Quick question: What can L&D learn from the marketing team?

Hannah Beaver (00:02):

You are listening to How To Make a Leader, a Leadership Development podcast from Big Think+, where we take the best ideas from the biggest minds in learning and development and distill them into actionable insights. I’m your host, Hannah Beaver. We are back with one question and one expert answer in about five minutes. Mike Taylor is our expert of the day. Mike is a learning consultant at Nationwide Insurance, a professor of instructional design at Franklin University, and author of the book Think Like A Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro. Today’s question is on that very topic, Mike. My question for you is, what does L and D need to learn from the marketing department?

Mike Taylor (00:50):

Yeah, that’s such a great question, and I think most people in L and d and training teams assume that people just pay attention because the training is mandatory, whereas marketers assume from the beginning no one really cares. And we have to earn every second of people’s attention. And it all comes from sort of psychology, cognitive psychology, marketing psychology, whatever you want to call it, that there’s two systems that are running in our brains at the same time. There’s this fast, intuitive, always on, we can’t turn it off type thinking. And then we also have this slower deliberative, more analytical type thinking. And it’s really fascinating. Our brains are about 2% of our body mass, but they use 20% of our energy. And so over hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution, our brain and our thinking have developed these heuristics or shortcuts. And in the book we talk about six attention triggers and we’ve developed these shortcuts to save energy.

(01:57):

So let me just quickly run through those six attention triggers, what they are. So I mentioned make it personal. So personal relevance kind of automatically captures our attention. The second one, make it contractable. So we’re hardwired to see contrast. So imagine we’re out in the jungle and something moves in the bushes, like that contrast we’re wired to see. That’s why a lot of marketing you see before and after is setting a contrast. Third one is make it tangible. So we’ve probably also experienced things where we walk out of a training and I don’t even know what that person was talking about as too abstract. So that’s a pretty logical one. Make it tangible, make it memorable, make it visual. And then the last one is one, I think a lot of training people tend to shy away from and it’s make it emotional. And it’s important to know that emotions sort of flag importance to our brain.

(02:46):

And it’s okay to have a little fun or have a little personality or invoke some curiosity, and we’re going to remember that stuff and hopefully apply it much better than if it’s sort of corporate generic rubbish that we see. So what I would say when we’re going to practical sense of applying this, how do we apply this to our job? The first thing is relevance is like rocket fuel. Getting to know your audience. How do you know what their environment is, what their challenges are, what they care about? Make what you’re doing and put it in a context that’s relevant to them as possible. So that’s the first thing in the book. We talk about learner personas as a way to do that. There are a lot of others. The next thing is shifting from a course mindset to think more of campaigns. So in the book we talk about treating training more as a multi-touch multi-channel.

(03:39):

So smaller, more frequent touches or nudges over time as opposed to one big giant course. And the cool thing with that is there’s a lot of learning science that aligns with that and supports that as well. And then all of that is to say we have to design for that attention intuitive type thinking gatekeeper, because if we don’t get through that gate, then nothing else that follows is going to matter. So this informs the way you write, the way you create videos, the way you create any kind of content. I think the greatest thing about this is it’s all free. You don’t have to buy any expensive software. It’s just really a mindset. And you could pick one of these things and look at your content and start doing this today basically for free. And that’s I think one of the exciting things about this.

Hannah Beaver (04:28):

And that was a quick question from how to make a leader. We’ll be back next month with a new challenge and a new expert perspective. Thanks for listening.

We’re back with a quick question: one big question, one expert answer, in five minutes. 

Mike Taylor explains why learning teams often underestimate the role of attention, and how ideas from cognitive and marketing psychology can improve the way training is designed. He shares six simple attention triggers that make learning more relevant, tangible and memorable, and shows how L&D teams can move from one-off courses to campaign-style learning.

About Mike: 

With over two decades of experience as a learning consultant, Mike has been a driving force behind transformative instructional design and organizational performance. He is a Learning Consultant at Nationwide, a faculty member in Franklin University’s Graduate Instructional Design and Technology program, and co-author of the book, Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro. His work bridges the gap between academic theory and real-world practice, equipping future learning professionals with the skills to excel in today’s dynamic landscape. 

Connect with Mike here. Check out his book and his newsletter.