Designing Learning Experiences for Leaders – It’s not Just About Delivering Content
April 1, 2019
Designing learning experiences for leadership is an art and a science. The science is the selection of speakers and varying delivery methods to match learning styles. The art is how you tie all of that together along with the venues and entertaining components to create a dynamic high-quality experience. For our summit, we prioritized the content delivery to ensure the learning objectives were met, but we did not stop at simply placing speakers into time slots. With the event now behind us, I wanted to share some insights into the why we felt it was important to convene in person, why any other organization should consider doing the same and a few tips and things we did to make it a success.
We also played with energy by setting guidelines for session length and delivery methods. Sessions longer than 45 minutes must include some sort of interaction, exercise, or movement. This all creates a high-energy experience, and fast moving agenda. With senior leaders, a fast pace is important. If things slow down too much, they will be tempted to check email or get distracted.
When in Las Vegas, dinner and a show make the most sense for evening entertainment. One of our learning objectives for the summit was to build storytelling capabilities and improve public speaking. While we had sessions that addressed both of those objectives, there was also an opportunity to ‘up the ante’ for some of our colleagues. The ten participants went through additional training and coaching leading up to the summit. They were tasked with telling a 6-8-minute story on stage as part of the Storytellers Cabaret evening. It was an incredible learning opportunity for our storytellers and proved to not only be entertainment for our group but the undeniable highlight of the program. The planning team took this idea to the next level by finding the perfect venue. And nothing beats your company’s name in lights on the Vegas strip! The ambience added so much to the overall experience and took the idea from good to great.Eight of our bravest colleagues took to the stage to tell their stories stemming from chaos, tradition and curiosity, giving us insights in to the people behind those stories – their motivations, fears and lessons.
-Rishi Talwalker, 2019 participant
In sum, there are two overarching drivers that contributed to our creative approach. First, we placed great emphasis on the experience of our participants, and that value was realized across the organizational chart. Second, our diverse planning team members brought exceptional strength in their areas of expertise. In addition to our core curriculum design experts, we had a colleague with exceptional event planning and hospitality talent, as well as a variety of key client leaders providing varying levels of support and counsel from the attendee perspective. Bringing the right people together, combined with a design thinking approach to the experience, resulted in an imaginative agenda that proved to be both captivating, relevant and successful for all.