Leading Links 2022 – Issue 4

Here is this month’s round-up of hand-curated, high-value links to help you grow your learning business. Please consider sharing it with your colleagues, followers, etc. and letting them know they can also sign up for their own free subscription.  

Also, be sure to check out the latest episode of the Leading Learning Podcast: Peanut Butter and Chocolate: Workforce Development and Credentials.

Now, on to the links.

[Leadership] Leading Through Uncertainty
Greg Satell, aka Digital Tonto, offers some very useful insights into the nature of leadership and decision making. To quote just one nugget from the article (Satell paraphrasing Cesar Hidalgo) “it is through emergent complexity that we create value.” Basically, so much about leadership depends on context – and we rarely get to choose that. A good one to file away for future reference and reflection.

[Strategy]  7 Ideas Worth Stealing from For-Profit Professional Development Brands
While many of these ideas are tactical, they speak to the sort of evolved approach to strategy that contemporary learning businesses need to have – like being well aligned with employer and employment market needs and understanding how approaches like cohort-based learning and coaching that can increase both value perception and actual impact. Pairs well with Learning from Big Learning: 14 Lessons.

[Capacity] The Case for Teaching Everyone to Lead
Practically speaking, cultivating leaders across your learning business can help significantly with succession planning – a component of learning business maturity. Perhaps more importantly – as this article by Mark Athitakis suggests – it contributes to a much stronger and more positive culture – also something mature learning businesses should be striving for. 

[Portfolio] Creating and Sustaining Learning Groups and Communities: A Guide for Beginners
If you have ever tried to start and sustain any sort of learning group you know – as we do! – that it can be very challenging. This new Learning Guild report by Jane Bozarth (a past podcast guest) digs into how to orchestrate participation and membership, as well as how to nurture and sustain your groups and communities. Must-read stuff in our socially-starved post(?)-COVID world. The report is free, but you do need to sign up for a free Guild membership (which you should have anyway) to download it.

[Marketing] The Future of the Web Is Marketing Copy Generated by Algorithms
We’ve talk about copywriting a lot over the years as it has become more and more critical to do it well if you want to continue attracting and converting prospective learners. The good news – highlighted in this Wired article – is that artificial intelligence can now help even poor or so-so writers produce good copy. It’s definitely worth understanding – and pursuing – the possibilities if you want to give your learning business a leg up. 

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That’s it for this edition. Be sure to check out previous issues of Leading Links. There are bound to be valuable resources you missed or have forgotten about. We encourage you to use them as a catalyst for your own learning and for discussions with colleagues.