Monthly Archives: May 2009
Coffee talk…
Coffee is unique among my daily rituals. I’ve come to depend on it as both momentary escape and drug delivery mechanism. Based solely on the perpetual line at my local Starbucks, I’ll assume I’m not alone 
Beyond the practical considerations of taste and price, I realized I know very little about something so central to my existence in our modern world. What do “Fair Trade” and “Shade Grown” actually mean? Are both organic? Does coffee actually come from South America originally, or have I simply seen one too many Juan Valdez commercials? And what about all those medical studies that alternate between “coffee as poison” and “coffee as elixir”? Where does the research actually net out?
I spent a little bit of time online and came up with a few quick answers to these questions for my ExperiencePoint SHARE piece (presentation attached). Now I’ll go suck back another Pike Place and feel smug in my enlightenment
Change is Good
A quick post to share an interesting little multimedia bit, Change is Good:
http://www.changeisgoodmovie.com
It’s a kind of cutesy piece, designed to be inspirational. It won’t give you much insight into how to lead change, but minimally, it’s got some good quotes worth stealing.
For professors and master consultants that use our ExperienceChange simulations, I thought this might be a useful resource to:
- Make the case for your change leadership program
- Show at the beginning or end of a session to pad skills being learned with inspiration
- Show during a session to pad case study at hand with metaphors
- Annoy hyper-pragmatic co-workers that can’t stand anything deliberately inspirational
Enjoy! Reactions to the video encouraged here, in comment form.
How much do we love our core customers
“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure – which is: Try to please everybody.” – Herbert Bayard Swope (1992 – 1958).
At ExperiencePoint, we are all about the client experience (and adding value of course) – we strive to have an intimate understanding of our partners’, clients’ & users’ issues, needs & wish lists. Over the years, we have expanded rapidly and our client base became varied. I realized that as we continue to be client-oriented, we have to be prepared to say “No” to anything that disagree with our values & principles or dilutes focus away from our core customers.
Recently, I’ve gotten to know (and became a fan of) David Dunne, Marketing Professor from the Rotman School of Management. David wrote an interesting blog post titled “Getting Tough with Customers” which discusses how the world’s all-time best marketer (The Holy Catholic Church) had benefited through standing firm on their values and principles & staying close to its customers & understanding them.
Visuals for Learning
Here at ExperiencePoint, we have a Friday ritual that contributes to our continued learning called the “Share Piece”. It involves one of our team taking 45 minutes and sharing something that they expect the group will find valuable. The source is usually a business book, and this works out well. We get a great synopsis, and there’s usually an accompanying presentation.
For my Share Piece, I considered the visuals that had so impressed me in previous share pieces. Why was I able to remember them so well? Did they have an impact on my retention? Accordingly, I decided to deliver my Share Piece about “Visuals for Learning” in the form of a Pecha Kucha presentation (full disclosure: the presentation was a miserable failure, I ignored my own advice and overwhelmed the visuals with too many spoken words. Luckily, a crowd that values practice as we do is a forgiving one.)
4 out of 5 doctors recommend…
The perennial question in our industry is about pay off. It’s sensible for clients to want an indication that their investment in simulation games will result in learning, new desired behaviors, and ultimately bottom-line success. It’s a tough question to answer for any learning program, but because simulations tend to look less like the formal education we’ve accepted culturally as “correct”, my experience is they receive extra scrutiny.
Fortunately this scrutiny has resulted in a growing body of academic research which is gradually but effectively building the case for simulation based learning. In 2006, Jennifer Vogel and her colleagues at the University of Central Florida undertook a meta-analysis of published research on simulation based learning. For one of my ‘Share’ pieces at ExperiencePoint, I built a quick summary of the key findings of this study.
