Hey, Megan, let's do a podcast.

Great idea. What should we talk about?

Part of my job involves talking to really interesting people, watching fantastic conference sessions, jamming with folks, and sometimes it feels a little bit selfish to keep it all to myself. So that's part of why we record these conversations and I get to share some of these jam sessions with the whole rest of our industry. So, Chris Adams, thank you very much for joining me today. And I wondered if you could tell us all about yourself, how you ended up at this role, your business, your career, and where are you right now?

Sure. Well, physically, I'm in Charlotte, North Carolina, and delighted to be virtually here with you. And let's see, how did I come to this place? One thing that I've noted is that I work with a lot of learning and development people, and relatively few of us planned that as our destination for our career. There are a lot of lateral entries. And so my undergrad degree a thousand years ago was in radio and television. I was a mass comm guy, but my first real job out of college was with what the time was called, Kinkos. It has become FedEx office. But I was a training coordinator for Kinko's.

And so that brought me into the field of L and D. I did a lot of standup training, a lot of employee orientations, and traveling around and presenting to audiences. And I really love that. But I was a mass communications guy, and so I wanted a broader reach. And so I. And again, this will date me as well. I answered an ad in an actual newspaper, physical newspaper, an actual employment ad. And the bold heading at the top was multimedia dream job.

And so that piqued my interest and got me into a role where I was what we would call now an E learning developer. We didn't have those terms back then. We were making CD ROMs. I was an E learning developer, and I really enjoyed that. But again, once I was in that role for a few years, I found out that it was really the designers that I worked with that had the reach that had the impact. I went back to school, got a master's degree, became an instructional designer, and really, really loved doing that job for a few years. But I became frustrated again. Again, I want purpose, I want depth, I want reach.

And what I found was I was very proud of the work that I was doing. I was very proud of my designs. I knew that they were results based. I knew that I was applying best practice. I could give participants tests and prove that they were learning something. But the clients that I worked with weren't seeing impact from the work that I was doing. I would deliver a solution, but then that solution would not meet the need or the expressed request for a learning solution wasn't really the need, it wasn't the actual need. It was just something that they wanted.

In the midst of that, I was very fortunate to encounter a man named Jim Robinson. Jim Robinson came and worked with the group of designers that I worked with at the time. And he spent some weeks with us and taught us about performance consulting and gave us a new approach and really sort of changed the direction of my career. And he taught us how to be less order takers and more partners to our clients and how to not focus on solutions but really focus on results. And so from that relationship and that sort of change in my work trajectory, I was even more blessed years later to work for about five years with Jim's wife Dana, and I was working with her to pay forward what Jim had done for me. And that's what I do now. That's still the focus of my work, is working with teams in the people side of organizations, so L and D, but also HR and organizational development teams to help us move out of the solution providing business and to become consultants to become partners to focus on results instead of just the solutions we provide.

Love that. I love that. And it's almost a story of that, that angsty frustration with wanting more, that that kind of moves you forward to that next step and that really resonates. You mentioned the word order taker, right? I think almost any conference you go to or anytime you get a group of people in L and D together, we will complain about just being order takers. And I think it doesn't matter whether you're on the consulting side, whether you're in house. And you know, I've been doing some work around power in organization people, you know, individual power in organizations as well as team power or functional power within an organization. And one of the things that is, is. Is an interesting challenge for us in our field is L and D is a cost center.

Right? We're a cost center. We're not the. The. In most cases, the CLO is not going to promote up to be the CEO. It's going to be somebody out of a revenue center, right. Where there tends to be more power. And how do you optimize a cost center? You reduce it. You reduce its cost.

Right. And so we have this trick here, right? So what do people in low power do or what do functions in low power do in order to increase their Influence, they try to get everybody to like them. So when anybody comes to them with an, with a request, you know, what they do is say, I can make that, I can do that, I can do that and I can make it really pretty. Right. So then we complain about being order takers, but we are seeking those orders in order to find relevance for ourselves. And we can make a pretty shiny. And I don't mean to disparage our industry. We can make a thing, and it feels good to make a thing, and we deliver a thing and look how perfect it is.

So let's talk about this undertaker ness.

Yeah, I really resonate with, with part of what you said there, which is that it feels good. Yeah. And so, yeah, a lot of people that I work with, they ask me, well, why we have this tendency. I think we have, you know, people that are mature in the field, they understand, you know, what goes on, how this works. But, but we, but it's. But it. But we have to fight against the tendency that we have. And we can't put it all on our clients.

Yes, our clients come to us and sometimes they are stuck on some solution that they saw and it is spinny and flashy and shiny and they want it. But we also have a tendency because it feels good. And I think that's the simple answer is that we get, we're validated by, hey, we got into this because we like to make these solutions, we like to provide these solutions. And when we do, it does feel good. It's what we enjoy these things. And so we're fighting that natural tendency to feel good. I tell a story about sort of when it, when it finally came crashing down for me, and it was. I was working with a team of instructional designers and we were working with a financial institution that had implemented a new call center.

And at the same time that they stood up, actually several call centers, they implemented a new system. And again, I'll date myself, this was the first time they had used what we call a GUI system, a graphical system. So before this, and it took Banks a long time to do this. But so before this, they were using green screens and they were typing. Everything was done on the keyboard. You memorized four digit codes. And then they changed that over to a graphical system where now you're using a mouse, you're looking at menus, you're clicking things. They wanted us to build training to support this conversion.

And so we went in and we started working on it. And sort of the person leading the conversion is, you know, we're we really need your help. We really need. We have a specific outcome we need for this training. Great. You know, we want to be results focused. What can we do for you? Well, our call time, since we've rolled over, started rolling over to the new system, they've gotten longer. Oh, well, how much longer? Significantly longer.

And so they had a quota. Not a quota, but they had a standard where they really need to handle the type of calls that were routed to this call center in about three minutes. And that's what they staffed for, that's what they planned for. And they were north of five minutes as their average call. Pretty significant. So what they were putting to us was we need your training to reduce our call time from close to six minutes to below three minutes. Well, I mean, that's a red flag for anybody who's worked in L and D. It's crazy, but you know, again, we wanted to do a great job and it was a big contract for us.

It was very important. So we worked on it, we started doing our analysis. But in the course of our analysis, we sat with the very best call center person, the person who coached all of the other people in the call center. And we sat with her and we said, walk us through a call. Show us what you have to do both verbally and in the system. We're basically doing a job task analysis of what this takes. Well, she got halfway through. We were getting very close to three minutes.

And so we started timing simply the page loads on the system. And what we found out was, and what we had to take back to our client was literally your system cannot load the information fast enough to do a three minute call. And unless you can fix that, no amount of training that we would do can achieve your goal. Now, we're happy to do the training, but understand that the change in your metric is not going to happen until you fix the system. And they fired us. So they sent us home. They said, you know, we understand what you're saying, but you know, we really need this training to fix this problem for us. We'll get someone else to do it.

And so they did. They sent us home. They paid us for the analysis we had done, but terminated the contract, which was a big contract. We were sad to lose it, and they went with someone else. And they built training. But the rest of the story is 18 months later, they called us back. They had built the training, it had been implemented, it had failed. And in fact, call times had gotten even longer.

So then in the interim, they had just spent three to four Months updating their system. They felt like they had actually improved the timing of the system. And they asked us to come back in and say, now we can come back in. And they became a great client. They were a client for years and years, but it was. We wanted to deliver the thing that they asked for. And we had a vision for great training and wanted to do it. Even after we knew that it would not have the impact that our client needed it to have, we still wanted to do it.

But that's really where for me, I started to learn that I needed to relate to my clients differently and I needed to think about their requests differently because we had no choice. I guess that's the. We were put in a situation where we had to do something new.

That is an amazing story I can only think of, aside from the disappointment of being fired that first time, you would never have been successful.

Oh yeah.

I mean, that is a losing proposition going in. You can never be successful that way.

Right. And it made me wonder in my personal practice, how many other no win propositions have I failed to detect? Yeah, I founded myself lucky because that one, I knew that when I could see how many times had I delivered products that, that, that, that produce no benefit to the organization and I didn't even know it, hadn't even detected it. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so how do we, now that we're all like going, yeah, right. How do we prevent that? Like what, what is your approach to figuring out what is going on and how do we work our way through?

So just to make it really basic, I think we have to change our focus. We have to shift our focus from solutions, which is where we live a lot of the time, to results. And we have to make results the most important thing, not solutions the most important thing. And that's really easy to say, but it's not that easy to do. And I recognize that. So there are some propositions that when I talk about this, I ask audiences to accept. When we think this through, the first proposition is that it is possible for learning solutions to support and drive business results. That that's possible.

If that were not possible, if we didn't accept that proposition, we shouldn't, we should get out of business. Like we shouldn't do this anymore. But we also have to accept that by itself, a learning solution is often insufficient to drive business results. And so we have to look at, we have to look at situations more holistically. And so in the model that I use, we link learning solutions. So we categorize learning solutions as an Individual capability. So we are trying within people to give them some skill or knowledge that equips them to do some performance. Yep, but that's.

But that's not all of the capability we need. We also need the system in which those people work to provide some capability. So I might be an expert carpenter, but if you don't give me a hammer and some nails, nothing gets built. So I also have to have things like tools and resources and data and incentives, coaching and support, you know, a good. A culture that supports what I'm trying to do. I have to have all of these things that the organization, the infrastructure provides. And then I can provide skill and knowledge. And then if those things are together, then performance can occur.

And then if performance can occur, if we can reduce call times from six minutes to three minutes, that's a change in performance, then outcomes can be produced. Business outcomes can be produced. Operational outcomes can be produced. So that means that customer satisfaction will increase because it's less. More transactions can be done in a day, so we're making more money. All of those things can happen. But we need to have a way. We need to have a logic that links, okay, I'm changing the.

I'm implementing a solution. But why? So I'm implementing a learning solution that means I want to increase skill and knowledge. Well, why? Well, that skill and knowledge is needed to drive some performance. Well, why do I want that performance? Well, that performance is needed to drive some business result, to reduce cost, increase revenue, those sorts of things. And then I have to remember also I have to go back down to the other end of that and remember as well that if all I do is increase skill and knowledge, that's likely insufficient to do the rest of the stuff. So once I have this, once I shift the focus and I go to the other end, not the solution, but the results that I'm trying to achieve, then I can build this logic to connect the two together. But here's the thing. This is why you and I talk about questions a lot.

Leaders do a bad job at this, too. This is why when requests come in to learning teams, the request is, my managers aren't doing a good job giving, giving feedback in a timely manner. Build some feedback training for me, for all my. And put all my managers through it. So that comes through. But they haven't connected the business result that they want with the training that they've requested. They haven't done that work either. And if you ask them about it, so, you know, frequently, I'll ask clients about, you know, what Are you trying to.

What do you want to achieve by putting this program in place? And it's hard for them to articulate, so sometimes it's like this. So, you know, Chris, we'd like your help in implementing a leadership development program. Terrific. How will we know, let's say, six months down the road after putting that program in place, how will we know that we've been successful? That's a pretty great question to ask. Well, the response I get sometimes is, well, we'll have a leadership development program. So we'll know that we don't have one now, and we'll have one, and that way we'll know that we've been successful. You can't measure a thing by itself. Right? You have to look to produce some results.

So that's why it's incumbent on us in those support roles that are providing those solutions. When a request like that comes in, we have to ask enough questions both to gather the information we need to do a good job. Because at this point, I don't feel like if I don't understand what's the business impact we're trying to have, how can I do a good job building something for you? But then also, we have to ask questions that influence the thinking of our clients, that help them see the picture more holistically. So I don't want to start just asking them about the attributes of the program that they want. That's the wrong place for me to start. I want to try to understand the performance they need to change and then the business results that that performance can drive. And so I start asking, I start asking questions in a different direction, maybe not in a different place. You know, I don't want to lose them.

I want to start where they are when the request comes in. But, but with a different direction in mind. I'm not looking to get, I'm not trying to start with what Allison Rossett would call a front end analysis. Right. If it's a front end learning analysis, I, I'm assuming that learning is the solution and the only solution that I'm going to do. Those are great questions, but I don't want to start with that. What I want to start with is client, business partner. What are we trying to do here? What's the business that we're in and how can I support it? That's where I want to start.

And once I help them see a more holistic picture, we can come back and make a great training program. Right? We, we can fit that in. But, but, but if we start there if that's all, if, if that's the direction we go first is tell me more about this training program. I don't ever get to talk about the other stuff that, that's where the conversation stays.

That makes total sense. That makes total sense. What are. If that were easy, everybody be doing it, and you and I wouldn't be talking, right? Sure. So it seems like magic, seems like something we all want. What are some of the barriers to this process that people come up with and how do we get past some of those barriers?

Yeah, so I'm just going to go to number one for me, and this is what I found. So this is from my personal practice. This is from serving people, trying to transition to use a more strategic consultative approach. This is from research that I've done with practitioners. My number one is to do this work and to do it sustainably and well over time. It requires intentionally developing partnerships with business leaders. And so again, because I tend to communicate in stories. I'll tell you another quick story.

So when I mentioned Jim Robinson earlier, that was around the year 2000 when I worked with him. So going pretty far back in my career, when he shared these ideas with me, this different mindset, these different techniques for asking questions, I was just on fire. Like I had, I'm ready to go and I'm gonna do it. And so one of my very best clients, they knew me because I had developed several elearning programs for them. And so they called me in again and they, they had a fairly large program that they would like. And man, I was on, I was ready. I, I did all my prep, I had my questions that I was going to ask. I was focused on, I'm going to get to those results that they need.

You know, I'm not going to, I'm not just going to go down and be an order taker on this. I went to meet with them and I asked those questions that Jim had taught me to ask and it did not go well. They weren't ready for it. I had a relationship with them that was based on sort of a different premise. And let me say this, I was not yet very skillful in asking those questions because this is a skill that has to be developed. You have to, you have to work out the muscles that are required, you know, to implement this skill. So, you know, I took my shot. I learned from that.

But I ended up building the training program. And that's as kind of, as far as it went. I did, you know, to maintain my credibility. When we evaluated the training Program. I brought back some of those questions, say, oh, so now as we put measurement in place, can we think about performance changes we're looking at and how that might, you know, benefit the business? And like, okay, you know, we get. We kind of get what you're doing. And they sort of played along, but it didn't really go that first time. The second months pass, they call me back in again.

They just want some program built, go back and I ask the same questions again. This time it goes a little bit better. They know that I have this new approach that I'm trying. They've heard the questions before. My skill has increased. I've been working out those muscles. And so that time we ended up doing the training program, I didn't get as far as I would have liked, but the evaluation of the program was more aligned with business results, so we made a little progress. But the third time that they called again, months later, this time, my boss at the time took the call, and shame on him.

He jumped to solutions with them and said, oh, I know that Chris has developed some programs for you in the past. What sort of E learning do you want to do? They said, well, we don't really want to do any E learning. It's like, oh, well, instructor led. You're going to do a classroom program. He can do that. He's great at that. No, that's not really what we want either. He's like, well, I'm confused.

Then Chris is happy to work with you and we'll get him on the line, but what do I say? What is it that you really need? And they said, we need him to come and ask us those questions. Whoa. And so it took those three cycles for me to develop the skill and for me to deepen our relationship so that they saw me as a credible partner in trying to answer those kinds of questions. And so to me, number one is we. And to me, it's always struck me as a little strange, but I think we in learning and development, although we are people, persons, we are focused on the human element. We are often not intentional about developing relationships with the people whom we serve and the clients we want a partnership with. And so to me, that's. That is sort of a parallel track.

There's some technical skill that you're developing, but also we need to be intentional about who are the influential leaders who can support us, who can work with us in this more holistic, strategic way, and then cultivating those relationships to the point where maybe it doesn't work the first time out. But we grow and we build so that they support this type of work. And so I think that looking at teams that have tried to develop this, they really have to focus early on in being intentional about growing those relationships with clients. And that's internal and external. You mentioned kind of the two before and it's very interesting when I talk about these sorts of approaches and techniques, people will come up and say, I totally see, you know, I've mostly been external for most of my career. I totally see how this works for an external consultant. You guys get to come in and you've got, you don't have any history, you've got a clean slate and they bring you in and you can just do whatever you want to. You've got a lot of freedom.

Well, you know, and then the next person that approaches says, you know, I totally get how if I was internal and I had access to the resources in the network and I knew the emails and I could get on people's call list, totally see how this would work. But how can it work external? Because I'm thinking about doing external. And so it's grass, it's greener grass, right on either side. To me, the root is the same though is that yes, it does not naturally happen that learning and development people, leaders in that area, develop good, deep business relationships with leaders across the organization. It doesn't just happen. And very few organizations are forward thinking enough to like do things to sort of force it to happen. We as leaders have to do that. We have to take that on and be intentional about it.

So that's my, that's my number one barrier.

That's huge. That's huge. Well, as we, I think about what my takeaways are from this, this conversation, right. One is, is really that focus on outcomes, not solutions. And which is hard and it's satisfying to be the hero because I can bring a thing, but focusing on outcomes, that's where I get to be the real hero. You talk about building credibility and relationships, right. And I know Amy Parent had told me that you have to give them what they ask for first before they can even see what you want to show them. And so that, that, that feels like it rings true here and that that building of a strategic relationship over time and intentionally and then finally just bringing that consultative role, whether you're an internal or an external consultant in that space.

This has been such gold lightning round. You ready?

I'm ready.

All right, bring it. What's a book we should all read?

Only I only get to pick one.

You get to. You can pick two. You can pick two.

How about three? Will you give me three?

Yes, three.

So I know it's supposed to be the lightning round. So performance consulting Jim and Dana Robinson. That's sort of the basis and the foundation for, for the work that I do. So you know, I'm in that every day. Human Competency by Tom Gilbert or Human Competence, Excuse me, by Tom Gilbert. Classic in the field. And just a really. He's just such a genius and such a great writer.

I try to read that book at least every couple years all the way through cover to cover and feel like I, I'm better every time I read it. And then Rummeler and Brock, improving managing the white space in the organizational chart. It fills in the rest of the gap of the practice of improving performance that, that Gilbert leaves on the table. So those are, those are the three books that, that I base my career on. They're. They're kind of where all of my thinking comes from in level of utility. Like I can pick it up and actually use it and accessibility. Like I really.

It makes me think and I have to think hard. I gave you in that order. So start with performance consulting. Then do Thomas Gilbert save Rumler for last because he goes pretty deep in scientific. But I recommend those three to everyone I can.

Oh, awesome. Yes. Familiar with Robinson Teach Gilbert actually in my class and Rummler's new for me. So the, the concept of the white space. I know you're not supposed to judge a book on its cover, but that title is appealing to me. What's a snack that you like while you are working?

Yes. So here's my snack and it's my go to because the next question you're going to ask me is about a fidget toy. So my go to snack is pistachios because if you have them in the shell, they're a fidget and a snack at the same time. And they might be calorie neutral because you have to get them out of the shell before you eat them. So you know, you've got a lot. You've got some effort there. So that's my snack. Pistachios.

Awesome.

If you're not fidgeting with pistachio shells. Do you have a fidget?

Yeah, I like because I think, because we've talked about this already, I think a lot of people in our field are generative people. We want to make things, we want to, you know, share things. So I like fidgets that build something so old fashioned. Play DOH is great for Me. But you can also get sort of magnetic putty that lets you build a little bit more cleanly, I think so Things that I can construct things out of. That's my favorite fidget.

I love it. I love it. I don't like the smell of play. D'oh.

Though. Well, again, there, there, there are other options now.

There are other options. Yeah. The magnetic is, is intriguing. Okay, I'm going to steal shamelessly from Adam Grant and, and his lightning round. What is a question you have for me?

Okay, so taking artificial intelligence off the table, what is the top impact to our business that you are coming to grips with this year, next year, the following year?

You mean like an external impact?

Yeah, or, or a trend? It could be. There are things bubbling within the industry too.

So, so yeah, I think there's a combination of. We have a very changing economy right ahead of us globally. I was going to say in the States, but actually that will affect globally. So we have a changing economy not just in terms of size, but I think in terms of mix. Right. So I'm looking a lot at workforce development as, as, as a space. And at the same time, I've been spending a lot of time on performance support. Five moments of need.

How do I not train so much and instead focus on training, reinforcing, providing support for the things that are the absolutely most important and really managing. I see that as a managing of cognitive load, but it's also a rapid, or rapid onboarding, easy transformation kind of not easy, but enabling that fluidity in the marketplace.

Yeah, yeah, very insightful. And the two are linked. If you're doing a great job of your workforce management, your workforce planning, then you've reduced not your cognitive load, but your operational load as far as people are prepared before they step into a role. And so what you have to do to support them in that role becomes relatively less. Yes. And yeah, I've been. Well, I only have my three books I've been reading in that area as well to try to. Try to think about how do we, how do we support people in a fluid environment when they did not.

When the role that they are in did not exist, when they started on their trajectory and they've moved into something that's brand new, not just to them, but potentially to the organization, potentially to their industry. And we cannot, we cannot simply train those people. If we, if we try to do that, we've lost them. So we have to, we have to do that elsewise.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's full employment for people, capacity, people like us I won't call it learning and development people, but that people. Capacity component people.

Yes. Yeah. That is an excellent way to think about it. And so much kinder than human resources. Yes, but that's another thing.

Yeah, but you know what? At one point, that was the kindest term that we had for it.

And that's the thing. It came about because people were trying to be kind in the way that they. At least we saw that you were human and that you were a resource. At least we're imparting some value to you. But, yeah, do we have the capacity in the people when we need it? And again, that comes. I feel like I've been involved in human performance for a very long time, and I feel like a lot of the things that come out of people like Rummler and people like Gilbert, I feel like the industry is now coming at that from another angle. Work is so fluid, so complex now that just having models that help us understand the work that people do, what is their expected performance, how does that contribute to the business? And not just today, but what does that look like in 5 years, 10 years? What should we be building, preparing to, Is so radically different now that we. I've had really interesting conversations with performance management people who are trying to come to grips with this as well.

They now they're getting, oh, it's not just reviews that we do. It's not just conversations with leaders. It's. We have to have people prepared to step into roles that don't exist yet and how do we do that? So, yeah, very insightful. Thank you.

Interesting. Interesting times ahead. We'll have to do this again, like, year too. Right. So kind of like, figure out where things are. So. Chris Adams, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a fantastic conversation.

Can't wait to share it with others.

My pleasure. Thank you again.

So how'd that go, Megan?

That was super fun and everything I had hoped for in this podcast. So I go out and I, like, I saw Chris do a session at ATD's ORG DEV conference last year, and I just sat there and I was blown away by. And I have a background in consulting and do this, you know, something like this all the time. And it was just the. The structure and the rigor with which he applies these questions, which we didn't even get to talk about in the. The podcast. But it was. It was just fantastic.That was super fun and everything I had hoped for in this podcast. So I go out and I, like, I saw Chris do a session at ATD's ORG DEV conference last year, and I just sat there and I was blown away by. And I have a background in consulting and do this, you know, something like this all the time. And it was just the. The structure and the rigor with which he applies these questions, which we didn't even get to talk about in the. The podcast. But it was. It was just fantastic.

And I've been. It's been, gosh, months and months and months since before I could get him on the podcast. So it was super. Super fun just to sit down, talk shop with him. And what nobody knows, you know, Dean, because you got to see it, nobody knows is that he and I both have the same color green background in our office. So we have that little bit of connection there.

So that was kind of fun.

This is Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance, and this has been a podcast from Torrance Learning. Tangents is the official podcast of Torrance Learning, 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.