454: Five Practice Levers for Navigating Uncertainty

Udemy, Coursera, and edX are part of the competitive landscape your learning business operates in, so it’s valuable to understand how your learners might view your catalog in light of the catalogs of Big Learning providers.This episode, number 455, features a conversation with Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, which Dhawal describes as a Tripadvisor for online education. Class Central aggregates reviews of hundreds of thousands of courses from platforms all over the world, bringing together the learning-verse in a single searchable and discoverable interface.Dhawal discusses the evolution of MOOCs, community in the context of online courses, business models (including pricing and the relevant benefits of business-to-business models versus business-to-consumer), and the importance of partnerships.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode455.

This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 454, is the second installment in a two-part look at how learning businesses can best navigate uncertainty. Co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss five practice levers: pulse monitoring, scenario planning, revenue model innovation, ecosystem partnerships, and tech awareness. These levers can help you translate the four habitsets discussed in episode 453 into action.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode454.

If one thing is certain these days, it’s that uncertainty is top of mind for many leaders. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 453, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss four habitsets that can help learning businesses navigate uncertain times: informed agility, strategic foresight, stakeholder intimacy, and portfolio thinking.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode453.

Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele discuss the powerful and sometimes limiting role of credit (CE, CME, CLE, CPE, etc.) and subject matter experts (SMEs) in learning businesses. Both are mainstays, but they can restrict innovation, often unintentionally.This episode unpacks how credit and SMEs function as enablers and as limiters—and what learning businesses can do to navigate those dynamics more intentionally.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode452.

Drawing on their own experience and insights from experts like Richard Rumelt, Roger Martin, and Michael Porter, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele look at the importance of coherence and posit that strategic coherence occurs when a learning business’s choices and actions reinforce each other in the service of its strategy.They unpack what coherence means, how to spot when coherence is missing, and ways to build and sustain coherence to help make your learning business’s strategy stick.Show notes and downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode451.

Flexibility is an essential skill for those leading learning businesses. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 450, we talk with Kevin Eikenberry about flexible leadership.Kevin Eikenberry is chief potential officer of the Kevin Eikenberry Group and an author, most recently of Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. The conversation covers three pillars of flexible leadership (mindset, skillset, and habitset) and four types of contexts leaders must lead in (clear, complicated, complex, and chaotic).The world feels more complex and uncertain. If you’re a leader, this episode can help you have more clarity in what you do and how you do it.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode450.

This episode of the Leading Learning Podcast looks at why and how learning businesses can and should segment their audience—what it looks like in practice and how it can lead to more engagement, better learning outcomes, and, yes, better business results.If you’re already segmenting learners, the episode will provide food for thought and an opportunity to reassess your approach. If you’re new to segmentation, then you’ll walk away with how to start.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode449.

In physics, momentum is the product of a body’s mass and velocity. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele define strategic momentum as the product of an initiative’s strategic weight and its execution speed, and they discuss why momentum matters, common barriers to maintaining momentum, and strategies for creating and maintaining momentum.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode448.

Because good strategy is organic and responsive, it needs to be revisited periodically. There are predictable, recurring whens that are be natural times for you to reassess your strategy, like the start of a new budget year.There are also less predictable whens that are important times to revisit strategy, like a global pandemic or government policy changes.While it’s easier to plan for revisiting strategy at predictable points, it’s as important to reassess strategy when the situation shifts. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele offer Marian Urquilla’s Strategy Triage Tool as an approach learning businesses can leverage for some of those unexpected times when a strategy reassessment is needed.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode477.

For learning businesses, bringing in revenue is an essential function. Revenue is what keeps the organization going and delivering on its mission, whether that mission is solely focused on learning and training or whether it’s a broader mission tied to improving a field, industry, or profession.In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele offer five ways to increase the revenue from your portfolio that don’t involve massive investments of time or money: raising prices, packaging products, borrowing to expand, running flash sales, and offering free courses.Show notes and a downloadable transcript are available at: https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode446.