Hey, Megan, let's do a podcast.

Great idea. What should we talk about?

So, Megan, one of the themes that's emerging here as we have these podcast conversations is the overall ecosystem around learning. And I'm not just. We haven't just talked about tools. It goes beyond that. We're talking about the ecosystem of all the platforms. Maybe artificial intelligence is part of our ecosystems. It's not just about learning ecosystems themselves, but it's about all of that put together.

Yeah, totally. And I think what's interesting is, in a world in which there's a lot of change right now, a ton of change and a ton of really cool opportunities, we also have the learning and development function continually seeking to add strategic value to the organizations that we're in. Right. How do we stay relevant? How do we maintain a voice at the table, so to speak? How do we maintain our budgets and our credibility? Right. So, I believe I am seeing out there that budgets for L&D teams are expanding after a little bit of contraction in 2023, and so the budgets are growing again, and organizations are seeing learning as that renewed, important function. We're not that paralyzed. Oh, my gosh, the economy is sinking, and what are we going to do? They're really like, oh, no, if we don't invest in people and certain aspects of our business, bad things will happen. Right? So I'm seeing that leaning in.

And so as budgets go up, people get to buy tools and people get to do things, and you have new people coming into the organizations with new ideas, which is great, but it leads to, and I heard this hilarious term somebody brought to the webinar I did the other day with Cognota and with Chris Tompkins from Rustici, and they called it, wait for this, platform salad. Well, I mean, salad's good.

Yeah, salad is good. I love salad. But maybe platform salad, not so good. So maybe we should take a more holistic look at things.

Yes. Right? And so the concept behind salad is you just throw a bunch of things and you mix it together and throw some dressing on, and it's magic, but it's not. Right. So, yes. And as a field, that's our job, to resist that kind of salad. So it was interesting. There's some very interesting conversations, a lot of things going on at TechKnowledge this past year or past February, and they had a bunch of these morning, unstructured, topical conversations. I love those.

Right? You get some coffee, you sit down with some people. Kind of a birds of a feather kind of conversation.

Of course you love them, Megan. It's coffee.

Well, yeah, like, free coffee. Of course I'm there. Right. And so I got assigned to talk about the tech stack, and with almost no description behind that. And so it could have been a conversation I was coming primed for. You know, like, let's talk about LMSs or LXPs or any of the things that I'm generally talking about. And. Or we could just sit around and complain about how IT is always such a buzzkill with all their security stuff, and.

And, you know, it. It was interesting when all of a sudden, the conversation started coming to the risks of the ecosystem, and I thought, huh, more IT buzzkill stuff. But what emerged in the conversation is that the number one risk is us.

Okay, interesting. Yeah. Cause you might think risk would be cybersecurity, or do we have backup recovery on our systems and all of that, but maybe that's not the biggest risk. You're saying we didn't talk about that at all? Wow.

I'm not saying those aren't risks. Right. And they're definitely things. But it was really interesting. So, you know, one of us, one of the risks to an organized learning ecosystem, an interoperable ecosystem, is us. It's us going out and shopping and finding the new cool, shiny tool. Right.

Shiny, shiny.

I like shiny tools. Right. And. Right. So we're out and we're shopping with these new big budgets, and we like shiny tools. And maybe we don't have the technical skills or the data literacy to assemble an organized ecosystem. Or we buy a set of tools, and they don't talk to each other at the right level. Or we have multiple units within an organization, all of them buying separate skills.

Right. So, I mean, you know, I've talked to lots of organizations that have four or more learning management systems, much less content authoring.

Right. And then they're all siloed, and, yeah, those connections aren't taking place.

Right. And, you know, it's so funny because you talk to them and you say, well, you know, where's all the learning? And the sales enablement team will point to their sales enablement stuff. But forget that the average salesperson not only consumes learning in the sales enablement space, but they also have all of the things that L & D is putting in front of them and HR and compliance, and. And there's all these other pieces. And so the average employee has to go to all of these systems, and that's a problem. And then as you get new systems on board, you have legacy systems that don't talk to them or are outdated. We end up using certain tools out of convenience. The number of people who use, you know me, I love a good learning management system, but the number of organizations that use learning management systems for things other than managing learning is fascinating.

But then you end up stuck with a system because it does a certain thing that even it wasn't designed to do. So it was really interesting. We talked about the lack of strategy, the lack of a cohesive change program, and really being able to make the case for doing something different than just bolting on new tools. So it was a fascinating conversation and a really good time.

Yeah. And it looks like I'm looking here at a picture that you created from this discussion. Looks like you captured all of that using one of our favorite tools, Miro.

Totally. So what was, it was interesting, right? So it was just a coffee chat, but they sat us down with a big screen, and I'm like, well, I wasn't supposed to bring PowerPoint. What do I do with this big screen? And as we were talking, I realized we were talking about, like, there were structures, there was buckets to it. So I pulled up a Miro with a bunch of colored stickies and I organized things. And what was interesting, in the process of trying to capture the notes, right? And I'm showing the notes to everybody visually in the room, and I'm pulling a structure out. They then fed back into it, and the Miro both captured the structure and then supported the structure as the conversation went on, which was also super cool. And then I took, well, a couple things so I could take all of the sticky notes in the Miro board and use Miro's built in generative AI tools to summarize it and query it and stuff. So I got a little summary that I was able to send out to everybody.

But then I took that image, fed that into the TorrenceLearning alt text generator, GPT, that we've built, and was able to get an entire description of all of the sticky notes to use for my alt text and my LinkedIn post. So it was kind of like all circular and meta and pretty awesome.

Wow, that's awesome.

So we should do this more often. Yeah, with more coffee.

More coffee. I see you even have a sticky note on that board that says, need more caffeine.

Of course we do.

Of course. Let's go get some.

All right.

So how'd that go?

You know, I end up. We talked about two very different topics. One was ecosystems and the other one was Miro. And the conversation, the time had to go together, but those were two different conversations. So maybe that fits with the whole naming of this tangents, because I kind of went off on a tangent, didn't I. Yeah.

This is Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance, and this has been a podcast from TorranceLearning. Tangents is the official podcast of TorranceLearning, as though we have an unofficial one. Tangents is hosted by Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance. It's produced by Dean Castile and Meg Fairchild, engineered and edited by Dean Castile, with original music also by Dean Castile. This episode was fact checked by Meg Fairchild.