Preconference Workshops

JUST ADDED! WORKSHOP 12 Re-thinking Corporate Responsibility, One Nail at a Time.

Get ready for a learning experience that will challenge you to rethink experiential learning, corporate social responsibility, and philanthropy. In just one day, you will build a home for a family caught in the cycle of poverty. You will measure, cut wood, and hammer nails while being immersed in Mexican culture interacting with the family for whom you are providing shelter

The learning experience won’t end once the house is built. You will take everything you learned about experiential learning, team development, and working together back to the conference and to your organization. You will have transformed one family’s life forever, and in doing so, will change your own outlook on life, work, and learning.

Participants will be transported by bus to Tijuana, Mexico. This is a full day workshop. Participants will depart the convention center at 6:30 a.m., returning at 6 p.m.

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Workshop 1
Breakthrough Financial Literacy: The New Required Language of Business
Speaker: Peter Frampton
Financial statements are a goldmine of information about your business. They tell of the value, performance and progress of the business. Fluency with financial statements is essential to any workplace learning professional. However, finance folk haven’t learned how to communicate their story in a way that works for non-finance people. Finally, using a breakthrough new approach to financial information, workplace learning practitioners can master the language of finance and accounting in one day. This celebrated workshop is used by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (created by the Sarbanes Oxley act), as well as many Wall Street banks like Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers, and educational institutions including Harvard Business School. This engaging, fun and powerful workshop is hands-on, uses color, props, shapes, activities and constant participation to achieve rapid, lasting and applicable learning. Anyone can do it. In two parts, Part A uncovers the principles of financial reporting which enable Part B to magnify your business acumen by looking at case studies and key business indicators. The combination is what makes the workshop so powerful. Bonus topic included!!! “How to Get Rich: an unforgettable presentation based upon Color Accounting.”

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Workshop 2
Building Business Acumen: What the CEO Wants You to Know
Speaker: Kevin Cope
Business made easy! Because people work hard for a paycheck, harder for a person, and hardest for a reason, WLP professionals must understand the reason a business focuses on some core items. So, what are you doing right now, in your role, to drive profitable growth? What are you doing to assure customers get served in the best way possible? You contribute to the business performance of your business…do you know what you could do to be better aligned with your business and its goals? Come see this interactive, engaging, and FUN session to start delivering business results in your role, whatever role that may be!

Business acumen is a strategic success factor in every company. Employees need to understand the basics of business, how their company makes money, and how each employee’s actions influence profitability and growth. As economies worldwide struggle, companies need employees at every level who know how to affect positively bottom-line results. In this session, we will eliminate the mystery behind the numbers. In clear and simple language, you will get the street-wise definitions of cash, margin, velocity, growth, and customers. You will master key concepts from Ram Charan’s book What the CEO Wants You to Know, including the essence of business thinking, the truth that every business is the same inside, and approaches to figuring out business complexities. You will discover ways to use your new skills to contribute more to your organization and achieve greater success.

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Workshop 3
Building Creative Output
Speaker: Tina Mertel
This workshop will help you boost your creativity and understand how the creative process works in individuals. It will give you skills and knowledge that you’ll be able to apply to many organizational and personal situations, now and in the future. It is based on more than 20 years of laboratory and applied research. The speaker will begin by reviewing and debunking bothersome myths about creativity, such as: It’s rare. It can’t be studied. It’s mysterious. Only high IQs have it. We'll show that creativity is not rare, and that we can study it to become more creative individuals.

Creativity can be accessed more easily if we know what skills to work on. If your interest is in boosting creativity in a particular setting, such as to rescue a failing department or to keep a business competitive, you’ll want to focus on the core competencies of creativity. You'll gain insight through a self-assessment of current competency levels online, then will focus in the session on skill building and creating a plan for increased creativity. You'll learn why people need to pay attention to and preserve their new ideas. Although not desirable, failure is invaluable for creativity because it causes ideas to compete, which leads to even better ideas. Broad training is important for creativity because it makes diverse ideas available to compete. Properly designed physical and social environments can stimulate creativity by causing ideas to compete.

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Workshop 4
Efficiency in Learning: Evidence-Based Methods to Optimize Mental Load in Workforce Learning
Speaker: Ruth Clark
Remember "seven plus or minus two"? Cognitive load theory is the 21st century version and the single most powerful modern learning theory available today. It can be applied to all instructional practitioners; all types of workforce learning content, from soft skills to hard skills; and to all delivery media, from classroom to digital. Drawing from more than 25 years of research by instructional research psychologists, the speaker will present guidelines, evidence, examples, and application exercises to define and describe cognitive load theory, how it is measured, its effects, and how awareness of cognitive load can drive more effective learning design through such elements as segmenting and sequencing content, exploiting worked examples, and promoting self-explanations of examples. The session is designed for instructional professionals interested in learning psychology with experience in design and/or delivery of training in classroom or digital environments.

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Workshop 5
Examining Cultural Differences: Increased Awareness for Global Leaders
Speaker: Heather Keller
By exploring differences in behaviors, values, attitudes, and beliefs across cultures, this workshop is designed to provide you with an understanding of how culture impacts organizations and the people who compose them. You’ll learn effective practices for communicating across cultures and managing multicultural teams within the U.S. and abroad. Learn of the cultural differences that successful managers must be aware of when interacting with people from a wide range of cultures, including Asia, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Discover how to lead across cultures effectively by increasing your understanding of cultural differences in motivation, negotiation, and decision-making practices. By focusing on a variety of cultural dimensions such as individualism versus collectivism, polychronism versus monochronism, and universalism versus particularism, you’ll be better equipped to manage a global workforce.

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Workshop 6
Quit the Nifty Teambuilding Seminars! Design a Leadership Development Team
Speaker: Steven Carlson
Creating a culture of leadership within an organization requires hard work and a long-term vision. If you want the quick fixes of nifty teambuilding seminars, this is not the session for you. Here you will analyze what your company is already doing to enhance and strengthen its employees’ leadership styles. Next, you will evaluate the extent to which your corporate culture is able to support a leadership development team concept. Finally, you will acquire the tools necessary to design a leadership development team that fits within your corporate culture, within six to 12 months. The principles you will learn should raise the bar for employees, making this team something sought-after and not just another humdrum HR-mandated program. Learn criteria that will enable you to design a program to develop teams of high-potential, lower-rung employees that your company wishes to retain and perhaps promote. A leadership development team should enable its members to discover their strengths as well as their personal leadership and communications styles. It should also assist employees in identifying those environments within your company that are best suited to their leadership styles. The long-term vision of these teams is to proactively develop an organic culture of leadership sustained by individuals who understand their unique leadership abilities and seek the best environments within your company to implement them.

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Workshop 7
Redesign Your Training with Appreciative Inquiry and Experiential Learning
Speaker(s): Carolyn Weisenberger, Cheri Torres
This workshop will provide you with a proven research-based strategy for taking an experiential, strengths-based approach to training. When used with competence, this approach has shown dramatically significant increases in employee motivational, relational, cognitive and affective competencies as measured by the Perceived Competence of Functioning Inventory. These competencies are positively correlated with productivity, engagement, retention, and employee satisfaction and negatively correlated with absenteeism. If you provide training directed at increasing workplace competencies associated with leadership, teamwork, collaboration, and organizational learning, then you will find this workshop beneficial. The speakers will discuss how to incorporate experiential learning into your training and how to use Appreciative Inquiry as a means for facilitating activities and learning in general. You will learn the principles of Appreciative Inquiry and how to apply the 4D action learning cycle to the reflection process following an activity. You will experience a variety of activities that you can apply in your own training programs and develop the skills needed to approach your training as an Appreciative Facilitator. You will spend time crafting appreciative questions to guide the reflection process following activities and develop your competence in guiding your training participants to recognize how their newly discovered skills will benefit them when they apply in them in the workplace. So that you leave with a plan to implement your learning, you will analyze your current training practices in small groups, and evaluate them in relationship to the EL/AI strategy. You will develop a plan to integrate activities at key points in your training programs to enhance and accelerate learning.

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Workshop 8 - CANCELLED
The Determined Gardener: Cultivating a Successful Performance Consulting Team
Speaker(s): AnnMarie Goodwin, Robin Clarke, Tracie O’Donnell
A successful performance consulting team rests on a foundation of training/business alignment focused on achieving business objectives. Business partners must recognize the value that a performance consultant brings to an organization and the unique set of skills that the performance consultant utilizes. This workshop will take the form of an interactive case study where you will build, deploy, and coach a performance consulting team within an organization. Throughout the exercise, you will confront questions, issues, and choices that will affect the effectiveness and viability of your team and the performance improvement of the organization. By exploring the rationale for and implications of your decisions with other session participants, you will leave the session with a tactical road map for cultivating the perennial performance consulting team within your own organization. Throughout the day, you will compare your decisions and rationales with the actual decisions made by a 2006 ASTD BEST Award-winning performance consulting team.

Workshop 9
The Seven Separators of Facilitation Excellence
Speaker: Michael Wilkinson
What is it that separates great facilitators from good ones? Sure, every facilitator needs to know about establishing ground rules, using the appropriate tools, and maintaining a safe training environment. But is there a set of skills that seem to distinguish the best facilitators from the rest of the pack? The speakers say, “Yes!” As facilitator trainers and practitioners, they have had the opportunity to train and work with more than 8,000 people in facilitation skills. They have identified the seven key skills that seem to separate the “top” facilitators from the “good” ones. In this session, they will share them with you, and will cover more than a dozen techniques that you can begin using immediately as you strive for facilitation excellence.

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Workshop 10
The Total Trainer Makeover: Methods for Evolving and Reinventing YOU!
Speaker: Jim Smith, Jr.
The star performers in life repeatedly look for ways to take what they do to greater levels. Regardless of the industry or profession, they consistently look for methods to ensure that their difference still makes a difference. The Total Trainer Makeover session provides that opportunity, and more, for you. In this session, you will assess myriad components of your training style and approach including mindset, energy level, classroom management, storytelling, openers and closers, presentation skills, materials, visual aid use, and variety. You will be urged to ask yourself, “What can I do that I haven’t already done in the classroom?” and develop a new approach. You will be challenged to develop your uniqueness--your WOW--and to refrain from mirroring others. From workbook to PowerPoint slide, evaluation to activity, appearance to movement, eye communication to theater, storytelling to closing the session, you will be made over for success.

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Workshop 11
Turning Classroom Trainers Into Online Facilitators
Speaker: Jennifer Hofmann
Making the transition to the live virtual classroom requires facilitators to develop skills that maximize engagement and learning for their participants. After discussing the changing roles of the training team, and creating a job description for the online facilitator, you will learn about the many roles you may fill as an online facilitator, and how to work with a production team to ensure the transfer of learning. The speaker will give special attention to creating effective learning environments for your participants and maximizing the engagement level of your audience using facilitation techniques specific to the online environment. You will take away templates that will assist you in preparing to deliver online learning events.

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