nagarajan does at Blue Cypress and a link to Amith’s LinkedIn profile. He’d love to connect. He’s also open to fielding e-mails.

Celisa Steele: [00:46:17] If you’re serious about AI—and you should be—be sure to check out the Sidecar site because Sidecar has dozens of free AI resources tailored to associations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:46:32] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it with a colleague. That helps more people find the show and supports the work we do.

Celisa Steele: [00:46:40] In this episode, Amith underscored that leaders can’t delegate understanding AI. Investing even 15 minutes a day in learning about AI and using it makes a huge difference, and learning businesses that put in the time will be positioned to thrive.

Jeff Cobb: [00:46:57] Amith also pointed out the opportunity cost of inaction. Amith’s focus is on associations, and he noted that associations have incredible assets—brand, content, community—but they risk irrelevance if they don’t apply AI to reduce friction and deliver value in new ways. So, dear listener, make the time to learn and apply a bit of AI today.

Celisa Steele: [00:47:20] Thanks again for listening—see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post Building AI Capacity with Amith Nagarajan appeared first on Leading Learning.

Associations have long played a role in supporting learning and education, but they may be overlooking the full extent of their potential. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele explore why associations are education’s sleeping giant and how they can awaken to the opportunity before them.

They discuss the distinction between learning and education, examine what’s often holding associations back, offer concrete ideas for moving forward, and highlight the wide-ranging impact that embracing associations’ role as major providers of learning and education can have on members, learners, employers, and society at large.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] We want to talk today about something that’s been on our minds since coming back from ASAE Annual 2025 in Los Angeles: the role of associations in learning and education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:30] If your learning business is part of an association, this conversation is especially for you. Associations have a unique role to play in educating the workforce and in supporting lifelong learning. It’s a role that may be more important now than it’s ever been.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:46] We’re calling this episode “Why Associations Are (Still) Education’s Sleeping Giant” because associations’ role is sometimes under-played, and, when it’s played, it may go under-recognized. The potential is there, and the power is there, but too often it’s dormant. Our goal with this conversation is to help us all be awake to this potential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:08] We’re going to explore how, while associations are a major player in learning and education, they haven’t always been recognized as such or played the role authoritatively, how they can change that, and the impact that doing so could have—not just for associations but for learners, employers, and society as a whole.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:30] And because this is fresh on our minds from ASAE Annual, we’ll also pull in some examples and themes that we heard there that underscore why this matters.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:40] Before we go any further, we should pause to make sure we’re clear on what we mean when we say “learning” and “education” because understanding that distinction shapes how we think about associations’ role.

Framing: Learning Versus Education

Celisa Steele: [00:01:55] In episode 397, Jeff, you and I talked about the difference between learning and education, and we’re going to link to that episode in the show notes for this episode in case any of you, dear listeners, want the fuller explanation. But we’ll offer a CliffNotes version now. Learning is the broad category. It’s the umbrella. Learning encompasses formal education but also informal experiences, like mentoring, peer-to-peer sharing, problem-solving on the fly, or even reflecting after a project is done.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:30] Networking at a conference, for example. Education is a subcategory of learning. Education is structured and organized. It’s designed to lead to a particular set of outcomes, and it’s often packaged as a course, program, workshop, or credential. It has defined parameters—who participates, what’s covered, when it starts and ends.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:53] All education is learning, but not all learning is education. Learning can happen anywhere. It can be that conversation in a hallway or at a conference, as you just said, Jeff. It can be troubleshooting a problem at the office with one of your colleagues. It could be reading a book or article.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:10] We’re not just splitting hairs here. This learning-versus-education distinction is critical. When leaders think about their association’s role, they have a tendency to default to formal education: the annual meeting, online courses, or certification programs. Those are important, but they’re only part of the picture.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:32] Associations can also play—and most already do play—a huge role in fostering informal learning. They create the spaces, connections, and resources that allow members to learn from each other and from the broader community.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:47] In today’s world, the lines between formal and informal learning are blurring. They’ve been blurry for quite a while now. A learning experience might start as a structured course but then spill over into ongoing discussions in an online community or spark a peer mentoring relationship.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:05] That blurring might be what’s going on with my eyesight. I seem to have more trouble seeing things now.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:10] You must be learning a lot then.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:11] That’s what we can hope. When we talk about the role of associations in learning and education, we are talking about both the structured, planned offerings and the more organic, less formal opportunities.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:26] Keeping both in view allows associations to think much more expansively about their impact and to see themselves not only as education providers but as learning catalysts.

The Opportunity for Associations Now

Celisa Steele: [00:04:38] Next, let’s look at why this moment feels so right for associations to lean into their role in fostering learning and education.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:48] To start with, there are big-picture forces at work—forces shaping careers, industries, and society in ways that make lifelong learning essential.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:59] Yes, shaping and reshaping those careers and industries and society. The nature of work is changing faster than ever. We have automation. We have artificial intelligence. We have global competition. We have new technologies that are shifting what’s required in nearly every job, from entry-level positions up to the executive level. Reskilling and upskilling aren’t just nice to have; they are essential for staying relevant and employable in today’s job market.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:29] Careers are no longer linear. Many professionals will move across roles, industries, even switch entire fields multiple times. Every shift requires new knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking—in other words, new learning.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:46] At the same time, we have trust in traditional higher education and in the value of traditional higher education eroding. Enrollment numbers are down. People are questioning the cost, the time involved, the return on investment, and whether or not what’s taught is actually aligned with what’s needed in the workplace.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:07] That opens the door for new thinking and for other credible providers. And associations are uniquely positioned to step through that door.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:16] Associations tend to have deep and sustained relationships with their members in the fields that they serve. Many associations have been around for decades. That longevity can build trust. Trust, in the context of learning businesses, is really important, has real value, is a real currency. In a session at ASAE Annual, Denise Roosendaal, the executive director of I.C.E. (the Institute for Credentialing Excellence), cited an Independent Sector finding that associations are bucking the trend of distrust in many institutions. We have pretty high levels of distrust among U.S. citizens in things like government, big business, and media. About 57 percent of Americans report high trust in nonprofit organizations, including associations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:09] Associations are mission-driven, existing to serve members and their fields. That alignment can make learning feel like a shared investment in the profession’s or field’s future rather than a simple transaction.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:23] Associations usually have unparalleled subject matter expertise. They can tap into thought leaders, innovators, and practitioners in ways that often other learning providers can’t match.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:36] They also have built-in communities of practice. Members aren’t just passive consumers of education; they’re potential mentors, collaborators, and co-creators of knowledge.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:47] And, unlike higher ed institutions, associations can move more quickly because they’re not bound by semesters or lengthy curriculum review processes. When a new regulation comes out or a skills gap emerges, associations have the potential to respond in months and sometimes even shorter timeframes, weeks.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:08] In that same session where Denise Roosendaal mentioned associations’ trust advantage, Letty Kluttz of APIC (the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology)—that’s hopefully the last time we’ll have to spell out the acronym—talked about three microcredentials that they’ve launched in 2025. Three in one year.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:32] Associations are uniquely positioned to combine the rigor of formal education with the relevance and immediacy of workplace training. Those three microcredentials from APIC that you just mentioned definitely fit that bill.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:46] We’re seeing really smart approaches, things like microcredentials tied to emerging competencies or created to address skills gaps and partnerships with employers for career pathways.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:59] Associations have credibility not just with their learners—they tend to be trusted also by employers, by regulators, by policymakers. They can bring relevant stakeholders together to help ensure that the learning has real-world value and is recognized in the marketplace.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:19] Several ASAE sessions focused on how associations can help with workforce development. Associations can also be part of workforce policy. Which dovetails nicely with education. If you’re influencing standards, you can align your offerings directly with them.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:35] The opportunity is big, it’s multifaceted, and it’s here right now. But the important part of today’s conversation—or an important part—is that it’s not entirely new. This potential has been here for decades.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:50] That raises a question. If the potential has been there all along, why hasn’t it been fully realized?

Celisa Steele: [00:09:57] That’s what we want to talk about next because understanding the barriers is going to be key to making sure that this sleeping giant doesn’t roll over and hit the snooze button again.

Why the Opportunity Hasn’t Been Fully Realized

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:10] If this opportunity for associations to be recognized as big players in the education and learning space has been here for years, decades even, why haven’t associations fully stepped into it?

Celisa Steele: [00:10:24] I don’t think there’s a single reason why, but culture and identity definitely come to mind as potential barriers. Some associations still primarily identify as conveners or communities—places to gather, network, and share—but not necessarily as learning providers. That mindset can limit then how much they invest in education as a strategic driver.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:49] Another big barrier is internal. Many associations, especially larger ones that have departments, have silos that keep education disconnected from other parts of the organization. Education staff may work largely apart from membership, marketing, advocacy, or technology teams.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:08] And that separation can lead to missed opportunities. If your membership team isn’t feeding insights about member needs to your education team, you risk developing offerings that are out of sync with what’s needed and what’s most relevant. If your education team isn’t telling membership about what it’s developing, then the education offerings, even if they are in sync and relevant, might be underused.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:31] Another factor is resources. Even when leaders do see the opportunity, budgets and staff capacity can be stretched thin. When you’re juggling an annual meeting, member services, and advocacy work, education can become one more item on a long to-do list.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:47] Then the default often becomes sticking with what’s familiar: the same annual conference format, the same Webinar approach, the same template for online courses. Without innovation, what you’re offering may not meet evolving learner needs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:02] There’s also the pull of legacy formats and models—things like credit-hour requirements or long-standing curricula that are slow to change because of external accrediting bodies or internal governance.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:15] Another challenge is that many associations are product-first in the way that they think rather than audience-first. They design the course or program and then go looking for people to fill the seats in that offering, rather than starting with that deep understanding of learner needs and then building educational products or learning opportunities from that deep understanding of learner needs.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:40] In some cases, associations have simply underestimated their own value as educators. They might think, “We’re not a university; we don’t have a campus. We can’t compete with Coursera or LinkedIn Learning.”

Celisa Steele: [00:12:52] But the reality is associations don’t have to compete on those terms. Their value can lie in niche expertise, in credibility, in community—advantages that big, generic providers like LinkedIn Learning can’t easily replicate.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:09] And one more point. Sometimes there’s a lack of data—or a lack of the right data—to make the case for investing more in education. Without metrics that show the connection between learning and member engagement, retention, or revenue, education can be seen as a cost center rather than a growth engine.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:28] That ties back to the silos that we mentioned earlier, Jeff. If education and marketing and membership aren’t talking meaningfully and regularly, you probably can’t see the full picture of how learning drives membership and advocacy and vice versa.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:42] So the bottom line on why this opportunity has often been missed? It’s a mix of structural, cultural, and strategic barriers, but they’re not insurmountable. That said, they do require intentional effort to address.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:57] Which is where we’re headed next: What associations can do to better seize the opportunity to be—and be recognized as—major providers of learning and education.

How to (Better) Seize the Opportunity

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:08] We’ve talked about the opportunity in front of associations and why it hasn’t been fully realized. The next part is arguably the most important. What can associations do to seize that opportunity?

Celisa Steele: [00:14:21] Every organization’s situation is unique, but there are some common approaches that we’ve seen work. They’re not particularly complicated, but they do require commitment. We’re going to talk about six things that we think associations can do.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:37] First, elevate education and learning in your strategy. That means making them central to your mission, not just a byproduct of events or a line item in the budget. If you’re an association leader, explicitly name education and—probably even more importantly—learning as strategic priorities.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:57] This can be as concrete as including learning-related goals in your organizational scorecard or more broadly ensuring that your mission statement reflects your role in developing your field’s knowledge and skills. The point—in either case or anywhere along that spectrum—is to make the role that you play in education and learning visible and to make sure that there’s some accountability around that role.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:22] Second, take an audience-first approach. That means starting with a deep understanding of your learners—their needs, challenges, and aspirations—before you design anything.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:36] That can mean investing in formal needs assessment. It can mean investing in member surveys. But it also probably means listening in informal ways: paying attention to discussion threads in your online community, debriefing with volunteers after events, asking open-ended questions in one-on-one conversations or at the end of a course evaluation. As with so much these days, AI can probably help you. It can help you find trends and common threads in the data that you have, both quantitative data like Likert ratings of courses and qualitative data you might get from phone interviews.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:15] I’ll stress that none of this means that you’re just being reactive to your market, that you’re taking what you’re hearing and turning around and producing based on that. It’s your job as an association, as a leader, to lead learning. That’s what we’re all about here at Leading Learning. You’re taking that data, you’re taking that information, but then you’re infusing that with your own knowledge, your own vision, to set the pace for your profession or your field with the learning experiences that you’re helping to catalyze and facilitate. Remember that your audience isn’t just individual members, even if you are an individual member society. Employers, industry partners, regulators are part of your learning ecosystem too, and understanding their needs can help you design offerings that are valued by learners and, importantly, in the marketplace.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:06] The third thing we’ll suggest is consider partnerships. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Partner with employers to co-create training that addresses specific skill gaps. Collaborate with universities on credit-bearing programs that might connect with your niche expertise and connect that to a broader academic credential. Work with vendors, and maybe embed some of your learning resources into tools that your members are already using. Maybe you can work with other associations.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:38] Partnerships can also help you scale. If you’re resource-constrained—and so many associations are—leveraging the marketing reach, brand, content expertise, or technology platforms of a partner can let you do more without overextending your team.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:53] Fourth, we’ll suggest that you invest in the infrastructure needed for education and for learning. I’m using “infrastructure” to refer to systems, processes, and frameworks that make your educational offerings sustainable and adaptable. I’m thinking about content governance, data strategy, competency frameworks.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:16] For example, a solid competency framework gives you a blueprint for aligning all your learning—from Webinars to conferences to certifications—so that everything builds toward clearly defined capabilities in your field.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:30] Content governance means that you know what you have. You’re going to then be able to—based on that knowledge of what you have—keep it current. You’re going to be able to tag it and organize it so it can be potentially reused, remixed, and delivered in multiple formats. And then, when the time comes, it can also be sunset and retired from your catalog.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:51] A data strategy ensures you can measure not just participation but impact and use that insight to improve and to make the case for further investment. We’ll include links in the show notes to some past episodes on measurement and evaluation—in particular, conversations with Alaina Szlachta and Will Thalheimer.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:14] Fifth, embrace flexibility in format. The days of one-size-fits-all education are over—if there ever really was a day when one size fit all. Be thinking about shorter, modular learning alongside potentially offering some deep-dive programs. You want to make it possible for learners to engage on their own schedule and on the devices that they use every day.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:38] To be clear, we’re not saying you should abandon your in-person events or longer programs. It means thinking about the total mix—how your offerings work together to meet different needs and preferences. Think about how your offerings compare to other options your learners have. Online and shorter options may stand out if your learners are comparing those to semester-long, on-campus courses, for example.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:04] Sixth and finally, advocate for learning inside your organization. Sometimes the biggest barrier is getting your own leadership or board to see education and learning as essential to your mission and sustainability as an association.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:21] We feel it is fundamental to member value to be cultivating and facilitating learning. That’s what people are looking for these days. And that’s where your data, stories, and learner feedback come in. Share examples of how learning—whether it’s formal or informal—has helped members advance in their careers, how it’s influenced policy, or how it’s driven revenue and retention for your association.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:47] Because, when you connect the dots between learning, member value, and organizational success, you’re making it easier to get the buy-in you need to be able to grow the impact that you’re having with your education and learning offerings.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:01] Of course, you don’t have to do all of this at once. Start with leverage points—the changes that can create momentum in multiple areas. For some associations, that might be building a competency framework. For others, it might be piloting a partnership with an employer.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:16] The key is to start. Waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect plan means that you might let opportunity slip by.

Jeff Cobb: [00:21:25] And, when you start, you begin to shift culture. Which is so important. You shift from seeing education as an obligation or a side benefit to seeing it as a core way you deliver on your mission.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:40] Which brings us nicely to the final part of our conversation: What happens when associations fully seize this opportunity? What’s the impact for the association, for learners, and beyond? Let’s talk about what happens when associations step into this role fully, when they make learning and education central to their mission and strategy.

The Impact of Seizing the Opportunity

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:05] The most immediate impact is usually on the association itself. Learning becomes a driver of member engagement, loyalty, and retention. When members see clear value in your educational offerings and the broader learning that you’re making possible—whether that’s helping them advance their careers, meet requirements, or solve real-life, day-to-day problems—they have a stronger reason to stay connected to your organization. Scott Wiley, the CEO of CoreNet Global, told me that he believes, “The future of associations lies in flipping the script—from leading with membership to leading with learning. When education becomes the front door, membership walks in naturally.” Well put, Scott.

Celisa Steele: [00:22:51] Yes, I like that idea of education being a front door—that’s very nice. Seizing this opportunity also diversifies and strengthens revenue. Education can become a reliable income stream that supports other parts of the organization. That helps reduce dependence on, say, a single big event, exhibit show, or membership dues alone. Erin Pressley, senior vice president of Education, Training & Events at NRECA (the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association), was at ASAE Annual. She’s been on the podcast before, and she loves to say that she loves to make money for her association—because that money feeds mission. It allows NRECA to better deliver on its mission and better serve its members.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:39] And there’s the reputational impact. Associations that lead in education and learning are seen as thought leaders and as the go-to resources in their fields. That can translate into stronger advocacy influence, better partnerships, and greater visibility with funders or sponsors.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:56] For members and for the learners, the impact is personal. They get access to trusted, relevant learning opportunities that help them do their jobs better, that help them advance their careers, that help them adapt to changes in their industry.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:11] And, because associations can combine formal education with informal learning opportunities, members can build skills in ways that fit their lives—whether that’s a structured program, a peer mentoring relationship, or a quick just-in-time resource.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:25] Of course, employers benefit too. They get a more skilled, adaptable workforce. That can mean higher productivity, fewer mistakes, better compliance with regulations, and a stronger talent pipeline.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:39] When employers see that an association is helping solve real workforce challenges, they’re more likely to support their staff’s involvement—through memberships, event attendance, or sponsoring educational initiatives.

Celisa Steele: [00:24:52] Lastly, we would be remiss if we don’t mention the societal impact. Think of fields like healthcare, engineering, law, public safety; in those fields, better learning and education directly affect public well-being. Even in less obviously high-stakes industries, stronger professional competence benefits the communities that those professionals serve.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:17] In other words, when associations seize the opportunity and embrace the important role of being providers and leaders of education and learning, they’re not just serving members; they’re serving the broader public interest.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:30] And all of this reinforces the association’s mission, making it more resilient, more relevant even as the world changes rapidly.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:45] We’ll finish in just a moment with a recap of what we’ve discussed in our look at why associations are (still) education’s sleeping giant.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:06] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share this episode or another with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:16] We covered a lot in this episode, starting with the distinction between learning and education, then looking at the opportunity associations have right now to more fully embrace their role in leading learning and education, some of the barriers in terms of why they haven’t been able to fully realize that potential, and then what to do to help them better realize that potential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:40] To recap, we believe associations are uniquely positioned to lead in both learning broadly and education because of their credibility, community, and potential for agility. The opportunity is here, but it’s been missed or not fully realized in the past due to silos, resource constraints, legacy models, and a product-first mindset.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:04] To better seize the opportunity, associations can elevate learning in their strategy. They can make sure that they’re taking an audience-first rather than a product-first approach. They can partner wisely. They can invest in infrastructure. They can embrace flexible formats. And they can advocate internally.

Jeff Cobb: [00:27:23] And, when they do, the benefits ripple out, from stronger member engagement and more revenue to delivery on mission to employer partnerships and societal impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:27:34] Thanks again—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• Learning and Education
• Culture, Mindset, and Money with Erin Pressley
• Measurement and Evaluation with Alaina Szlachta
• Learner Surveys and Learning Effectiveness with Will Thalheimer
• Could Associations Replace College? (Take 2)
• The Career Retention Business
• Amplifying the “A” Factor
• Serving Education’s Third Sector

The post Why Associations Are (Still) Education’s Sleeping Giant appeared first on Leading Learning.

If you know your learning offerings need to evolve, but you’re not sure where to start or how to bring others along, this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast can help. Whether you’re struggling with risk tolerance, engagement, or relevance, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to figure it out alone either.

Mary Byers is an association consultant and author of the books Race for Relevance and Road to Relevance. Co-host Celisa Steele talks with Mary about how learning businesses can evolve through consistent innovation; what it means to adapt in uncertain times, without upending your core mission; practical ways to increase risk tolerance; how every threat is also an opportunity (AI being the case in point); and how comfort and complacency are the biggest threats.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

Access the Transcript

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] If you know your learning offerings need to evolve, but you’re not sure where to start or how to bring others along, this episode can help. Whether you’re struggling with risk tolerance, engagement, or relevance, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to figure it out alone either.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:33] This episode, number 459, features a conversation with Mary Byers. Mary is an association consultant and author of the books Race for Relevance and Road to Relevance. She’s been on the show before, and she always brings grounded, practical insights for learning leaders.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:50] This time around, Mary and I talk about how learning businesses can evolve through intentional, consistent innovation. We explore what it really means to adapt and improve in uncertain times—without chasing every trend and without upending your core mission.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:06] Mary shares thoughts on evaluating programs, increasing risk tolerance, and making change part of your culture, not just a one-time event.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:16] And we get into trends—from microlearning to AI to peer learning—and how learning businesses can respond in ways that keep them relevant and valuable.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:26] There’s a lot here to learn from and act on, so here’s the conversation with Mary Byers.

Go-Forward Strategy

Celisa Steele: [00:01:37] You’ve been on the Leading Learning Podcast before, and I thought it could be interesting to start with a phrase that you used the last time that you were on the podcast: “go-forward strategy.” I would be curious what “go forward” means to you now, and I’m thinking especially of so much uncertainty that we’re dealing with. It feels like there’s political uncertainty, economic uncertainty. There’s upheaval in the technology space. What do you think about now when you’re thinking about a forward-focused strategy for associations and other learning businesses?

Mary Byers: [00:02:14] Go forward, to me, means looking out the windshield and not the rearview mirror. It means looking at trends, anticipating what’s going to happen. There is a lot of uncertainty now, but the reality is there’s always uncertainty. We might feel like we have certainty—maybe it’s because things are a little less volatile—but the reality is we’re always working in an uncertain environment. When we think about that, it’s really helpful to go back to our north star. For associations, that means going back to your mission and your vision and letting that guide you. I believe that lends clarity to decisions that need to be made, and it, in some cases, may also lend clarity to things that are no longer serving the association or your members in the same way. One of the things that was a silver lining in the pandemic for associations is we took a leadership role in helping our members figure out what they could and couldn’t do, what they should and shouldn’t do, and that helped us have a definitive value proposition. Our north star also will help us with a definitive value proposition, and the associations that are really thriving have a strong value proposition. The ones that are just surviving really don’t, and it’s something that we need to take time to articulate and think deeply about.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:40] I’m hearing in your response there that go forward is about looking out the windshield, not the rearview mirror, and, to a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how uncertain the times feel. That’s what we should always be doing—looking ahead but referring to our north star, our mission, our purpose, the reason we exist.

Mary Byers: [00:03:58] I think that helps simplify the environment that we’re currently working in. I’m not suggesting that we don’t have uncertainty or volatility and that we shouldn’t be asking what that means for the association and our members, but, to a certain extent, the best strategy is to focus on what you can control, and a lot of what you can’t control are the things that create uncertainty in the first place. From a strategic standpoint, simplifying and asking yourself, “Is this something we can control?,” and our mission and vision is. It’s our reason for being, and doubling down and focusing on those areas and making an impact in those areas that are your reason for being to begin with.

How to Be an Innovative Organization

Celisa Steele: [00:04:43] You’ve talked about the need for evolution and continually evolving. I’m curious to get your thoughts around what it looks like to be an innovative organization versus an organization that’s saying, “Yes, innovation is important,” without necessarily doing a whole lot to support real innovation.

Mary Byers: [00:03:40] It can be overwhelming to call yourself an innovative organization because that conjures up creating something from nothing or having the next big hit. When I talk about innovation, I like to use this very simple definition: doing something differently. When I think about being an innovative organization, I think about making a small percentage commitment to doing things differently going forward. The way that this applies to learning companies is a lot of times we use the exact same format for our learning and education that we’ve always used. If we’re having an in-person meeting, we might change the date and the location but keep the format. There’s an invitation for us to change our format, to make things a little different, interesting in a new way, unexpected, surprising our audiences—even though we know they also like the similarity and the comfort level that comes along with attending events. The best way to do it is simply to say, “We’re going to change 10 percent of what we do every time we do it”—10 percent of your blog posts, 10 percent of your Webinars, 10 percent of your in-person meetings. Small changes over time lead to evolution, and then it doesn’t become a thing that you have to do. It becomes a practice of who you are.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:38] I’m guessing that 10 percent is more of a guideline than a strong recommendation. The point being, you don’t have to change everything but some significant portion, which might be in that 10 percent range, and, if you’re doing that, then you become accustomed to that as an organization, that this is something we do. We don’t just always do everything 100 percent the same way.

Mary Byers: [00:07:02] It helps your board too to recognize that this whole idea of continuous learning is part and parcel of what makes an association relevant. If you wait and have big innovations on occasions or infrequently, then it’s a higher hurdle to get your board to go along with. But, if you are constantly asking for money for your own CE on staff or money for some innovations, and that becomes part of what you do…. Many organizations have an innovation budget, or they have a percentage of their reserves set aside for innovation. If that becomes part of your habit, and you do it reflexively, then it’s built into the culture of the organization rather than having to be a heavy lift, which, a lot of times, innovation is. We decide we’re going to be innovative, and so now we’ve got to put together a team; now we’ve got to figure out what we mean, and we make it harder than it has to be sometimes, honestly.

Experimentation As Part of Innovation

Celisa Steele: [00:08:06] Talk a little bit about how you see things like pilots, experimentation feeding into this continuous evolution that associations should be aiming for.

Mary Byers: [00:08:16] What I love about the education space is that it’s easy to try things and place small bets, to do things a little bit differently, and then get people’s feedback. It’s not that you have to redo the entire meeting or totally change educational format. You can launch a Webinar that tries to do things a little bit differently than you’ve done before and get some feedback. With that feedback, you can recalibrate. Keep some of what you like; get rid of some of what didn’t work—understanding, though, that sometimes we have to try things more than once before we can get true feedback. I was on a call with a client yesterday who was talking about a meeting he had been to, and he said, “This is what I liked about what we did, and this is what I didn’t like about what we did.” Immediately I thought, “That is the kind of feedback that is essential to meeting planners, education planners, curriculum developers.” Sometimes we just send a survey. We hope people will fill it out. It’s really nice to talk to people as they’re coming out of a meeting or following up with them and saying, “Hey, do you have 10 minutes? I’d love to get your thoughts.” The in-person conversation, like we’re doing now, can be its own market research and is really valuable.

The Role of Sunsetting in Innovation

Celisa Steele: [00:09:40] Another thing that you often encourage organizations to think about is sunsetting things that aren’t doing what they need to do any longer. With an innovation lens on that, is sunsetting a way of being innovative sometimes?

Mary Byers: [00:10:00] I think so. A lot of people don’t look at it that way because they look at the loss or the change that goes away with whatever you’re sunsetting. But I believe that sunsetting opens up time, money, and expertise to do the innovation that you need to do. I’ve worked with some associations whose certifications have been on the downward trend for 10 years because perhaps another certification came up, or states no longer required the certification. And I asked the question, “If this is costing you money every year, why are you still doing this?” Or, “If you have three certifications and only two of them are doing well, why are you doing the third one?” “What about meetings that used to draw a lot of attendance that are no longer doing so?”

Mary Byers: [00:10:49] I don’t think it’s a matter of sunsetting; it’s a matter of asking, “Is there something that we could be doing differently that would help us refresh this meeting or reengage attendees? Is our marketing what it needs to be? Are we providing proper incentive? Is the timing of the meeting good?” There are a lot of things that we can be asking. Sunsetting or purposely abandoning programs and education might be what you end up doing, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. You might start out with the idea that you’re making a decision about keeping or not keeping, but, as you do your discovery, you might decide that there are some things that you could do that could help promote the program or service and give it a new life.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:38] Particularly in the association world, sometimes there’s tension that can come out of mission and feeling like you need to be everything to everyone. As you were giving as an example, maybe there’s a certification that’s no longer as strong as it used to be. Talk a little bit about how you think about or help associations think about that tension and when to balance the revenue that might come from an educational offering versus what it might mean to the mission overall.

Mary Byers: [00:12:11] It’s a challenge when there is a program that is a cash cow that might not be perfectly mission-related because that revenue coming in then does ultimately support mission and vision because it enables you to operate, and, in covering your operational expenses, then you can meet your mission. The best-case scenario is when you have a program that provides revenue or sometimes purposely breaks even—that can be part of your strategy too—that also meets mission. It needs to be an overall conversation and a conversation that is association-wide, not just in the learning department but in all of the departments that provide programs and services. It makes sense to take a holistic look, although each individual department can have its own conversation as well.

Mary Byers: [00:13:10] I’ll also say that there’s no one right way to do this. The main thing that I advocate for is being intentional and deliberate and questioning year to year, month to month, week to week perhaps, our activities that we’re providing to members. Sometimes we’re trying to do so much that members end up tuning out everything we do because it’s just too overwhelming for them. We call it “communications clutter.” If your legislative activities are competing with your education activities or competing with your charitable activities, it can be overwhelming for members. If we’re not careful, they tune us out altogether. And I hear that all the time from clients: “How can we get members to see the value of what we’re doing?” Part of the question is, “Are you trying to communicate too much?” And so they’re hearing nothing.

Making Risk Less Scary

Celisa Steele: [00:14:07] Sunsetting programs, particularly ones that maybe if they’re not doing particularly well but are valued by a vocal subset of folks, that can feel risky. Risk is something that can inhibit evolution and innovation, experimentation—a lot of these things that we’ve been talking about. How do you think about talking about risk when you’re dealing with associations? Is there a way to reframe it and make it be a little bit less scary to staff or boards or other stakeholders who might be contemplating something that they think is risky?

Mary Byers: [00:14:46] One of the ways that I’ve done this with clients is to have a risk conversation. If I’m doing it with the board, I’ll ask the board, “On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being very conservative and 5 being willing to take risks, what number would you give yourself in your personal life, in your professional life, and as an association leader?” We ask everybody on the board to give themselves a number in each of those areas, and then we get an average. What we often find is that people are more willing to take risk in their personal life because they have full control or in their professional life because they’re paid to take risk. But, when they walk into the boardroom, they may feel risk-averse because they don’t want to be embarrassed in front of their colleagues. They want to do a good job for their colleagues.

Mary Byers: [00:15:43] Often board members will tell me, “Well, it’s the members’ money that we’re spending, and so I feel risk-averse to doing that.” It’s a great conversation for staff to have together as well, either departmentally, senior staff, or association-wide. You need to have a balance—people who are willing to ask questions, who are curious, who are willing to run small pilots, and balance that with people who are watching the bottom line and making sure you’re not getting out too far over your skis. But, if we don’t have those conversations, and we don’t know how risk-averse we are, then we don’t have a sense of what’s possible for the organization and how we need to balance experimenting. How many pilots are we doing simultaneously? What kind of expectations do we have over what they will show? Are departments working together? Are committees working together?

Mary Byers: [00:16:41] It’s so much easier to talk about innovation than it is to actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit it. But that risk conversation, and having it on a regular basis as your staff turns over, and your board turns over, being able to say, as one of my clients did, “On a scale from 1 to 5, we’re at 2.7. And we aspire to add to that. We aspire to be a 3+.” We had a great conversation about “What would it take to add a little more comfort to you as a board?” Some of it was simply as easy as having more than one proposal to look at. One proposal was more risky. One was less risky. They wanted to have an opportunity to look at both rather than having to vote one up or down. A very small shift, but it made a huge difference for the organization.

Engagement in Learning and with Associations

Celisa Steele: [00:17:35] What are you keeping your eye on today in terms of engagement—engagement in learning, engagement with associations in general? In particular, you maybe have some thoughts around the younger generations and professionals that are coming into work and into potentially being members of associations.

Mary Byers: [00:17:56] We know that microlearning has been a trend since TED Talks began—the short opportunity to learn. Anecdotally, I’m hearing that new dentists are going to YouTube to find out how to do procedures, which could be good, and it could be bad. But, if you think about just-in-time education and the opportunity for associations—“I’m stuck. I need some help. Who do I turn to?” If I know I can turn to my association, there’s value then in the membership. I was working with a nursing group—it was pediatric nurses—and they were talking about when very few nurses are on the floor, and it’s late at night, and a nurse has a question about something that’s going on, where can they turn to get that information? This was years ago, before artificial intelligence. Now, artificial intelligence is, I think, both an opportunity and a threat for associations, especially as we talk in terms of younger generations. If I can go on to Claude, Copilot, or any other AI platform and get an instantaneous answer without having to log on to my association Web site or search the association Web site or go to the association online community, ask the question, and wait for answers, that’s a real threat to associations. Very similar to social media and how it changed the game for associations.

Mary Byers: [00:19:33] I also think it’s a wonderful opportunity because we have the opportunity to teach our members how to use AI, to talk about ethics, to talk about how it’s going to change in the workforce. Many associations that I’m familiar with now are building their own bots. I can go ask my association the question, very specific to my industry, not a general question, but a very specific question—that’s an opportunity. I know of some organizations that are building AI study buddies. So, if I am studying for an exam or a certification or simply have a question, I can go to a vetted source that I know has been updated, and it’s using the current material that I need to know—the rules, the laws, the regulations, the requirements—and I can find it from a reliable resource, and that is my association, again, that has value. So I’m really looking at microlearning. I’m watching what AI is going to do, but I believe that everything that’s a threat to an association is also an opportunity.

AI As Threat and Opportunity

Celisa Steele: [00:20:44] That partnership between associations and AI that you were pointing towards does hold a lot of potential because when you marry up that instancy of the AI, but you have that vetted content that associations can usually bring to bear and have all the subject matter experts having it up-to-date, then that’s a very, very powerful combination. Then we get additional tools too that can then serve up that content. It doesn’t have to just be a text chat with a bot. You can have podcast-style content generated on the fly for that learner. It’s really interesting and exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing where things head over the next few years.

Mary Byers: [00:21:27] I am curious what you’re seeing in your environment, from the AI standpoint. There are the aids that help us, but, if you are an association or institute of higher learning, and you’re providing continuing education, where would you say we are in the process? I think we’re still very early. There’s a lot of interest in watching, but do you see a lot of people jumping in?

Celisa Steele: [00:21:53] You’re right to say that we’re fairly early on. Back to what we were talking about earlier, there’s some experimentation and some pilots going on, and people are trying to figure out where things will land. Of course, that is further complicated by the fact that these tools are changing so quickly. What’s working now in the current pilot or current experiment could be very different from what’s possible just a few months from now. That is an added layer that is interesting to follow. But one of the things that particularly an association learning business has to potentially capitalize on is community. When you want the human interaction, that human mentor, yes, to a certain extent, a chatbot can simulate that or give you that feel. But, if you really want that connection—it may be a cohort of learners going through an experience together, supporting each other, not only with content but emotionally—then that’s an area where associations certainly have a head start over something like a more generic AI tool—ChatGPT, Copilot, or anything like that.

Mary Byers: [00:23:07] I’m glad you brought that up because I think peer-to-peer learning is an opportunity, and I don’t know that we do enough of it in associations. I’ve had the privilege of facilitating a couple of mastermind groups, and I love the ability to take a cohort, meet monthly, quarterly, and do deep dives in topics of interest and to challenge each other and to learn from each other. Frankly, I don’t understand why more associations aren’t starting their own masterminds. We’re certainly seeing for-profit companies do it. Consultants do it. Vistage does it. EOS does it. A lot of groups are doing it, and yet we have the subject matter experts in our associations. We have the ability to organize. We have the ability to pull together. That’s a real opportunity for associations going forward too, especially in the impersonal environment of AI.

Mary Byers: [00:24:08] But, as you said, that whole opportunity to learn together with colleagues, to learn with and from, but also the peer-to-peer learning aspect of it too, so it’s not just a sage on the stage, but it is an opportunity to hear some learning, then to personally decide, “How does this affect me?” and then to talk with colleagues and debate with colleagues to decide, if this is good information, how we can use this information. “What’s the takeaway from this new learning that we’ve done together?” There are real opportunities for associations there. And that’s not the typical learning that we’ve done before.

The Role of Learning and Education in an Association’s Value Proposition

Celisa Steele: [00:24:50] We’re in the process of talking with a number of association CEOs about the role of learning—the broad umbrella of things that go into learning—and also the role of education, so a little bit more narrowly, more of the formal experiences, but the role of learning and education in the association’s value proposition. You work with association boards, association leaders, and so I would love to get your perspective. How often does learning and/or education come up as an aspect of that overall association value proposition?

Mary Byers: [00:25:28] If you look at association mission and vision, you’ll see it baked in. I was working with a CPA organization recently, and their vision says they want to be viewed as leaders in professional competency. The only way that you can be a leader in professional competency is if you are providing education and learning on an ongoing basis for your members. Their mission also says they want to contribute to the success of their members. I don’t know how you contribute to the success of your members if you’re not educating them, helping them learn, helping them look at what’s ahead. Many medical organizations, part of their mission is to improve patient outcomes. I don’t know how you improve a patient outcome if you aren’t helping your physicians with their continuing medical education requirements and emerging best practices when it comes to specific illnesses or diseases. I think it is part and parcel of who we are, and sometimes, if we haven’t specifically stated it, it’s worth recognizing it because, if it doesn’t say “education” in your purpose, we have to recognize the value of education in helping us with our mission and purpose.

Celisa Steele: [00:26:51] That’s definitely consistent with what we’re hearing. It is usually baked into the mission at some level—the importance of learning or education—which then points to the association’s need to help provide that learning and that education. You’ve been doing this for years at this point, so have you noticed any change in the relative value or importance placed on learning or education over the time, or has it been pretty much consistent in your time working with associations?

Mary Byers: [00:27:20] It’s been pretty consistent. Perhaps—and this is a blanket statement—the revenue opportunities for education have shifted. I know for a fact that the competitive environment has gotten more challenging for organizations because associations used to be the primary way that members were educated, but now we have competition from sometimes the association’s consultants. Sometimes the organization that the member is part of itself is doing more in continuing education. We have for-profit companies that are offering certification and education. There is more competition than there ever has been before, and I think that’s challenging associations because part of our question is, “Do we have the capacity to keep up with the rapidly changing environment?” And, as you just said, what we’re looking at with AI now is going to be different in a matter of months.

Mary Byers: [00:28:25] In some ways, it feels to me like the train has left the station, and we are running after the train trying to catch it. That’s why we need to be looking through the windshield and not looking at what education was yesterday but where the possibilities are going forward. The landscape has changed. I don’t think the importance has changed. We’re more revenue-challenged than we’ve ever been before. Some discussions about that. If your education provided a profit, and now it’s providing less of a profit or break-even, there’s value for a discussion. If it’s part of our mission to educate, then maybe break-even is okay, maybe smaller revenue is okay, and, as we talked about, maybe there are some programs that need to be sunset so that we have the necessary expertise, capacity, time, and financial resources to invent the future of education for our profession or industry

Mary’s Approach to Her Own Lifelong Learning

Celisa Steele: [00:29:26] We’re talking about the learning that associations can provide. You yourself exist in the world, and you need to continue to learn and evolve. I’m curious to hear about how you approach your own lifelong learning, Mary. Are there sources, habits, or practices that you go back to?

Mary Byers: [00:29:43] I have an education process map that I use annually, and I’m happy to share it with you, and you can share it with your listeners. It helps me identify each year what I need to learn and takes me a step further and asks, “Where can I learn that? Is it something I can learn in small bites in a little bit of free time in my office? Would it make more sense for me to go do a deep dive? And, if I’m going to do that, who am I doing the deep dive with?” At the beginning of every year, I set some learning goals. I’ll confess I haven’t hit 100 percent of those learning goals, but I hit more than if I wasn’t setting any goals to begin with at all. For me, it’s very intentional and deliberate. Where do I feel like I’m falling behind? What do I need to know? For me, I’m asking, “Where are my client’s being challenged, and how does my education need to change so that I can help them in those challenges?”

Celisa Steele: [00:30:47] Would you be willing to give us a glimpse of what you’re focused on this year in terms of what you’re trying to learn?

Mary Byers: [00:30:54] Absolutely. Just for fun, I’ll let you know that I set professional goals, but I also set personal goals. One of my personal goals is I would like to learn to surf next year, so that’s in the future. For me, AI continues to be an important piece of my learning, partly because it is changing so rapidly. I help facilitate a mastermind, and that is how I am reaching that goal, by leading that mastermind. I’m not the subject matter expert, but I’m being exposed on a monthly basis to learning in that area, so that’s how I’m meeting that challenge. Another thing that I have identified as being important is looking at how for-profit companies are developing strategy and making sure that, as I help associations with their strategy, what we can learn from for-profits is coming into the not-for-profit arena. But also I’m challenging myself to make sure that the process that I’m using is as up-to-date as possible. And, as I see an opportunity for improvement and change, then I’m borrowing from what I’m learning in the strategy environment. I’ve taken two different strategy classes this year. It’s been interesting for me in affirming that I’m where I need to be there, and sometimes that’s the purpose of education too—it’s not to learn something new, but it’s to affirm what you already know, and I think there’s value in that too.

Mary’s Three Takeaways

Celisa Steele: [00:32:25] We’ve covered a fair amount of ground in our time together. If you were to try to pull out one to three things that you are hoping listeners might take away from our conversation, what would you highlight?

Mary Byers: [00:32:38] I would go back to focusing on innovating in small percentages, whether it’s 10—a number that I just pulled out of the air because I thought it was doable. For some organizations, it might be 5 percent. Other organizations who’ve gotten behind, it may be 30 or 40 percent. If you innovate small percentages regularly, that naturally leads to evolution, and that’s healthy for organizations. The second thing I would say and repeat is that threats are also opportunities. I mentioned the threat of AI, but there’s a teaching opportunity there. We can use AI for things like study buddies, help with certification prep. Anywhere that’s a threat, take a step back, and look at where the opportunities are. And then the last thing that I would say is that comfort and complacency are associations’ biggest risks, both on the leadership side and on the membership side. When members have become comfortable and complacent with our programs, services, and offerings, and they’re not taking advantage of them, that’s not good for the association. And, if our leadership, either on the staff side or the board side, has become comfortable and complacent, and they’re not innovating, and they’re not doing pilots or placing small bets, then that is a surefire way to become irrelevant very quickly. It’s really important to make sure that we haven’t gotten too comfortable or complacent and that our members haven’t.

Wrap-Up and Recap

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:30] We’re not done quite yet—keep listening for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:33] Learn more about Mary’s work at marybyers.com.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:43] If you got value from this episode, please share it with a colleague or leave a rating and review. Those things help others find the show and support the work we’re doing on the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:34:55] Mary shared a lot of helpful advice. One point that stood out for me is that innovation doesn’t have to be flashy or a big breakthrough epiphany. Small, consistent changes can add up to real evolution.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:09] She also made the point that every threat also presents an opportunity. This is why so much strategy work focuses on really understanding the situation, so that threats can be seen, and opportunities teased out. As you and Mary discussed, AI, for example, may be a challenge, but it’s also a chance to better serve learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:35:31] Lastly, I’ll echo Mary’s assertion that comfort and complacency are real risks, for leaders and for learners. Staying relevant requires intentional action and sometimes uncomfortable change.

Jeff Cobb: [00:35:46] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• Mary Byers’s Personal Learning Road Map
• Redux: Studying Innovation with Mary Byers
• The Messy Middle with Geoff Stead
• Nondisruptive Creation, Part I
• Nondisruptive Creation, Part II

The post Evolving Through Innovation with Mary Byers appeared first on Leading Learning.

If you’re a leader navigating change, shifting expectations, or questions about your organization’s identity and future, this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast is for you. It features Lowell Aplebaum, CEO of Vista Cova. Lowell works with association leaders and boards on visioning, governance, and strategy—and he brings a thoughtful, deeply human approach to the challenges facing organizations today.

Co-host Celisa Steele talks with Lowell about how identity has to come before strategy because you can’t lead effectively if you’re unclear on who you are as an organization. They also delve into bravery, stability (even in volatile times), empathy, and curiosity. And, while those might sound like highfalutin topics, Lowell translates them into practical advice.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:17] If you’re a leader navigating change, shifting expectations, or questions about your organization’s identity and future, this episode is for you. Whether you work in an association or another kind of learning business, chances are you’ve felt the weight of uncertainty and are looking for a way forward that’s both grounded and strategic.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:37] Our guest for this episode, number 458, is Lowell Aplebaum, CEO of Vista Cova, and a previous guest on the Leading Learning Podcast. Lowell works with association leaders and boards on visioning, governance, and strategy—and he brings a thoughtful, deeply human approach to the challenges facing organizations today.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:58] Absolutely. Lowell talks about how identity has to come before strategy—how you can’t lead effectively if you’re unclear on who you are as an organization. He also talks about bravery and stability—about showing up with conviction even in volatile times.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:15] And it’s not all high-level philosophy—Lowell also shares practical advice. He talks about how to structure board agendas, how to equip volunteer leaders, and how to rethink learning design so it’s not just rigorous in content but meaningful in experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] We also get into empathy, curiosity, and AI, and we wrap up with Lowell’s perspective on lifelong learning, both professionally and personally.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:42] There’s a lot in here, so let’s get to it. Here’s the conversation with Lowell Aplebaum.

The Intersection of Uncertainty and Volatility

Celisa Steele: [00:01:52] When I think about the world right now, it seems like we’re continuing to be served up a lot of uncertainty. We’ve got political uncertainty. We’ve got economic uncertainty. We’ve got a lot happening in the tech realm with AI. I’m curious to know, Lowell, what do you see as some of the most pressing implications of this moment when you think about the work that associations and other learning businesses do, from that strategic standpoint of what it means to do their work and exist in this world of uncertainty?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:02:24] I’m going to parse uncertainty into two frames. In the early 2020s, with the onset of COVID and what that did to our rate of change, that unto itself caused an uncertainty. There was forced innovation that had to happen if you were going to adapt to survive through a terrible time of challenge. But also that time of challenge, the forced adaptation, gave us some base level of skill sets from an organizational standpoint of how to be more adaptive. And so, at least when I’m working with organizations, whether it’s through the idea of a changing generation and learning context or an overall organizational direction, that rate of change is not new—we’re five years into that. And, even before, that was moving quickly. There’s an uncertainty that comes with we need to be able to quickly adapt, perhaps not who we are but how we are living, who we need to be, that we’ve had a handful of years to come up to speed, whether or not organizations have embraced being quicker in that adaptation in the face of uncertain times.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:03:36] What I’d point out here—by the time we’re having this conversation—is this year’s been interesting because the uncertainty of an ever-increasing rate of change has now intersected with volatility. What I mean is that, even as things developed and changed—new technology—some of those bedrock places of foundation and stability that were the basis upon which organizations and their leadership could base their conversation and their projection have really been shaken. Whether you look at that through the lens of threats to nonprofit tax status and potentially having corporate tax rates on membership and learning and everything, whether you look at grant-funded organizations and what that’s done, whether you look at so many of my beloved scientific organizations, pick the things that were tried, true, tested.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:04:35] If you could live in D.C., how many people thought they were safe in their jobs for the rest of their lives? How many of your colleagues, friends, and family are now experiencing job upheaval? Uncertainty—I think we’re at the intersect of these two contexts, Celisa. We’re at the intersect of a society that now is experiencing rapid evolution, shift, and change, and we’re doing so now in this time and age that has not slowed, but the pieces, the bedrock of stability that perhaps gave us a place to stand to navigate that, are teetering. And, if you know any change management theory, you know the slope that change is hard because, when you experience change, you experience loss—the loss of stability of what you once knew was true, the abandonment of the processes that brought you success—and you have to come out the other side of seeing wins and returns, that the change was worth it, until you build a new platform of stability that, whatever you change to now, is better and is working.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:05:38] That’s the long way around to get to the answer to your question, which is the opportunity I see in this moment for our organizations is to try to find those places to create (even if it’s short-term) stability, short-term bedrocks of knowledge, of convening, of community. Together there’s a greater whole that, through volatility and uncertainty, there is still stability in who our profession is, who our community is. And perhaps the work we have to do has to change—the problems we have to address, our priorities still need to be navigated. But, if we have clarity on our identity, then I have a deep-seated belief that the nonprofit organizations that we serve are the beacons of hope and light in a time of universal uncertainty that can gather people, gather industries, gather professions together to navigate that uncertainty through the strength of unity and community.

Strategy Amid Crisis: The Importance of Identity

Celisa Steele: [00:06:35] Part of what you’re saying there does make me think about the fact that, when you were on the podcast last—not too long after COVID had hit—one of the points you were making was around the need to shift from the crisis mindset in dealing with the immediate upheaval and uncertainty to a strategic mindset. Which still feels very relevant in this moment. Do you agree that, in this moment, there is still a need to shift from crisis to strategy? And, if so, then what does that look like practically? What are some of the ways to get to some of that bedrock that you were talking about in your answer to that last question?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:07:18] There is still a continual need for a strategic mindset. What that means for this moment in time has a different lens, at least from my point of view. A strategic mindset for where we are in the mid-2020s heading towards the late 2020s means two or three critical pieces. Number one is a clear, crisp understanding of identity before you get to strategy. From an identity perspective, if you take a group of leaders and say in a sentence or two, what makes this organization unique in what it brings to community and society, either because of what it can do that no one else can or what it does better than anyone else that makes a positive impact for its community and for society? But you make them do that in the context of what would that have been ten, twenty, thirty years ago? What is that today? What does that need to be in five to ten years?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:08:17] The articulation of identity—especially present to future—gives a core basis upon which you can build strategy. A volatile and uncertain world should not change your identity. It should change how you utilize that identity and the impact that you make and what you advance. But I have found a muddying of the waters, and, in the face of so much uncertainty, identity is based off of past instead of future-focused context. I use that as one lens of strategy, of a strategic mindset. The other is this balance of a place of, as I referred to earlier, being able to put in places of stability. What can you depend on us for? No matter what happens, what will we be here for? As well as a place of bravery. If truly you are driven by mission—and money drives mission; organizations need to have political relationships to advance mission—there are many factors of what you need. But the ostrich philosophy of “Let’s hide our head in the sand, and hopefully these things pass by” is simply going to lead to you drowning in the sand.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:09:34] Where do organizations—if they are clear on their identity—choose bravery to be the voice and the standpoint, to be the champion of their mission, of their purpose? To do so in a way that hopefully is a place of unification, recognizing there are many diverse parts of their community, and they have to be the platform, the bedrock for all of those? But those places of unity should be places that they are loud, proud, and the leading voice of. And I think a strategic mindset for the place we are in the mid-2020s has a clarity of identity, has recognition of where we bring stability to our community, has the bravery to be the strongest voice, the champion, purpose and mission, and the ability to convene and bring together, build bonds between the community that is going to rally around that purpose and that mission in a way that, in the world where we’re all too divided, our organizations are places of strength together.

A Place for Messiness When Agreeing on Group Identity

Celisa Steele: [00:10:41] Looking back and then looking at the current moment and then looking forward, I really like that because it helps, I think, a group of leaders or those involved to see the evolution and how that does shift slightly over time and then gives you the permission or the ability then to think about the future and imagine where we might go from the present moment. Part of what’s on my mind is, if this is a group of people and this idea of coming to a shared identity, it seems like that can be somewhat messy. What does that look like to get to agreement around “This is our identity; this is what people can count on us for, so that then we can speak with this loud, proud voice about the work that we do and how we’re going to serve”? Talk a little bit about how multiple voices come to coalesce around an identity and what that looks like in practice.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:11:32] The opposite of messy, if you’re talking about neat, has to it a finality. If everything is neat, ordered, and structured in its box, then you have a hard time moving things to a new structure. And so I think you need a little bit of messiness. But the messiness I would think of is the mindset of the identity of an organization has clarity but malleability for a continual evolution. And that means that inherently leadership has to be emboldened, strengthened, recognize the obligation, and be trained to be champions, so that the identity of the organization and how it embodies its community is not something done to the community but with the community.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:12:18] And that means, as we think about the duties we look to our leadership to fulfill, a primary one that has emerged is that we don’t do the job that we should in terms of training our volunteer leaders to be this. When we think about them being champions of the organization, there needs to be a continual place of effort and proactive outreach for dialogue and input with the many components and pieces of a community—not that the loudest voice changes direction because you always get the bell curve of the loudest voices on one end and the loudest voices on the other but that there is a continual dialogue and a place of input, a place of “What are the trends, the themes, the perspectives that we’re hearing? How do we, as an organization, steer—not from our place of purpose and mission and turn 90 degrees but navigate what makes our unique identity true, through the waters of what we’re hearing, as the challenges that are being experienced?” That’s where you get the messiness—the continual evolution of the solution, design, and application to ever-shifting challenges without losing the identity.

Collective Decision-Making in Strategy Execution

Celisa Steele: [00:13:31] We’ve often talked about strategy—and a lot of people talk about strategy—as a framework to help make decisions. How do you wrestle with collective decision-making around what is the right decision based on the strategy?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:13:45] A strategic framework is a good reference point if you want to point to it in terms of decision-making, but it’s meaningless if you haven’t incorporated it into practical ways of how you’re living it. There’s a multi-tier incorporation that has to infuse the organization if it’s something that’s actually going to guide the organization. If I’m designing ideal board agendas, 10 to 15 percent of the time is consent agenda with all the committee…. No one got on the board because they want committee reports read at them. So get all that stuff done there. And then 40 to 50 percent is about the business of the organization—the idea is those things are directly correlated back to connect to what we set as our strategic focus and priorities and the things we’re trying to achieve. There are things that are the business of the organization that don’t correlate to those things. They become glaringly obvious if that’s part of your routine. That direct correlation unto itself creates a fluency of leadership that where we invest our resources is designed to connect to what we said are the critical places we need to focus, and so there’s an answer to the responsibility therefore.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:15:08] By the way, there’s a 25- to 30-percent piece of that agenda left for generative and futurist conversation. From all these conversations, what’s coming that may need to shift some of that? But that’s just one piece of it, Celisa. If you really want to see strategy guide an organization, besides a direct integration with how leaders spend their time and agendas, how is every committee of an organization’s charge refreshed? I have a phoenix philosophy that every committee should be sunset every strategy cycle, and then you rebirth the ones that you need, demanded by operational strategic priority, with charges that directly align to those strategic or operational priorities. With what they’re trying to achieve, correlate it to that, with clear, mini-strategic plans. “What are we going to achieve this year? What’s our scope of work there?” So their work can be celebrated for the achievements. But the story of strategic advancement from this framework is not just at the central organization; it’s every arm of the organization.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:16:09] The committees, the same thing with the components, the chapters, the task. So what you see is a hub-and-spoke model of strategy. The strategy itself guides the organization as an absolute of identity but as a malleable place that many hands contribute to how it advances. From there, the singular framework of “We make decisions based on our strategy” If we started from a place of uncertainty, you have to recognize that, if you are any organization that experiences efforts in the advocacy realm, in the learning realm, in grant-making realm, the world right now does not look like the world nine months ago. I don’t, however, think that that means frameworks that design what we’re trying to accomplish are necessarily moot. It may have shifted how we accomplish it. It may shift what groups we need to accomplish it. It may shift how we communicate it. It may shift who we convene and how we convene.

Empathy, Listening, and Curiosity

Celisa Steele: [00:17:13] Part of what you’re talking about with who we convene, how we convene, how we do the work—to me, that feels related to an importance you place on things like empathy, listening, and curiosity. Because that’s part of how we’re going to diagnose, in the moment, what needs to happen and how we can serve the community we’ve set out to serve. Talk a little bit about things like empathy and listening, their role in an organization strategy, and potentially even how one might operationalize something like empathy—if that doesn’t already sound like a contradiction to operationalize empathy.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:17:52] Of the three books I’m writing right now, my favorite is titled Curiosity Driving Mission. Play with me in the sandbox if you will for a moment, in the space of an organizational mindset and framework that was driven by curiosity and how that would have to change how we function. Curiosity inherently means that all of us need humility—what we know today is insufficient. We are continually looking to expand perspective and horizon because curiosity means exploration. What does that mean for leadership? When you get elected or selected for a critical role in the organization, much less an officer role, it’s not because your wisdom is sufficient; it’s not because your experience and the length of your CV are all that’s needed. A curiosity-driven organization is going to select leaders that all the more so are seeking the many voices that will continue to enhance.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:18:53] Staff-driven—if we think about that as lens and context, what is the difference? If you think about customer service and experience of what we’re trying to provide for our community, from a curiosity-driving mindset, “Password reset?,” “Okay, here’s your answer. And what else are you curious about? What else should we know so we could serve you better?” Are we proactively reaching out so we can understand the experience you’re having? A curiosity mindset shifts that. And, in our communities—you talked about empathy—if we were more interested in hearing others’ voices than hearing our own, how would that shift the sessions we put on, the learning we design, the meetings we convene, the communities that we create, and the opportunities we provide for every single member to have deeper-set relationships with one another?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:19:45] Because what we’re trying to introduce to them is that, yes, we need your shared wisdom, your individual lived experiences contributed, but the opportunity you have is not in those contributions; it’s what you hear from one another and the relationships that are going to inform the stronger community we’re going to have. A curiosity mindset that becomes part of the cultural foundation of an organization demands empathy because you’re in the service of another and hearing what they bring to you, and there’s a care for someone who is bringing you insight and willing to share of themselves with you. If we think about powerful organizations that are able to rally many voices behind causes, it’s because there’s a driving need, but there’s also a community that sees in one another connection and a greater coherence that comes from an empathetic “We’re going through something together, and we will get through this together if we are together.”

Celisa Steele: [00:20:48] I like the emphasis on curiosity, and I think there’s also the benefit for the individual. Personally, if I’m curious about my work, then that tends to mean I’m more interested; I’m more engaged. It’s not just checking things off the to-do list; it’s me really enjoying the work that goes into doing whatever task is at hand.

The Role of Education and Learning in an Association’s Value Proposition

Celisa Steele: [00:21:14] We’re talking to association CEOs, and we’re talking about the role of learning broadly and education more specifically in their organization’s value proposition. You’re not an association CEO yourself, but I know you work with many and work with boards, and so I would love to get your perspective on how often you hear learning and education come up as an aspect of that overall association value proposition—what role you see it play.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:21:45] Nine times out of ten, it’s one of the strategic pieces of identified priority and identity of an organization. There’s a real universality there in terms of what organizations and nonprofit associations bring to the table, that, once someone has finished with their formal education but needs to continue to learn to get better in their career, the role that associations have played and have the potential to continue to play in terms of supporting a workforce. What I unfortunately see that goes in tandem with that, though, is that the learning approach and methodology and even many times the platforms that are being presented are based off of what learning has been in terms instead of more modern and current not just theory but application of how adults learn. If what we are looking for in any sort of upholding of certification is credit units, then I can sign in for a Webinar, have it playing on my third screen, answer five true-and-false questions at the end that these organizations let me answer as many times as possible until I get it right, we have to assume best intent and hope that they’re learning. But let’s be honest.

Celisa Steele: [00:23:02] You’re right. Not a lot of rigor there and not necessarily a lot of learning.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:23:07] And there could be great rigor in the quality of the content, and that is where organizations traditionally used to shine—if we bring rigor to the content we are providing, we have fulfilled our obligation of bringing best-in-class learning. I would posit that is insufficient for what is needed for workforce development in the world today. You do not need less rigor in the quality of your content. I’m not saying diminish that. But, in terms of the experience of the content in terms of the acknowledgement of the multimodal learning that different learners need, the idea, in this time-strapped time, that people are able to dedicate a full hour versus, can things be broken down to smaller bites and segments so they can do sprint learning?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:23:56] I was talking with one organization whose members often go back and take MBAs, and they were talking about some of the programs emerging, that you can do literally all the learning for your MBA on your phone—listening to lectures, answering the things on your phone. You don’t need a computer. The idea of not just a certification or a certificate but a degree. That concept of meeting the learner where they are at is a gap that I don’t see as many organizations as I would like adapting to. In part because you have many of those in leadership that went through tried-and-true traditional methods of learning, and so that’s the context they have for what learning looks like. The tolerance for a subpar learning experience, regardless of the quality and rigor of the content, there’s less tolerance for that. So organizations that have chief learning officers that think not only about the rigor but about the design and the experience are heads and tails ahead of those that only think about the rigor.

Opportunities and Stumbling Blocks for Today’s Learners

Celisa Steele: [00:25:09] You’ve begun to talk about it some, with things like the MBA that you can do completely on your phone or the need to evolve and look at the different modes and ways that we can engage learners. When you think about learning that’s happening now and what associations can do to serve those learners, are there particular changes that maybe you haven’t talked about that come to mind? Or issues that you see that are hampering individuals’ ability to learn? Which, of course, then opens up the opportunity for organizations to help address some of those issues that might be hampering learning.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:25:47] One that’s not new but still not done well is to help learners right-size the level of the content to the level of their knowledge, experience, and career. Someone who is five years into their career versus 15 versus 25 versus 35 has a different inherent potential learning place, depending on what the nature of the content is. The need to set a baseline of introduction is needed. And so organizations, I have seen more of them try to be like, “This is introductory or advanced.” There’s been some effort to it, but what I do not see is the follow-through that holds the instructor accountable to what they say the level of their content is. That’s one place that I think there is an opportunity.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:26:40] The second, if I’m being very blunt—I apologize to my many meeting professional friends out there—is stadium seating in learning settings is terrible. The rows of sitting cramped in. You have Socrates at the front giving you their wisdom that you are going to absorb through osmosis. I’m not saying there’s never a place for it—I understand in a keynote. But that, as default, puts so many barriers in the way of having the space to be creative. The only person you’d be in dialogue with is who’s at my shoulders. The only place to capture, create, write, or draw is whatever I can balance on my lap. There’s no space to be an active learner when you’re in those sessions.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:27:37] Third is that there is a difference between a subject matter expert and someone who is a learning expert that understands the many modes of designs of learning, and there’s a difference between someone who’s a learning expert in a virtual environment—it is rare to find one person that does all that. And none of them are negatives. You don’t have the other pieces. But the truth is you want all the pieces if you’re really thinking about the holistic learner experience. Organizations are trying to explore in their learning design the recognition of the strengths of who they’re bringing to the table and to supplement those who don’t have those strengths.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:28:16] If we care more about this being a workshop so it’s really about the learning design and experience, we need the content to be rigorous, but can we have someone who’s an expert in learning design and supplement them with someone who can provide them with the data, the facts, the knowledge, the research they can design off of? This is more of an intensive learning about content. We still want some good activity and thought. Can we give the subject matter expert a learning consultant to help frame and how to shape the actual class and maybe even facilitate some pieces of it? There’s a real opportunity for organizations to think about the holistic learning experience and these different competencies of what you want designed to supplement the sessions you create, not assuming that one person has everything that you need, but that the organization takes on the responsibility of giving them the structure they need to design the best learning experience possible.

AI as Both a Tool and a Learning Contributor

Celisa Steele: [00:29:15] What are you seeing or thinking about in terms of AI?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:29:19] My answer today will be different three months later, nine months later, two years later. What I’d say right now is that, when I am running sessions, the frame that I try to give to those in my sessions—and, I’ll be clear, for me, every session is a learning session. Strategic planning is a classroom, and all you are constructing is a place for the learners to also be teachers so they can learn from one another. And, if you use the mindset that every session you do is an opportunity for learning, as a classroom—whether or not you state it that way—then AI is both a tool that can help enhance the learning experience as well as potentially another learning contributor. The frame is where do you incorporate AI capacity and capability to supplement the learning experience so that someone who wants to express something but doesn’t have the right words can say, “All right, give me three or four ways to express this idea”?

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:30:24] If you’re thinking about a collaborative learning moment, the group can come up with, “What do you think? What do you think? What do you think?” AI: What does the collective of this look like together? There’s not a deferment of the responsibility of ideation or of conclusion-making to AI, but it’s at the table with you for a place of input, refinement, and possibility. So it expands what you could potentially think about. Where AI comes in is from a place of expanding perspective, refining possibility for directions, but there’s not the abandonment of the human ideation nor the human assessment, refinement, and conclusion. It’s in that middle piece that, when it comes to learning, at least from my perspective right now, AI is at its strongest in an active learning setting.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:31:23] In a separate learning setting, if you look at ChatGPT today and use its Deep Research button function, there’s a whole lot of possibility in terms of clicking that on and saying, “Here’s the topic I’m about to do a session on. Deep Research, give me a whole bunch of background sources.” You need to check them. But you want 20 different citations about the curiosity mindset and how it’s impacting nonprofit organizations? You can’t tell me that it doing that in five minutes and coming back, that I can’t scan those articles and be like, “These three would be good pre-reads,” and that’s not going to enhance my session. So there are possibilities in preparation as well. There are possibilities in refinement at the end. “We have 20 different vision/missions. What would be the different places?” At current capacity, I do find that AI is better in an analytical than an aspirational space.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:32:28] If you’re trying to come up with citations and data or you’re trying to access the gajillion different references out there, you’re trying to take ideas and synthesize and come out with possibilities—“Is there logic to this? Give me different places.”—those analytical directions, AI is a great tool for. “This concept is incredibly important, and we want to make sure the next generation coming into our profession not only understands the concept but feels inspired by it because the concept is going to be one that potentially gets them to decide that this is the profession for them,” I find there is less expertise at this moment for the empathy, for the emotional element. AI will still produce that. I just don’t see what it’s producing to have as much heart as it has brain.

Lowell’s Approach to His Own Lifelong Learning

Celisa Steele: [00:33:18] Tell me a little bit about how you approach your own lifelong learning.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:33:22] The most important thing in my life is my children. By nature, I’m a lifelong learner, but I’m a big believer that the example that we set is at least going to be a memory upon which future generations make decisions. Learning doesn’t just feed my brain; it feeds my soul. But, as much as I feel like the work I do is my dedication and investment to building a better world for my children to inherit, I believe the learning I do is the same thing. Finishing a degree, I had friends and family tell me I was not allowed to start another for at least 12 to 18 months, so I’m on my mandatory hiatus period. I have a few different paths. I continue to seek structured learning because I find, whether it’s a certificate or a certification, it’s not about the letters, but one-off learning, for me, doesn’t leave as much of a memory. It could be good for a singular skill set acquisition.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:34:35] In terms of shaping my mindset, shaping my attempt, structured learning with segments and accomplishment. I look for what certificate, certifications, and programs would align to that. LinkedIn—who’s posting what, and who’s learning what, and how should I think about that? A degree is always out there, but, being in a doctoral program for three or four years, I’m a voracious reader, as are all the members of my family. But, for three or four years, my reading was pretty much towards the doctoral program, and so, when I got out of the doctoral program, my brain was like, “Feed me.” I read probably between seven to nine books a month and listen to two or three. I’m on a flight every week, and I’m a big believer in sacred spaces. Saying good morning to my kids, saying good night every night even if I’m at a board dinner are sacred spaces. I leave the board dinner for 15 to 30 minutes—these are things that will not be touched. For me, takeoffs and landings on flights are sacred spaces for reading. They’re not for working. They’re not for watching things. They’re for reading. And so that influx for me.

Lowell Aplebaum: [00:35:51] I struggle a little bit with audiobook versus podcast because I love both and fluctuate back and forth there. But, for me, it’s this balance. I always am between four to eight books at a time. I have a book or two or a podcast or two I’m listening to. Usually if it’s gone 30 days without me being in some kind of small, structured learning, I need to find another one. It’s like, “I can’t sleep. Let me work on this a little bit.” And then I’m always playing with the thought of “What’s the next degree?” Again not for more letters but because as humans, if we’re not growing, we’re atrophying. So it’s important that my kids see that learning is lifelong. And it’s important for my own health as much as exercise is. I think exercise for your wisdom, your intelligence, and your perspective is just as important. Muscles grow because you stretch them, and that’s not only true of your physical muscles.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Jeff Cobb: [00:36:56] We’re not done quite yet—keep listening for our recap.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:00] Connect with Lowell Aplebaum on LinkedIn, and learn more about Vista Cova.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:10] If you got value from this episode, we’d appreciate it if you’d share it with a colleague or leave a rating or review. That helps others find the show, and it supports the work we do.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:20] Before we end, let’s hit a few of the big takeaways from the conversation with Lowell.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:25] First, strategy has to start with identity. If you don’t know what makes your organization unique—and why that matters—you’re going to have a hard time navigating change with purpose.

Celisa Steele: [00:37:36] Speaking of change, Lowell emphasized the role of curiosity and empathy—both in how organizations learn and in how leaders lead. Those qualities help create space for dialogue, evolution, and community.

Jeff Cobb: [00:37:52] He also challenged the idea that rigor in content is enough. As learning businesses, we need to be thinking about design, experience, and engagement too—not just the information we’re delivering.

Celisa Steele: [00:38:04] I liked the metaphor that he used—”Muscles grow because you stretch them, and that’s not only true of physical muscles.” That’s a good reminder that learning isn’t always easy, but it is essential.

Jeff Cobb: [00:38:17] Thanks again for listening—and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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Related Resources

• “With” Strategy Not “For” Strategy with Lowell Aplebaum
• Four Habitsets for Navigating Uncertainty
• Five Practice Levers for Navigating Uncertainty

The post Curiosity, Clarity, and Courage with Lowell Aplebaum appeared first on Leading Learning.

If you’re leading a learning business right now, you’re almost certainly navigating uncertainty—political, economic, technological. It can be hard to know how to lead well, plan strategically, and stay responsive without burning out.

Our guest in this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 457, is someone who has spent years helping association leaders. Seth Kahan is the founder of Visionary Leadership and the author of the books Getting Change Right and Getting Innovation Right. Co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Seth about his Disruption Playbook and the seven elements he sees as essential for leading in uncertain times.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Listen to the Show

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Read the Show Notes

Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:17] If you’re leading a learning business right now, you’re almost certainly navigating uncertainty—political, economic, technological. And, in the face of all that, it can be hard to know how to lead well, plan strategically, and stay responsive without burning out.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:33] Our guest in this episode, number 457, is someone who has spent years helping association leaders. Seth Kahan is the founder of Visionary Leadership and the author of the books Getting Change Right and Getting Innovation Right. He’s also a long-time friend of the show—we’ve had him on four times before. Jeff, this time around you talked with Seth in June 2025, a moment of volatility in U.S. politics.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:00] Yes, indeed. And Seth opens with how that’s affecting the associations he works with, and he shares what leaders can do to stay effective when the ground keeps shifting.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:11] You and Seth talk about his Disruption Playbook and seven elements he sees as essential for leading in uncertain times. You also talk about the role of learning—for staff, members, boards, and leaders.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:25] And we get into AI—how Seth is using it personally and professionally as a tool for curiosity, not just efficiency.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:33] If you’re looking for ways to think more clearly and lead more intentionally, dear listener, then this conversation is for you. Here’s the interview with Seth Kahan.

Seth’s Take on the Current State for Leaders

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:48] Seth, you’ve been on the podcast several times now—we’re up to four at this point. Each conversation has felt very of the moment. There’s been something afoot every time it feels like, and there certainly is right now. What’s been most on your mind lately in the work that you do with leaders and organizations?

Seth Kahan: [00:02:06] I’m watching the fallout from the new administration. A lot of my clients are really suffering. They’re suffering from research being cut, truncated right in the middle of things. That has a huge impact on not just funding but morale, and so many people are in survival mode. A lot of my work—in the mental health space, I’m leading a grand challenge called Stop Stigma Together—includes working with organizations like the CDC, and there’s been a lot of uncertainty with people not being allowed to attend meetings, not allowed to contribute professionally. That’s probably the biggest thing of the moment—that we’re waiting to see how far this is going to go.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:45] We’ve talked in the past about your work with grand challenges, which I think is so interesting in this current environment. Can you say a little bit more about the grand challenges you’re working on? But also is this a time when leaders are open to taking on grand challenges?

Seth’s Work with Grand Challenges

Seth Kahan: [00:02:59] I don’t think so. I think a lot of leaders are in survival mode. They’re contracting, and so they’re going back to basics. A grand challenge is something that you do when you’ve got the desire to contribute largely to the world and to work with other partners on a big framework, take on problems that people have shied away from in the past, and a lot of times now organizations are asking, “How do we push through this time and survive? How do we not lose ground in the space that we’re in?” In general, I see people backing off of grand challenges. However, grand challenges are unique. And people who go after them or organizations that go after them, some of them are doing well. There’s still going to be a grand challenge here and there. It’s not going to go away. In general, the appetite is focusing much more on change and innovation. How do we create new products and services? How do we create new value? How do we get our staff to embrace being proactive in an environment that feels like it’s very choppy? And how do we get people to take the good kind of risks? That’s what I’m seeing.

Seth Kahan: [00:04:03] The two grand challenges I’m working on right now—I’ll just do a quick summary, and, if you want to, we can dig in deeper to them. Stop Stigma Together is about eliminating the stigma around mental health and substance use disorders on a national scale—bias and prejudice, trying to get that away, and trying to treat mental health the way we do physical health. A big word that’s used there is “parity.” Mental health should be on parity with physical health, and that comes down to the common understanding of it, so that we don’t look at somebody who has a mental health challenge as having a character flaw, but we see that you can have a mental health challenge just like you can get diabetes. The other aspect of it is laws and compliance—do we reinforce the stigma unintentionally? So that’s Stop Stigma Together. And we’re working with the Ad Council. We have a seven-year campaign called “Love Your Mind.” It’s going very well. I can talk about that. And we’re working with a lot of partnerships. We have about 300 organizations that are working together to eliminate that stigma.

Seth Kahan: [00:05:06] The other grand challenge is working with the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. They were birthed out of radiology, X-rays, physics. And X-rays, oh my God, we could look inside the human body with these things 75 years ago, and that has evolved. There are all kinds of ways of looking inside the human body—medical ultrasound, many different types of radiology now. Then there are therapies, and the therapies are literally putting radioisotopes in pharmaceuticals and delivering them in the body, mostly around cancer. Cancer is the number one area. The other area that physicists contribute to in medicine is AI. They are the original creators—the physicists—of the artificial intelligence in terms of code, understanding how to make it safe, large language models, and all of that. There are a lot of physicists in the medical space who are zeroing in on how do we develop AI in medicine?

Seth Kahan: [00:06:04] I was just reading the other day about how, in Europe, they’re already using AI to make decisions around, for example, cancer treatment. What’s most effective? They’ve reached a point where they’re comfortable relying on it. I don’t think Americans are there yet, mostly. We’re doing a summit in early 2026, where we’re identifying the biggest breakthroughs in physics and medicine over the next ten years. And we’re bringing in multiple stakeholders—not just the physicists but the FDA, all the different organizations that need to participate for those breakthroughs to happen.

Seth’s Disruption Playbook

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:34] We’re always following your work with great interest, reading your newsletter, trying to keep up with what you’re doing, and it’s always great to have you here on the show. What made you pop on our radar screen this time was we noticed in one of your newsletters, not too long ago, you talked about a Disruption Playbook that you had put out, and you were just talking about AI there, which obviously is a disruptor. We were like, “Well, we’ve been talking about uncertainty. We’ve been talking about disruption.” And the last time you were on the show, we talked about disruption.

Seth Kahan: [00:07:01] Yes, we did. I remember that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:03] So it’s apropos to have you back again. You put out this playbook for executive leadership in turbulent times, and you’ve characterized this or said it’s “a guide for executives ready to lead with foresight and integrity through political volatility, cultural shifts, and systemic uncertainty,” all of which we’re certainly feeling right now. What compelled you to say, “A playbook is what we need for this. I’m going to put out a playbook here.”? What are you hoping leaders are going to be able to take from this playbook? Which we’ll, by the way, link to in the show notes.

Seth Kahan: [00:07:37] It’s already being used, so it’s been nice to get the response from CEOs, saying, “We’re using your playbook.” The environment was just so disruptive. First, you had—as we’ve already spoken about—the truncation of grants, research, people losing their jobs in the federal government, which impacted science, healthcare, and other fields as well—even manufacturing, which I know they’re trying to promote, but I’m not sure it’s going well. And I saw that the CEOs were scrambling, the ones that I was in touch with. They were getting hit in so many different directions simultaneously. They were a bit in shock, and they weren’t sure how to move forward. Of course, this is not the first time that we’ve been through massive disruption, and so I drew on my experience from the mortgage crisis, from the pandemic, and also the knowledge that I accrued studying disruptions during those disruptions. I thought, “Okay, this would be a great time to put out something that’s simple, that’s concise. It’s not too prescriptive, but it gives you a lot of different ways to look at what’s going on and to think about how you should best respond here.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:38] You talk about seven elements in the playbook, and these feel pretty perennial to me. As you said, you drew on experience from the past. They’re going to apply now. They’re going to apply in the future, I’m certain, but I’ll tick those off: situational awareness, strategic agility, stakeholder alignment, value-driven decisions, visibility and voice, culture of adaptation, and systemic foresight. Like I said, those all sound like areas that leaders need to be focused on continually and perennially. Do you find that there are ones that CEOs and other executives are struggling the most with right now? Do any of those stand out more than others in what you’re seeing?

Common Strengths and Weaknesses During Times of Disruption

Seth Kahan: [00:09:21] Yes. I would say that there’s a strong commitment in CEOs in general around strategic agility and stakeholder alignment. There is certainly this ongoing desire to make value-driven decisions. Nobody would say that we’re making decisions in any other way. Those are three where I think there is strength. They’re not super threatened by the current environment that we’re in because people are already doing that. But some of the others—situational awareness becomes extremely important right now because things are happening so fast, and they’re multidimensional. It’s too much for one person to keep track of all that’s going on. Having a weekly briefing or convening a diverse round table of people that can say, “Here’s what’s happening in my space” can all add so that you get a holistic picture, like a hologram. Everybody speaks up in a short period of time, and you start to see a general trend, or you start to see synergies or places where forces are combining in a not good way that could impact your space. Situational awareness, whenever there’s a lot of disruption, becomes more intense and requires a shorter periodicity. Whereas before I might convene this group once a month or once a quarter, now weekly briefings might be in order. What are we learning in real time? Or ad hoc briefings.

Seth Kahan: [00:10:38] Strategic agility—most people pledge allegiance to strategic agility, but they’ve still got their strategy, and they’re hunkering down and working on the tactics to execute it. This is a time where you suddenly need to be able to say, “Where should we be pivoting, and what does that look like?” You were asking me—in an e-mail that you sent me—around the difference between agility and speed. Agility is that flexibility to do something that’s different. Speed is how fast you respond to it. And you want both, to the best of your ability. But a lot of times speed with what you’re currently doing is not too hard to achieve because you get really efficient. You focus in on it. It’s like the race car that pulls off the track, and they’ve got to change the tires and do all the maintenance, and they’ve got seven seconds to do it in. It’s like you can run drills. But agility is different because then you say, “Okay, we’re not going to change the tires. We’re going to turn this into a tank. Or, “We’re going to turn this into a bicycle.” It’s like, “What?” That’s a whole different ball game. So strategic agility becomes important here.

Seth Kahan: [00:11:36] The visibility and voice is an area that requires an increase because your usual communication channels don’t suffice when there’s a lot of disruption. People get scared, and they want to know now, “What are you doing for me? How are you helping me out?” And there’s always a tension. Right now in the mental health work I do, there’s a tension between where can we work with this administration, or should we work with this administration? There are staff and customers who say, “Take a stand. Tell them we’re not going to do that. Push back.” And then there are others who say, “Let’s be more practical. There must be some place where we can work with them. Let’s just ignore the places where we can’t, and let’s join hands where we can.” That can become a real tension in this day and age.

Seth Kahan: [00:12:17] For example, in the mental health space, I convened the top leaders from 15 major mental health organizations in the United States in April to talk about how we work together under the current administration. Some of those big organizations, like the American Psychiatric Association or Mental Health America, were really about finding where can they shake hands with the administration and where should they stay away from it. But there were organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and Black Girls Smile—much smaller organizations—that have a target on their back with this administration. There’s no place they can work with them. You can see the tension there. “What are you going to do? Are you going to take a stand in my favor? Are you going to protect me? Are you on my side, or are you going to try and work with these people who are trying to take me out?” Visibility and voice is where you say, “This is who we are. This is what we’re doing.” And you stay in touch. You stay in touch with your members, with your customers, with your vendors.

Seth Kahan: [00:13:09] Culture of adaptation—just like what I was talking about before—I talked about agility, but now it’s like, can we really morph what we’ve got? Can we take it to a different place? How do we adjust? Let’s look at all the variables, and which one should we adjust? And the last one I’ll mention before we’re done is systemic foresight. Again, just like the briefings, you want to start engaging more deeply in it because, suddenly, you’ve got dramatic changes with short-time horizons, and that’s a different environment. You have a lot of talk in the press about uncertainty and how much the business world does not like uncertainty. That’s where this stuff comes in, dealing with that, so you’ve got to build your chops.

The Fundamental Importance of Situational Awareness

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:47] Really knowing your situation well, having a grip on it, feels fundamental to having the confidence to be able to be agile, to be able to have that visibility and voice that you may need in this situation. What’s your perspective on that? Often organizations move too fast in saying, “Yes, we understand our situation. It’s this, this, and this, and we’re going to move ahead from here,” when they should dig in and come out of that with strong confidence that “We know what’s going on here, and here’s how we’re going to respond.”

Seth Kahan: [00:14:21] Yes, that’s a great question. What I find in my consulting practice is that, in some ways, you could take a lens and say, “I’m going back to basics.” Rather than doing grand challenges, I’m focusing on change, innovation, and leadership. Those are perennial, to use your word. However, it’s 2025, and all those things are done differently and with greater depth than ever before. For example, you can bring AI into the picture and start using prompts to help you dig down deep and to discover where you’re weak whereas your understanding is not as strong as it is in other places. Are there partners that we should be identifying for future fit that it doesn’t necessarily seem like we would be partners, but maybe there are rising or emerging opportunities that would bring us together? There was a great Pepsi Cola document on the Internet about how to develop strategic foresight, and they talk about some of the new products that they were able to come up with using strategic foresight—this is 20 years ago—and they had teams of people doing things that AI can do now. God knows how many hours they put into that, and now it’s probably measured in seconds or, at most, minutes that you can get some of that same information. We’re in a different world, and we want to make use of all the tools that we have. While you might be doing basics, we’re talking about doing it at a whole different level.

How to Realize Systemic Foresight

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:44] And coming back to that idea of systemic foresight because everybody’s looking for some foresight right now to figure out how they’re going to adapt, where they’re going to take things, how do you help organizations (I’m assuming it’s primarily the executives and the board) really get that foresight that they need. And what are the characteristics of the leaders who get that and are able to implement that in their organizations?

Seth Kahan: [00:16:09] The characteristics of the leaders are that they’re hungry, they’re smart, and they understand strategy. Those are really the characteristics, and those fit many of the leaders on boards and many of the CEOs who are out there. Then you’ve got to feed them something that operates at the level that they’re capable of operating. For example, I was just watching a keynote speech for Inteleos, run by Dale Cyr, who does certification and medical ultrasound and radiology in many areas where we’re looking at imagery using technology, and he’s bringing in keynote speakers that are at the cutting edge of, for example, AI. In fact, he’s got one on his board. He’s vibing what’s the latest thinking out there? AI is one of those fields that’s growing exponentially. It’s too fast for any of us to keep up with. So he found experts in AI who are genuinely interested in the future of education and certification. He’s really importing that knowledge. That’s one of the things that you see CEOs doing. They’re out scanning the environment for thought leaders who understand their space, who can help them see, “What does this new emerging opportunity look like for us? What should we be concerned about? And what are some of the things that might be counterintuitive?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:22] That’s the looking forward part of it, but looking back is also something that you need to do. One of the actions that you recommend, which, again, is a perennial thing—you need to come back and do this on a consistent basis—is identifying a legacy practice or assumption that needs to be questioned. We both do a lot of work in the association and nonprofit worlds. I’d like to focus there. What are some of the most common assumptions that you see associations or nonprofits clinging to? What’s the downside of doing that? Why do they need to get rid of those things and jettison them to be able to move forward?

Seth Kahan: [00:18:02] One of the most dangerous things that I see is when you’ve got an organization that is eminent in its field, and people start to say, “Look, we already know what we’re doing. We’re number one. Let us do it the way we do it. We know this space.” That can be really challenging. If I walk into a market leader, and they’re telling me about all the weird stuff that they’re looking into that’s on the horizon, then I relax. But, if they’re telling me that they don’t need to go digital or that they can still do things the way they did them ten years ago because that’s what got them to where they are, then, to me, that’s a major danger sign. We all know that being eminent in anything does not ensure your future success. That’s a perennial issue too. You can look at Clayton Christensen’s work on The Innovator’s Dilemma—that’s what that’s all about, in part.

Seth Kahan: [00:18:49] When I’m working in an organization, one of the first things I’ll do is go in and start interviewing people. I’m always especially interested in interviewing people who are seen as sticks in the mud or are naysayers, apathetic, antagonistic because often they’ve got something real to say, and I’m all about finding the gem in that. It’s like, “What’s going on here? Why is this person holding on so tight to this?” And then sussing out, “What’s the issue?” Is the issue that the organization is not looking at something, or is the issue that there’s a sacred cow that the organization is not willing to sacrifice? Or is the issue that this person is truly living in an organization 20 years ago? And, mostly, it’s not the latter, I find.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:27] To tie a bow around the Disruption Playbook—and, again, we’ll definitely link to this because it’s a valuable resource, whether you’re an executive or at any level of the organization, looking at what’s laid out in the playbook is valuable. But, if you want to get started with that or you want to get better at leading through disruption, what’s one thing that a listener could potentially do today to start shifting their mindset or their habits?

Leading Through Disruption

Seth Kahan: [00:19:52] You want to shake yourself up in a constructive way, and the way that I always do that with myself is I try and find someone who’s talking about the thing that I’m interested in and is pretty far out—but not so far out that their feet leave the ground. It’s like I want someone to open up a vista for me that I hadn’t been seeing before. I set out to intentionally get shaken up. It can have far-reaching consequences because it can reach into every other thing that you’re doing. But that’s okay. We’ve got YouTube now at a whole different level than we’ve ever had it before, and you can find thought leaders on pretty much anything. You can also ask your buddies about it because I find, in any collection of leaders, CEO communities, a group that goes out to lunch together or that has a distribution list, that you can say, “Who’s talking about something that seems extremely exciting to you and far out, and tell me why?” That’s one thing that you can do right away.

The Value of Learning for Association Members

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:48] I’ve been engaged in a project myself recently and talking with association CEOs—I know you do a lot of work with association CEOs—and I’ve been specifically concerned with the value of learning in the association value proposition and how CEOs look at that. Learning broadly, not just formal education and events and things like that, but learning more broadly, how is that driving the value of associations? I’d be interested, particularly since you work with change so much—and change requires learning; learning and change go hand in hand—how do you see association CEOs thinking about learning as part of the value of associations for their membership, for society, thinking about it in strategic terms? I’d love to hear your perspective on that.

Seth Kahan: [00:21:44] There’s learning for the staff. There’s learning for the members. There’s learning for the interrelated sectors that you’re operating inside of. There’s all of that. So ask yourself, “Where is the value proposition now? Am I having more challenges with my staff? Is it with my members? Is it with the people that I’m trying to excel out in the world with?” And, in any one of those areas, if you feel that you’re being constrained, then obviously that’s an area to focus on. I have an engagement right now with a large organization where the majority of the staff are not taking a proactive view towards learning, and that’s a problem, and we need to figure out how to resolve that, how to get it to catch in the organization. You really want it to catch—the traction, buy-in is critical for something like this. It’s not something you want to push on someone; you want them to be seeking it out. For one thing, with the evolution of things like ChatGPT, we’re all capable of highly customizing our own learning and excelling at it.

Seth Kahan: [00:22:39] For example, some organizations are giving ChatGPT to their staff, and then they can’t stop there. You’ve got to give them at least a couple of classes. They can be short and powerful, but you’ve got to teach them what’s possible out of this thing, and there’s a lot that’s possible out of it. We want that organization in particular to get hungry for learning because we want them to stay at the head of the pack, which is where they are. So that’s staff. Then members—obviously there’s a value proposition for learning around members. In fact, I was cautioned about this in a meeting I just came out of, which is that we were looking at things that were way out on the horizon, and the CEO said, “We’ve got to make sure we don’t leave our members behind. They’re feeling a sore need right now. We need to create some breakthroughs that they’re feeling the pain of. We need to make sure that we’re doing that.” Then you get into learning and teaching the members about what are the constraints? How do you create a breakthrough? Getting change right—I have a formula for a breakthrough. It’s not the only formula, but it is a formula, and you can apply those in the organizations.

Seth Kahan: [00:23:40] And then you get into learning. This gets into stakeholder alignment, ecosystems, learning with your partners, and exploring things together. That’s not just you sending them stuff; that’s getting into the trenches together and looking together at what’s out there? What’s possible? How is this going to change our field? Where are the opportunities for us? To me, learning is core right now. In the ‘90s, it was like a new discovery, the learning organization and all of that. To me, now it feels like it’s got to be embedded in the foundation for a healthy organization, and, if it’s not, then that needs immediate attention, just like other core issues would.

Jeff Cobb: [00:24:17] One of my perspectives—and, again, I’m biased because I’ve got a hammer, and everything is a nail with this particular issue. I feel like what we’ve seen happen over the past five to ten years is workforce development, talent pipeline, lifelong learning, upskilling, reskilling—all of these things have become mainstream, commonplace. You read about them in The New York Times, when you never used to ten years or so ago. And associations obviously play an incredibly critical role in supporting people from entry into a particular profession or field and then throughout their career. In your work with association CEOs, do you feel like there’s a consciousness of the association playing that role in whatever field or industry they’re serving?

Seth Kahan: [00:25:03] Yes, I do. One of the ways that I see that consciousness manifested is in frustration. For example, having a board that is not looking towards the future. They’re more interested in managing the mundane aspects of the organization or more interested in flywheel spending by doing the status quo. When I go into an organization, one of the first things I look at is the relationship between the CEO and the board—that tells me so much. In those organizations where it’s really humming, those are the organizations that I see flying and succeeding. I’m trying to suss out are there problems? Are there challenges from the CEO’s angle with those board members? And how do you work with difficult board members and all of that? When I see a CEO who’s frustrated because his board won’t take on something that’s going to carry the organization forward, that tells me that there are some learning issues—assuming that the CEO’s doing well—with the board, and then we get into how do we create some learning experiences for the board? How do we get them out of their comfort zone? One of my favorite things is something experiential. Let’s take a field trip. Let’s go to an organization that’s got this down. Let’s walk in and see what it feels like when you’re in an organization where people are excited about the future and actively retooling their minds so that they’re more capable, more equipped to deal with what’s going on.

Seth’s Approach to His Own Lifelong Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:22] Our conversation has obviously turned to learning, which is appropriate here on the Leading Learning Podcast.

Seth Kahan: [00:26:27] Yes, that’s right.

Jeff Cobb: [00:26:27] I would love to hear a little bit about your own learning right now. What’s something that you’re learning right now, whether it’s about leadership, change, or anything else? Because I know you’ve got wide and varied interests that you’re very kind to share with the people who follow you. What are you learning about that you think others should also be thinking about right now?

Seth Kahan: [00:26:48] I’m taking deep dives into my client spaces. You’ve probably seen my podcast where I’m interviewing people who are physicists in medicine, for example. I just learned about the use of digital twins at a population level, and I got a much deeper introduction to digital twins. A digital twin in the healthcare space is a mirror image of you with all your healthcare information fed into it. Right now, we still talk about the lack of coordination of care. If somebody’s got diabetes and they’ve got congestive heart failure, some human being that’s in their family has to take accountability for making sure that those two doctors know what the other one is doing and that they’re not issuing contrarian advice and so on and so forth. With the digital twin, you can feed all the information into a computer simulation of a human being, and you can see immediately if there are challenges. How does congestive heart failure interact with diabetes, for example? And it can be a healthy person too. It doesn’t have to be someone who’s suffering. But you create a digital image that has all of the health information of a human being, and then you can do things to it, and you can watch how the whole system changes.

Seth Kahan: [00:27:52] Now, all they have is healthcare information, so it may not know what color my eyes are or what kind of clothes I prefer to wear, but it will know what my blood pressure is and things like that and the medication that I’m on. And then extrapolating that…. This, by the way, was from a podcast with Dr. Ehsan Samei in North Carolina, who is doing this work, and he’ll create copies of these digital twins, so he has entire populations. He could look at 20,000 people who have a lot of different characteristics and ask the question, “If such-and-such a virus were to come loose in this environment, who’s likely to catch it? What kind of symptoms are going to be the most severe that we need to treat? Who should we go after first in terms of vaccinations?” Things like that. That’s all me doing a deep dive into physics and medicine, and I start learning about digital twins and stuff like that. I love to learn more about the clients that I’m working with, and I do a lot of work, as do you, in science and healthcare, and that continues to feed there.

Seth Kahan: [00:28:48] Of course, I’m studying AI. You can’t be alive these days and be operating and not be studying AI. I’m pulling in books. I’m looking for references. I’m following people on LinkedIn. I’m watching videos and trying to understand. And I’m using it myself. That’s another thing I should say—everybody in my family is using AI. My daughter, who’s in college—she’s a freshman in college—said, “Dad, I don’t need to use AI.” And I said, “Okay, I’m paying for ChatGPT for one month, and I’m coming back to you in 30 days.” I came back, and it’s, “No, don’t take it away. Don’t take it away.” Everybody should be trying it out and using it. I often hear in the news someone saying, “You have no idea what’s really going on in AI. The stuff that you’re using was hot six months ago.” I want to know, what does that mean? What are you doing? Educate me. Give me an idea. I’m very interested in how organizations and businesses are using AI, what they’re relying on it for, how they’re relying on it, and how do they keep the human at the helm while they’re doing all of this? Those are a couple of areas. I could go into other sectors with my clients, but it’s the deep dive with clients and AI, those are areas where I’m learning a lot. Let me turn the tables on you for just a little bit in this. What are you most excited about when it comes to leadership, learning, and AI?

Jeff Cobb: [00:30:07] With AI, where I’ve been trying to implement it, it’s how can I take AI and use it in the business in a variety of different ways, not just from a productivity standpoint, but how does it help me with analysis? How does it help me with brainstorming, strategic foresight, all those things that I need myself just as much as my clients need? Of course, I will bring it to bear. We do a ton of market assessment and things like that, so bringing it to bear, it’s like I can have almost a whole team of analysts with me to work through whatever the particular situation is. That’s incredibly fascinating. In my personal life, on the side, I’m a musician, and I’m starting to figure out how AI might be instructive there—what I would or wouldn’t want AI to help me with in terms of musical production and things like that. What’s possible is just truly fascinating.

Seth Kahan: [00:30:58] That’s an area that I’m interested in, what you just talked about with your music. With my ChatGPT, which I have a small subscription for, it caches all my stuff. I’m asking it about everything. I might say, “My daughter’s a vegan, and I need a recipe for dinner tonight.” I’m going on a camping trip. I’m trying to figure out are there any bugs or poisonous snakes where I’m going that I should be aware of. I’m a spiritual person, so I’m reading all these sacred texts that I find interesting and doing analysis, and I’ll say, “What are the top five copies of the Bhagavad Gita that are written by or that are commented on by someone who’s a non-dualist?” It’s like getting to the arcane stuff. ChatGPT’s got all of that. Of course, there’s my business. I’ll feed whole conversations into it and say, “I need a summary of this conversation. What were the most important points?” and stuff like that. Then, when I go back to it and ask it some generic question, it draws on all of that, and I’m surprised sometimes. It’ll say, “Because you’re interested in this, you definitely need to check that out.” And those are dots that I would never have connected on my own. There’s this holistic element when you utilize it for all the different areas of your life that it brings to the table. And I really like that element of it. I feel like there are often really good surprises in there for me.

Recap and Wrap-Up

Celisa Steele: [00:32:19] Learn more about the work Seth Kahan does through Visionary Leadership.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:31] If you found this episode valuable, we’d be grateful if you’d share it with a colleague. That helps more people find the show and supports the work we do.

Celisa Steele: [00:32:39] Jeff, you and Seth covered a lot of ground, from the impact of political disruption on many organizations to practical ways leaders can strengthen their foresight and flexibility.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:50] I think the elements he covers in his Disruption Playbook highlight how important it is to stay grounded in situational awareness. True, accurate situational awareness is something I’ve long seen as absolutely foundational for any strategy work.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:07] I appreciated Seth’s take on learning as a strategic necessity—learning is core, as he put it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:33:13] And I appreciated Seth’s personal take on AI, using it not just for productivity but as a tool for curiosity and exploration in work and family life.

Celisa Steele: [00:33:23] Thanks again for listening—see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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What will it take to keep your learning business relevant and thriving in 2030? In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele unpack seven strategic shifts that are reshaping continuing education—from personalization and AI to credentials and commoditization and more.

You’ll come away with ideas to apply now and questions to help you think more strategically about what’s next—and what will keep your CE responsive and successful over the next five years and beyond.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Celisa Steele: [00:00:03] If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you’re in the right place. I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:16] In this episode, we’re peering into the not-so-distant future. We’re taking a look at 2030 and what continuing education might look like five years from now.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:27] Our conversation is grounded by a recent Webinar we led, titled “A Look at Continuing Education in 2030: Disruption, Competition, and Changing Expectations.” During that live Webinar, there was a lot of chat activity and some wonderful, insightful contributions from attendees.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:43] So much so that we hosted a follow-up online meeting that we invited Webinar registrants to attend. That meeting was less presentation and more conversation. By the way, that’s something we’re thinking we’ll do more of going forward.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:59] What we’ll talk about today comes out of the prep we did for that Webinar, the chat contributions during the Webinar, and then the discussion that happened during that follow-on conversation.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:09] Today’s discussion will, we hope, distill some of the most powerful and provocative themes that came out of all that we did to take a look at CE in 2030.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:20] If 2030 sounds far off, remember that’s just five years away. Think back to 2020—five years wasn’t that long ago, but so much has changed. Now’s the time to be thinking about how learning businesses will not just survive but thrive with their CE offerings in the years ahead, 2030 and beyond.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:41] What we’ll talk about today are seven strategic shifts—areas of change that learning businesses need to understand and act on to stay relevant, responsive, and sustainable.

1. Personalization As a Strategic Priority

Celisa Steele: [00:01:55] The first strategic shift is one we’ve seen building over time: personalization. For years now, we’ve heard organizations say they want to create more personalized learning experiences. While progress has been made, we’re still pretty far from truly personalized, bespoke educational offerings being the norm.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:16] There are organizations that are making strides by doing things like investing in segmented marketing, mapping out learner journeys, and more intentionally making use of behavioral data to refine their offerings. But many organizations also know that they’re still largely product-driven, product-first—designing a course and then trying to match it to a market—rather than truly audience-first and starting with a learner’s needs and building from there.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:45] One newer and more nuanced idea we heard in the follow-on discussion was around micro-personalization—the idea of creating small slices of learning that are tailored to learners’ immediate context and delivered at the right moment, that moment of need.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:01] Think of this like a Spotify playlist for learning. Instead of a monolithic course, learners get modular, relevant snippets—say, a quick simulation, a three-minute video, or a just-in-time reference guide—something that meets them exactly where they are in their day-to-day work.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:19] Of course, that kind of personalization doesn’t just happen. It depends on competency frameworks, self-assessment tools, and often artificial intelligence that can help make real-time recommendations. And building those systems, especially well-structured ones, can be complex and resource-intensive.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:40] But here’s the key—personalization is moving from nice to have to strategic differentiator. In a crowded, competitive market, the ability to say, “We know who you are and what you need” carries real weight.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:55] To be clear, personalization doesn’t always mean fully custom. It doesn’t have to be a fully bespoke offering assembled dynamically at the point of need for a specific learner. Sometimes personalization is as simple as suggesting a learning pathway based on that learner’s prior participation, job role, or some self-identified goal.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:17] It’s also worth asking, “Are you thinking about personalization only in terms of content? Or are you also personalizing timing, format, pacing, and support?” These are all elements that shape the learner experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:32] Jeff, I know that social is another element you like to think about or talk about in terms of personalization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:39] It is. Social is all about dialogue. Whether the learner is in dialogue with other learners or with a subject matter expert, it puts the learner in the position to ask about her specific concerns, needs, issues—whatever the broader topic is, to bring it down to that personal level for that particular learner. Social learning, cohort-based learning, community-based learning is one probably the oldest form of a no-technology-needed personalization experience.

2. Point-of-Need Learning

Celisa Steele: [00:05:12] The second strategy shift we want to mention is point-of-need learning. This is one of those concepts that’s easy to get excited about (easy for me!), but it can be hard to operationalize.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:23] During our follow-on conversation, Gayle Claman shared an example from engineering. She pointed out that early-career engineers often turn to mentors or colleagues—not CE courses—when they face a new challenge. It’s informal, it’s fast, and it fits their workflow.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:41] That’s a critical reminder. For CE providers to be relevant at that point of need, we need to be asking, “Are we even in the learner’s consideration set when a problem arises?” And, if the answer is no, then we need to ask, “Why not?” Part of the issue may be this older view that we’re clinging to that learners need to come to us as learning businesses versus us going out to serve learners where they are.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:06] A few organizations are working to close that gap. Some are embedding microlearning directly into tools or platforms that professionals already use—think apps or project management software. Others are developing searchable resource libraries where content is tagged to real-world tasks or use cases. Some are leveraging chatbots or other ways that individuals can quickly locate the information they need in what can often be an overwhelming set of resources that a learning business has amassed.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:38] There’s also the potential for newer tools to help. NotebookLM is a Google AI tool, and it can be used to convert material—even dense, technical material—into digestible audio content. That makes the information more accessible and more usable in moments where time and attention might be limited.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:59] This kind of modality flexibility—text, audio, video, whatever fits—is central to point-of-need learning. But, to make that possible, you need well-organized content and clear metadata.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:12] A key question here is, “What would it look like if our learners didn’t have to come find us? What if we were already where they are, embedded in their moments of challenge or curiosity?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:24] That’s a provocative vision—and one that’s likely to become more feasible as AI tools get better at context sensing and content matching.

3. Fragmentation and Innovation in Credentials

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:34] Our third theme is a big one: the evolving credentials landscape. We’ve entered a time that we’ve called the credentials shake-up, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:47] Learners definitely want credentials, but they want them to be stackable, flexible, and visible—visible especially online. And many traditional systems weren’t designed with those values in mind.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:01] We know of organizations issuing digital badges for certificates aimed at younger professionals, for example. This is partly about market expansion—maybe reaching underserved audiences. But it’s also about adjusting to a world where learners want more control over how they document and how they’re able to communicate their expertise.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:21] This is where some friction can arise. Accrediting bodies aren’t necessarily keeping up with these shifts, and so some learning businesses can be constrained by things like seat-time requirements, older reporting systems, or other legacy issues.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:37] Employers aren’t necessarily keeping up either. We’re starting to see some transition there. But some learning businesses are innovating around the edge, creating offerings that offer real value but don’t necessarily count in traditional ways. That can be both risky and liberating.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:55] We also heard the view that younger professionals are less interested in credits and more interested in skills that they can show off, and that might be in a portfolio, on LinkedIn, or during a job interview.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:07] So the challenge becomes how do you create credentials that travel—ones that are trusted by employers, usable by learners, and sustainable for your organization?

Celisa Steele: [00:09:18] That is a strategic question—one that can’t be answered in isolation. It needs to be part of a broader rethinking of your learning portfolio and the place of credentials in your business model.

4. AI as Both Enabler and Disruptor

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:33] We’ve covered three strategic shifts so far: personalization as a strategic priority, point-of-need learning, and fragmentation and innovation in credentials. Next up: artificial intelligence—arguably the biggest driver of change in nearly every industry, including CE. In some ways, AI is hard to separate out from the other shifts we’re talking about. AI has already come up multiple times in our conversation about how those first three shifts are happening.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:02] AI has the potential to revolutionize how learning is created, delivered, and consumed. AI is an enabler, but it’s also a disruptor. What’s the role of a learning business when AI can do parts of what we do faster, cheaper, better?

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:21] There’s the very real possibility that AI will soon be able to build bespoke learning experiences from massive content repositories, assembling a course on the fly from building blocks that are already in your catalog.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:35] That changes, fundamentally, the job of the learning provider. You’re no longer just designing experiences. That puts more emphasis on curating, tagging, and structuring your content so artificial intelligence can work with it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:50] AI might reduce the need for multiple content formats. You might only need a single master version, perhaps loaded into something like a custom GPT (as we’ve discussed before), and AI will handle the rest, turning it into a video, a slide deck, an article, an interactive chatbot, whatever, based on the learner’s needs and wants.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:13] That’s a profound shift. It means learning businesses need to invest in content governance—taxonomies, tagging, competency alignment—so that your materials are ready to be remixed and reassembled.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:28] You mentioned NotebookLM earlier, Celisa. The ability exists now to create podcast-style guides from existing materials. That’s a glimpse of what’s to come. Imagine a future where learners expect that level of flexibility and responsiveness as the norm.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:45] The point isn’t to go out and start using NotebookLM or to choose any particular new tool to chase. It’s much more about building infrastructure and strategy that lets your learning business adapt. If you’re thoughtful now, you’ll be more agile later.

5. Commoditization and Competition

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:03] Theme five is one many of us are already feeling—CE is becoming a commodity.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:09] Yes, learners increasingly are prioritizing things like convenience, usability, and experience over other, maybe more traditional measures of quality.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:21] One of the Webinar participants who leads learning at a healthcare association, for example, reported that some learners will choose a course that’s faster and easier, even if it’s technically less rigorous, because it fits their lifestyle better. That’s a wake-up call.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:37] In a crowded market, being high-quality isn’t enough. You have to be high-quality, fast, easy to access, relevant, and affordable. That’s a lot.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:47] That is a lot. So what’s the differentiator? It might be the curation, the community, or the context you provide—or even some level of access to the subject matter experts. Those are harder to replicate, and they can offer much more defensible value.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:02] That reminds me of some of the ground that you covered in your conversation with Dhawal Shah of Class Central, Jeff. Especially that community piece. Dhawal flat-out said a learning business shouldn’t try to compete with Big Learning providers (Coursera, Udemy, etc.) on price. That’s a losing battle there because of the sheer scale involved.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:22] This ties back to business models. If your value rests solely on CE credits, you’re vulnerable. What happens if someone else offers the same credit faster or cheaper?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:33] Or if learners start asking, “Why do I need the credit at all?” I don’t think that’s a hypothetical question. That’s already beginning to happen in some sectors.

6. Silo-Busting As a Strategic Imperative

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:43] Our sixth theme is a more internal one versus the external competition we were just talking about, but it’s no less important: silos.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:52] Yes, we hear repeatedly and consistently about challenges related to siloed departments. You have education working separately from marketing, and you have communications that aren’t aligned with credentialing, and so on and so forth.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:06] This fragmentation makes it harder to deliver cohesive experiences, and it slows down innovation. Breaking down silos may require structural changes—shared KPIs, cross-functional teams, or even reorganizing departments.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:22] But it can also start small and less radically than some of those things you just suggested, Jeff. It could be that you start with some joint planning sessions, integrated calendars, or a more collaborative product development process. Because the goal is to act more like a unified learning platform and less like a patchwork of separate functions. Jack Coursen from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) mentioned that, years ago, he made the move to have the professional development team start talking to the marketing team very early in the process—not when a course was ready to launch and they needed to try to drive enrollments but back when the course was being identified as a need and was just beginning to be created, that was when he started talking to marketing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:10] This also means a shifting culture in many organizations—rewarding collaboration, encouraging experimentation, and sharing both risk and wins.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:22] In a lot of ways, all seven of these shifts that we’re talking about, to some extent, tie into a shift in culture. But certainly with that one around silos, I definitely see the connection there.

7. Data Strategy: Beyond Dashboards

Celisa Steele: [00:15:32] The seventh and final strategic shift that we’ll mention today is data, specifically the shift from isolated dashboards to data ecosystems that prioritize things like interoperability and integration.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:47] In the past, we were happy if the LMS showed us completion rates or test scores in a somewhat easy way. In fact, we’re still very happy if it does that for us. But the bar now is much higher.

Celisa Steele: [00:15:59] Centralized data lakes are becoming more common and more appealing because these allow LMS, AMS, e-commerce, and engagement data to live together. Which then means you can query all that data in powerful ways. Often you’re going to make use of AI to help you with some of that querying.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:21] That kind of infrastructure enables not just reporting but personalization (which we’ve talked about), prediction, and automation. But it doesn’t happen by accident.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:32] Organizations are going to have to make that decision to invest in interoperability. They’re going to need to choose systems that talk to each other. And they’re also going to need to invest in data governance so that they can make sure that they have high-quality data, that the data is consistent, that there’s security around all of that data.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:50] If data is the fuel for innovation, we need to make sure it’s clean, accessible, and ready to use. That’s not a tech project—it’s a strategic imperative.

Recap of 7 Shifts Shaping Continuing Education

Celisa Steele: [00:17:06] We’re about to recap the seven shifts that we think warrant some attention for learning businesses looking to offer continuing education that’s valued in 2030 and beyond, so stick around to the end.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:26] If you enjoy the Leading Learning Podcast, please share an episode with a colleague or co-worker you feel would appreciate and get value from it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:34] So let’s recap the seven strategic shifts shaping continuing education as we head towards 2030.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:41] First, personalization is moving from optional to essential. Learners expect relevance at the individual level, and that expectation is growing over time for true personalization, ultimately down to individualization.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:57] Two, point-of-need learning is incredibly valuable, as it meets learners where they are. But we’re still building out how to achieve and monetize point-of-need offerings.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:09] Yes, that can still be a bit tricky, but the value of point-of-need learning is so valuable that it warrants trying to crack those nuts. Then, third, we talked about credentials and how they’re fragmenting. Stackable, flexible recognition is in, and skill or knowledge demonstration is gaining ground over older measures like seat time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:31] Four, this hardly needs to be said, but AI is changing the game, both enabling new capabilities and requiring new strategies.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:39] Fifth, competition and commoditization are real. These realities make not only what you offer but how you offer it important. There’s a growing expectation among learners that it should be easy, relevant, and enjoyable to engage with you or any learning provider.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:58] Number six, silos stall strategy. Integration—of teams, systems, and goals—is key to innovation.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:07] And then, seventh and finally, data isn’t just about reporting anymore. Data is the engine for personalization. It is part of what makes AI so powerful. And it helps you make informed decisions.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:22] And here’s something extra to consider. None of these shifts stands alone. They’re intertwined. Personalization depends on data. AI depends on breaking down silos. Credential innovation ties directly to commoditization and learner expectations.

Celisa Steele: [00:19:38] If you’re wondering where to begin, start with leverage points. Think about places where a single change would support progress on multiple fronts for you. For example, investing in a data structure can help with AI, personalization, and strategic decision-making.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:56] Or piloting AI tools in one area of your content strategy might create momentum to rethink credentials or learner engagement.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:05] The key is to take some action and to not get overwhelmed and remain inactive. These shifts aren’t a checklist, but they are signals. Your job is to interpret what these signals might mean for your mission, your learners, and your future.

Jeff Cobb: [00:20:21] If you’re listening to this, you’re already a little ahead of the curve because the future isn’t waiting for 2030 to arrive. It’s unfolding now, and learning leaders have a real opportunity to help shape it.

Celisa Steele: [00:20:33] Thanks again, and see you next time on the Leading Learning Podcast.

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The post CE in 2030: Strategic Shifts and Emerging Realities appeared first on Leading Learning.