How to Effectively Measure Behavioral Change - Chris Taylor

In today’s episode, I chat with Chris Taylor, the Founder of Actionable.co, an organization that helps facilitators, trainers, consultants and coaches scale their impact through measurable behavior change. 

That latter point has proven so elusive for talent leaders for as long as I can remember. Development programs are divisive: on one hand, you have strong advocates who cite transformational experiences at the individual, team and organizational level. And others question the true ROI. 

Talent leaders find themselves in the middle, and until recently, have been underequipped to have meaningful conversations. 

It was this line of discussion that I was keen to explore; memories of my own experiences still fresh in my mind from nearly 20 years in the corporate world. And Chris was kind enough to indulge my curiosities - from the importance of development as a tool for strategic alignment to the critical importance of knowledge transfer to ensure learners do realize benefit. 

It was a really fun discussion, and I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did recording it.

Chris Taylor

Chris founded Actionable.co in 2008 for the express purpose of helping corporate learners apply what they learned; consistently and measurably.  Since then, Chris – and his team at Actionable – have supported the deployment of over 2000+ programs leveraging the Impact Certainty model for driving change.

Chris is a regular speaker and writer on Learning Impact Measurement, Behavior Change and how to overcome the challenges of eLearning.

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Matt Burns

Matt Burns is an award-winning executive, social entrepreneur and speaker. He believes in the power of community, simplicity & technology.

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Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

organizations, behaviors, program, technology, learning, people, strategic priorities, mattered, years, driving, strategic alignment, l&d, facilitator, work, clients, shift, change, company, leaders, participants

SPEAKERS

Matt

00:04

What I became really sort of sensitive to was that sort of inch I couldn't scratch was that that was great. It was moving well beyond the feedback forms and even knowledge retention surveys, but it's still within the HR bubble. Right. And again, with all love and respect for HR, you know, these are my people. But it's very much in that that bubble of it's not necessarily connecting yet to strategic priorities to business objectives to the hopefully the strategic reason that justified investing in that program in the first place, right? If we're gonna put 100 grand into a leadership program or a million bucks into a leadership program, there's, uh, there should, in my opinion, be a strong why behind that, right? Like, what about leadership? There's a lot of flavors of leadership. What's the point here?

Matt  00:58

Strengths drive innovation. Hey, everyone, its Matt here for another episode of thinking inside the box, a show where we discuss the innovative ways organizations and their leaders overcome complex issues at work. If you're interested in checking out other content, you can find us at our shiny new website, inside the box podcast.com And on all your favorite podcast platforms by searching thinking inside the box. And if you enjoy the work we're doing here, consider leaving us a five star rating, a comment and subscribing. It ensures that you get updated whenever we release new content and really helps amplify our message. In today's episode, I chat with Chris Taylor, the founder of actionable.co, an organization that helps facilitators, trainers, and consultants scale their impact through measurable behavioral change. And it's that latter point that's proven so elusive for talent leaders for as long as I can remember, development programs, let's be honest, are divisive. On one hand, you have strong advocates who can cite myriad transformational experiences at the individual team and organizational levels. And yet there are others that still question the true ROI of training. Talent leaders often find themselves in the middle and until recently have been woefully under equipped to have meaningful conversations about ROI. And it was this line of discussion that I was keen to explore with Chris, memories of my own experiences still fresh in my mind for nearly 20 years of fighting the same battles in the corporate world. And Chris was kind enough to indulge my curiosities, from the importance of development as a tool for strategic alignment to the critical importance of knowledge transfer to ensure learners do actually realize benefit. It was a really fun discussion, and I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did recording it. And now I bring you Chris Taylor, two seasons pros having a conversation what could possibly go wrong on a Friday afternoon, Chris Taylor, how are you today?

02:59

I'm fabulous, Matt, thanks for thanks for making the time.

Matt  03:01

Hey, no expectations, but teed you up with a really complimentary and thoughtful introduction. You know, I'm looking forward to today's chat. We had a great conversation a couple of weeks back around a number of things, you know, tech fatigue, the idea of leadership in organizations, strategic alignment, you know, also knowledge transfer things that I'm really passionate about. So I'm excited to dig into all those before we do May a bit about who Chris Taylor, is your background, your experiences, and what's led you to today?

03:27

Sure, yeah, no, I appreciate that. I so father of two husband, one. based in Toronto, Canada, I current state run a company called actionable Dotco. We help facilitate the learning transfer and measurement of that learning transfer impact in corporate training programs. But how I got there was a bit circuitous, I ran a franchise in my early 20s, that went really, really well. And then really poorly, isn't like, catastrophically poorly, or at least catastrophic for a 23 year old, you know, moved back into my parents basement, licking my wounds. And I started reading a lot, like a lot, a lot, four or five business books a week, I was powering through these books, nothing was changing. So consuming all this knowledge, but nothing actually taking place. I had one of those sort of palm to forehead moments after about six months of this going, right. So you actually have to do something with information to create impact, not just consume it. And so that was really the one of the critical pivotal points for me was the what became a borderline obsession with with knowledge transfer, what Bob Sutton calls the knowing doing gap, right, how do we go from learning something to putting it into practice, which led me into the world of corporate training. I ran a corporate training company, a little boutique shop in Toronto for about six years doing mostly leadership, communication skills, culture type work with midsize companies. And I got really addicted to what I came to call the facilitator. Hi, anyone who's been a facilitator knows that feeling towards the end of a session where everyone's just sort of jiving with you right there. They're getting your jokes, the light bulbs are going off there. They seem on top of the world and they make these broad sweeping statements around the changes they're going to make When they leave, and then I became really disillusioned with that world when I'd have the same clients because of my, you know, fabulous feedback scores, inviting me back in six months later to teach basically the same thing to almost the same people and go, there's this, there's something wrong here like this, this really seems to be broken, because something happened with that intention. And so that's I took the these two pieces around, you know, sort of my personal passion project of taking ideas from business books and putting them into practice, and my facilitation experience and not seeing that application and blended the two together. And so for the last nine years, 10 years, we've been working with organizations around the globe, in helping learners in a corporate environment, once they've had that moment of inspiration, that light bulb in the session to translate that through. So it's a great little company, it's a great team, we work mostly with boutique consulting firms and sort of 2000 person organizations and smaller directly in in that and so I've carved out a bit of a niche within a niche on knowledge transfer within the l&d space.

Matt  06:04

So I'm excited about this topic for a number of reasons. I think for those who listen to the podcast for a while know that my strong bias towards traditional education, I use traditional with all respect. And before we get into that, what is going to be long winded and might be painful rant for those listeners. Tell us a bit about the how so you mentioned you guys are supporting the quantification of learning. You mentioned having had firsthand lived experiences as a facilitator. How do you guys assure or how do you measure and then assure a higher quality of product? For the clients you work

06:38

with? Yeah, it's, it's interesting, because the answer to that question is evolved over time. I mean, they in a very mechanical sense, we have a nudge technology, called the habit builder. At the end of the session, participants identify their biggest takeaway, which they're probably doing anyway, they filter that good intention. So you know, I'm going to be a better listener, like, great, that's a good intention, that's not something you do, right, that's more of an outcome of certain behaviors or tasks. So we through the the platform, they, they sort of translate that good intention into a daily practice commitment. So we, you know, basically, any book with the word habits in the title has used the same body of research around how what a structure of a good commitment to behavior change looks like, we've taken that and put it into a corporate environment. So I'm going to be a better listener might translate into when I'm interacting with a colleague, instead of waiting for my time to speak, I will pause and ask one clarifying question, something like that something really micro that's a daily practice, we then nudge them usually through text message for a self evaluation, how do I feel I'm doing over the course of the coming weeks, and then it gets validated through the sort of quasi 360s. So observable change through peer and manager, all very sort of lightweight and low impact from a time standpoint. That's what we did for years. And it works and people like it. What I became really sort of sensitive to it was that sort of he couldn't scratch was that that was great. It was moving well beyond the feedback forms and even knowledge retention surveys, but it's still within the HR bubble. Right. And again, with all love and respect for HR, I, you know, these are my people. But it's very much in that that bubble of it's not necessarily connecting yet to strategic priorities to business objectives to the hopefully the strategic reason that justified investing in that program in the first place, right? If we're gonna put 100 grand into a leadership program or a million bucks into a leadership program, there's a there should, in my opinion, be a strong why behind that, right. Like, what about leadership? There's a lot of flavors of leadership. What's the point here, and it was on a project that we worked on, just before the pandemic, that it shifted for me, we were working with a consultant that was supporting a casino in the US. And they were running 170 ish people through a frontline Leadership Program. And they'd budgeted about 140 grand for that. And the consultant that we were working with kept pushing on the client before they did she'd agreed to actually designing the program. She was pushing for why, right? Because they were saying, you know, we want to do trust, we want to do whatever she said, Yeah, but why tell me what what sort of return you'd expect on this 140 grand? And often, you know, in her case, as we see, in a lot of cases, the response was, Well, you know, we want people to be stronger managers and better leaders and better able to, you know, support their people. And but she kept pushing through that, right, because again, all of that is still very HR. You know, it's good, but it's feel good. It's not an ROI answer, right. Well, we got to and digging was that this company had a massive voluntary turnover problem. The industry as a whole has a high turnover, but they were so far beyond the norm that it was costing the delta between industry norm in them was about $7 million dollars a year and hard costs of replacing frontline employees. Okay, so that's the answer. So then the question became, well, okay, you want a leadership program? Sure. But before we get to content, you're investing In leaders assumably because you see leaders as a vehicle to retain frontline talent, yes, yes, great. What are the behaviors that leaders who retain top line or frontline talent are demonstrating. And so it's a bit of a brainstorming exercise around the behaviors, then the content that was chosen was not, you know, we love Pat Lencioni. I love Pat Lencioni. But we're not just doing five dysfunctions, because it's five dysfunctions, we're actually getting into what elements of this matter in driving the behaviors. So the whole the whole conversation flipped from what content can you deliver? And what are the outcomes of that to what are the outcomes that we're trying to achieve? And what's the minimum amount of content we need in order to trigger the behaviors that drive those outcomes? From a measurement standpoint, this is all my very long winded answer to your question of how do you do that, Matt, what we were able to do was we're looking at self reported and externally validated behavior change. We organize the reporting going back to the client in a way that showed not the what which modules drove which behaviors, but rather organized by cluster 170 ish leaders, three shifts, ampm, and graveyard, and then two functions, food and beverage and gaming. Everyone fits into one of six cells within that right and food and Bev, exactly. So we looked at the behaviors that were shifting on a cell by cell basis, and fed that back to the client. So they could then compare that to their voluntary turnover numbers. are we actually seeing a change in retention, and how long a time lag is there between behavioral shifts and, and voluntary turnover impact. And just to tie that story off, what we found is that there were out about the 18 behaviors that identified there was four that were disproportionally correlated with improved retention. And there's about a 90 day lag. And so they were able to then refine future iterations of that program to focus on those behaviors that they were finding in their environment. Were the ones that were from a correlation standpoint, connected to improve retention.

Matt  12:13

Hey, everyone, it's Matt here. I hope you're enjoying today's conversation. And before we continue, I want to update you on my latest creative project this week at work every Friday at 7pm Pacific Standard Time. That's 10am Eastern and 3pm GMT, my good friend, Chris Rainey, of HR leaders, and I discussed the latest trending topics on the minds of executives globally. From organizational culture to technology and the future of work. We cover it all. And we invite some of our favorite colleagues join us from Dave alrik, to Whitney Johnson, and executives from iconic brands, such as NASA, Krispy Kreme, and Web MD. What can I say? We like to keep things interesting. And if you've been following us for a while, you'll no doubt recognize the fun partnership Chris and I have developed over the years podcasting together. We're not afraid to be real, share our own challenges and ask the tough questions, joining. Well, that part's easy. Follow me on LinkedIn, click the bell icon on the top right of my profile. And you'll get notified when we go live. And now, back to our discussion. I appreciate you taking the time to explain that because that's the level of depth that we want to get into on the show. No, I'm serious, because I think it's important to make it more practical. And you might mention a couple of things there that I think are worth double clicking on. The first one is Dziedzic alignment. So to your point learning in a lot of organizations that I've worked in, and certainly clients that I have supported, has been this this prescribed panacea for all the world's problems, or it's seen as a perk in a lot of cases and an incentive. Right. And there really isn't a true why behind it, or we're not clear on the why or we're not aligned on the why. And then there's a misaligned expectations throughout the organization on what the outcome is going to be of that, which is why oftentimes when we see fiscal headwinds, recessions, downsizing, what's the first thing that gets cut learning, because people don't see the very strong correlation between input and output. So I think the example to you you mentioned there really illuminates that connection really strongly. And that models that are developed for large consumption and whether that be traditional models or new models are built with a view to being democratized access and to be bendable to fit individual circumstances, you don't just take a book and prescribe the book chapter by chapter for people to learn. You have to switch the context to make sure it's applicable to the organization and that example you raise with the casino is a perfect example of that. Now, when I think about measurement, and I think about, you know, organizations and how we measure learning, you know, this is where I begin with my giant rant about education. If we look at any Study, whether we look at MIT or Harvard, or you know, any particular scientific, academic research around how people learn definitively, they will tell you that memorization and recitation lectures and PowerPoints don't move the needle, they do what you talked about, which is they create really good vibes in the room, we create this almost like, we're going through a shared experience, there's a bonding, there's a social connection, we all get excited about that social connectivity piece. And having gone through a shared experience together, we appreciate the disconnection from our normal lives and the chatter and the hecticness. And as a consequence of that, we feel good in the moment, but then to your point, the moment we'll leave the door. If we scroll things into our hotel issue, notepad, we don't do anything with the information, we simply think Well, that was a good experience. And that justifies further investments in training. But organizations are ultimately realizing very small amount of ROI, as a consequence of not being intentional about strategic alignment, and the delivery of the knowledge. And you're taking that that is to say, the introduction of what actionable does. We're not, we're not talking, we're not advocating for a model that is individual learner based. All of that is possible model. And we're not saying go do away with group experiences and group planning opportunities, but it just reinforces the value of learning has to be reinforced with micro lessons and nudges, among other methods to truly embed a habit, because absent of that, recidivism is going to be very, very high. And people with the best of intentions will go back to their office the next day, and get on with their lives and go back to doing what has always worked for them. And they may have a strong desire and a strong burning platform to change. But change is really, really hard. So thank you for outlining the details around that. I'm curious from your perspective, because your your clients are mostly consultants and and large organizations that are, you know, in this in service of learning it all in programs, leadership programs, what is the what's the conversation? Like? I'm assuming you meet some degree of resistance, or some degree at least of curiosity, as you explain your approach and why it's important, you know, incremental investment to be made in a learning program. I'm just curious if what's the discussion? Like, have you seen a shift in the narrative in the last five years around how people approach either learning measurement, knowledge retention, knowledge transfer? They talk a bit about

17:24

that. Uh, yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up, because it's the first of all, I love your rant, Matt. So please rant on. I share your sentiment very strongly. The, you know, I always have a bit of survivor guilt on this. But the pandemic was really good for us from a business standpoint, right? Like it, you know, and again, anyone listening to this knows that sort of the HR industry catapulted forward about 10 years, over 18 months as they were thrust into the spotlight, right. And that, yes, appreciating it was around remote work, and around all sort of policy in that front, it's cascaded into the rest, including learning and development. So I found that, you know, it's funny, I remember October of 2020, I got over the course of the month, I don't know if there's like a Davos for big tear consulting firms or what but I had McKinsey, Bain BCG, and one more that will scare me all reach out within the same sort of three weeks of each other going. We've identified a competency gap around impact measurement. And we hear that you do that. Can we talk about that? It's fascinating. So that to me was sort of that represented the moment where bigger consulting firms but also in companies started asking with a little more rigor, how are we going to know this is going to work? Right? Can you show me what we're going to be doing from an impact from a sustainment standpoint? And so the question, five years ago, six years ago, it was a slog, right, I was needing to educate a lot of folks on on why this mattered. A lot of people, you know, the ROI of learning is sort of the Holy Grail. Everyone is aware of that and has been for decades, but I think was largely written off as not possible or too complicated. In a lot of cases, people seem to have a more open mind around how we might go about measuring that and connecting the dots, which is certainly helped. When we do get the question, because yeah, there's an incremental cost to it. And in some cases, it's not insubstantial. The question that I'll put back to them not to be provocative, but to get it on the table is, what's your purpose behind this program? Are we here for entertainment purpose? Like, is this legitimately a perk? Because there's a time and a place for that if it's explicitly called out here? Sure. Or are we trying to drive change? Because if we're trying to drive change, then I would suggest we need to spend as much time energy and resources on what happens after the session as we do what happens in the session. This is climbing Everest, we don't focus just on the peak. You know, I read a stat 82% of the people who have died climbing Everest died on the way back down, right. So there was a whole psychology around all the visualization being on summiting and then losing focus on the back half. And while the consequences aren't nearly as dire, the the same is true here, I think, you know, I see millions 10s of millions of dollars being put into planning for the participant experience, which is, which is great. But then pennies or nothing on what happens after well, we'll send them some emails, right or will point them to our LMS. And again, I'm being a little provocative, but, you know, what's the ratio? If you're listening to this, and you're in a position of sort of authority or oversight on programs? It's a question worth asking, how much time and energy are we putting into what happens after the session compared to what we're putting into the session itself? If we are truly committed to this being a driver of change versus, you know, a really unique experience for the participant?

Matt  20:43

Absolutely. And it's your point, what how are we going to measure the outcomes of the investment is a key question many organizations don't really get philosopher thoughts do and that's why I think it's your casino example from earlier is really indicative of thought around, tying it back to a business objective. And oftentimes, in strategic alignment, we, we see a disconnect between the decision makers and those who are tasked with executing the plan. And that in large part is because of either poor translation or poor cascading of information, or a reluctance to answer those tougher questions about what it truly means. When you're working with organizations and trying to tap into strategic alignment. I'm just curious about, you know, is that casino example that you raise is that the norm? Is that something you see frequently? Where organizations don't really have a sense of why they're investing in training? Or is that also changing as we kind of move into a more mature world around corporate learning and knowledge transfer?

21:40

That's, that's a great. It's an interesting topic, the so I think that casino example was unique in two cases, one, that there was a, it took about four layers of digging to identify what the strategic priorities were. So it doesn't often require that, but it's also unique because a lot of clients aren't willing to go that deep, which is like, Well, no, we're looking for a vendor for a leadership program. Are you interested or not? Right, which I think is which I think is a mistake. But the second thing that made it unique was around there, how regularly they were tracking already, the data, like they already had packaged reports around employee retention on a month over month basis, with the ability to easily slice by those six cells that we then match to. So that was, that was reasonably unique. And the fact that they were they didn't share the actual data with us. But the fact that they were able to engage in dialogue with us around what was actually working through that was also fairly unique, but the data was at their fingertips and ready to go. So I think there's definitely a data component that's required. There's also that the strategic piece, like in that consultants case, she had to dig, dig, dig, because she was trying to find out the driving why behind that initiative, we found that there is a bit of a shortcut to that. And this was again, that was sort of four years ago, the shortcut sense has been well, what are the strategic priorities for the organization? And for each one of those? What behaviors need to shift? Like, basically, what competencies do we need within people, and, or we're gonna they're gonna buy them or build them. So if we're building them, that means that we're training up our people. I appreciate this as a bit simplistic, but it works as a good sort of connection point. What are the strategic priorities? What are the competencies that we need to develop or to develop, either buy or build? Are we building them? We assume so because we're investing in training? Great. What are some of the core behaviors that represent that competency? Starting from that place, we can start from understanding what the strategic priorities are, and understanding that we're doing a executive communication skills program or a teamwork program or a D AI program or whatever the program is, we can connect the dots from HR, right, like we don't have to have shaped the strategic priorities or even necessarily been involved in that as long as we know what they are. We as professionals can do the sort of logic path of what do we think needs to be developed from a people standpoint? My My biggest encouragement with this is I can hear people with the Yeah, buts you know, it's more complicated. And of course it is. But let's try to keep it as high level as we can to at least create the high level dot points on it before we get deep, deep, deep. Like anytime someone sends me a 46 page competency document around, here's the things we need from leaders. Fabulous. And let's start a little bit higher order, right. At the end of the day, the strategic priorities are going to be aligned to making more money, saving money or building some sort of asset, right like that. That's, that's really the core. And so there's only so many metrics that you would ultimately need to connect to in regards to that. Yeah,

Matt  24:40

and those metrics that may be downstream of those would be ultimately in service to one of those three driving metrics. And we had this conversation this morning, we were talking on another podcast about, you know, an organization that's made a pretty significant shift in its workflow model. And, you know, they're a publicly traded company and the harsh word out what it is that publicly traded companies and executive teams and boards have a sole fiduciary responsibility, which is to enrich the shareholder period full stop and the story, we can lament that we can say that's not right. But the reality is anything that is done in Human Resources strategy is a consequence of achieving, achieving that outcome. So if we're going to invest in talent, it's around operational and business continuity to be able to support the customer to drive revenue to make money, if we're gonna focus on engagement is to reduce turnover to increase knowledge, adoption, knowledge attraction, to be able to, you know, stem the flow of flow of STEM, the tide of people leaving irritation and knowledge drain to make more money, like it's that that is all roads lead back to that in a publicly traded context, when you were in a private company, or not for profit, of course, the menu gets broader and may shift. But thank you points well taken, we have a tendency, especially within the human resources profession, and being a professional myself, I can certainly speak to this. We have a tendency to overcomplicate things, because we're trying to demonstrate our value. And in doing so we can lose people in translation. And I think that's at our to our disservice. You know, I'm curious about your thoughts on this. I mean, you mentioned the pandemic a couple of times, obviously, in addition to it, changing the context in which we work and changing the context in which we look at this question in the questions we talked about. It also changed the context in which we interact with one another, whether that's in a learning context, or socially or in work context. And that's through technology, and ultimately actionable. It's a technology company, and its core. And there's this ongoing debate. And I remember 20 years ago, being an HR, my very first HR job, you'll love this was to file paper into filing cabinets, in personnel files, that was my first job important, and I felt fulfilled every day, at the end of the day. I'll promise you that. And it wouldn't surprise you, Chris, to hear that, you know, Matt, in his early 20s, would often ask the question aloud in the office. Can we not use computers? Right? Because 20 years ago, computers were a thing. I had one home that was possible these computers? Why do we use paper based computer why we use paper based applications for things? Why isn't learning done digitally? Why don't we try to increase access to tools by using technology and was met with at the time a common refrain will Matt technologies and inhuman vehicle for acknowledge that the best not best knowledge transfer, the best interaction between human is human to human, and we don't want to be the organization that uses technology is the interface because we are a human based organization and culture, Chris, it's important to us. And of course, over the course of 20 years that has softened, but it has not fought entirely. There are still people who will tell you that technology is not fit for purpose in a lot of different contexts. And I would agree for some training programs that are experiential based, you want to have face to face aspects. I'm curious, as an organization that is anchored in technology and its roots that ultimately supports training modalities that are both technologically interface but also human to human interface. How do you guys bridge the gap between that human connection and the technology piece to be able to find the sweet spot so that we can both lean into the inclusion and the wonderful democratization that is technology, while not becoming inhuman and losing some things in translation?

28:04

I mean, the way I look at it is we should just get rid of all the humans and replace them with robots,

Matt  28:07

and then everything well, AI is on its way, I promise. You

28:11

know, I think you know, and I take a really strong stance in the other direction on this I, you know, as a tech founder, there's two fundamental driving beliefs that I have around technology. One is that none of us need another app. Right, I got a phone loaded with apps I don't use I don't need another thing. Right. And the second is that technology should be an enabler of better human to human interaction. That's, that's my, my two core beliefs in here. And so what does that mean, in regards to the work that we do? Well, number one is, in regards to we don't need another app. Now we don't what we need is solutions to problems, things that will help us do things faster, or more reliably, or with more ease or more delight, something that makes the you know, the equivalent of the paper files in the filing cabinet drudgery work, right, a little more automated so that we can we can engage more in the creative human emotive work that that matters, right, and really separates us from for now, the the machines. And so so that's a really key piece for me is that, you know, we've talked about, I was thinking about as you reflecting as you were going through the business case for, for l&d, saying that's critical, because we've largely avoided it or haven't lean into it as much as we could. So if we want to earn the respect and value for l&d and people development in general, then my driving belief is we need to connect to strategic priorities. And it cannot be at the disservice of the individuals involved in the in the session, right or in the program itself. So you know, using actionable as the example, when participants are in the session, and they've had that light bulb moment because great facilitators have taken them to a place of contextual understanding, right. So I get it at a cerebral level, but I also care about this. I give a shit right? Like I actually this mattered to me And I want something to change as a result. I think it's a travesty when that intention that belief that desire fizzles, right when I get back to work, and I'm bombarded by status quo, and I lovingly placed the notebook on the shelf and never revisited. I think that's sad, because it's something that it's not the company telling me I should do something, it's something that I wanted to do with the content that I just experienced. Now, in the hands of a terrible facilitator with really dry, boring content, that's going to happen less often, right? I believe that while the purpose was actionable is to be there to meet the participant, when they have that moment of inspiration, when they want to, quote unquote, be a better listener, okay, let's acknowledge the fact that you're gonna go back to your desk and have emails to catch up on and that, you know, the change is hard, as you said earlier, right, then you're gonna try some stuff, and you're gonna not be great at it at the beginning, because it's a change in the pattern of behavior that you've established for 30 years. So let's acknowledge that it's gonna take some work to get through that. And that that change is hard. We want to make it easier for you to make that change happen, the change that you said matters to you. And if that ever stops becoming the case, then stop using it. And you can literally opt out with one click right. But let's make it about the learner. So that the learner, it's not, it's not a compliance thing for them to be doing their daily check in. It's something that keeps them on track with the thing that mattered to them. And through that, as they win, the organization wins, because they're able to see and support that both on a micro and macro basis. So tech fatigue to me, and I've seen it like we've watched participants globally, before pandemic during pandemic after pandemic. And there's been virtually actually there's been more engagement, but virtually no change in the baseline on adoption, willingness to use the technology, because it's still human beings on the receiving end of training by great facilitators, by and large, that have taken them to a place of inspiration. And then it's being, they're being reminded of the fact that it's up to you, if you want to do something with this, it's going to be harder. If you try to do it on your own, we can make it easier using this. So it's a it's technology for a specific purpose. And then then there's no issues, people lean into it, and they're all excited about it. Where I hear it is from HR directors pre program launch with our people are tucked out, they're exhausted, they can't do anything new. If we're able to get them to give it a shot, we find that this is the breath of fresh air for a lot of participants, because it's not something being done to them. Right. It's the thing that they feel empowered in driving that change forward.

Matt  32:29

Amen. Chris, what's next for you guys? I mean, obviously, the business is growing, thriving, but what's next for you in the business going forward,

32:37

I'm going to continue pushing down the path of connecting to connecting the behavior change outputs out of the actual platform into the into the KPI tracking systems, whatever it is the clients are using, I mean, my my holy grail would have the irrefutable $100,000 spent on this program $485,000 generated right like that, you know that probably an achievable target of clear, crisp, quantifiable, irrefutable ROI on l&d programs, those of us that are in the space, we know, inherently the impact that our work is having, I want to be able to shine a light on that in a way that the most discerning CFO not only doesn't argue with but pushes for greater investment in people development, because they can see the return that this is creating. When we do that in alignment with the individuals, you know, lots of magic can happen. So that's exciting to me. And then continuing to share, we actually just published our, we do an annual Insights report where we take all of the behavior change data from the platform packaged up sort of key insights on how to increase follow through for participants. So that one just came out, and I can probably link that up somewhere. But I want to continue to that path as well, you know, sector specific seniority specific. Can we actionable, be an enabler of even greater change following some of these learning sessions?

Matt  34:00

Very cool. No, we'll absolutely link the report in the podcast show notes along with all your details to folks can find you on LinkedIn and all the other platforms. Chris, thanks so much for your time today.

34:09

Thank you, man. It's been a pleasure.

Matt  34:19

Until HR is a digital transformation consultancy, working at the intersection of strategy, technology, and people operations, we partner with organizations private equity and venture capital firms to accelerate value creation, and identify the organization's highest leverage initiatives. And this can take place in many forms, from strategic planning and alignment to technology procurement, implementation and integration, along with organizational design, process reengineering, and change management. With our proven track record of working with complex high growth organizations, we provide a lens that goes beyond the balance sheet, increasing enterprise readiness resilience and value. For more information, check us out at bento hr.com