Last week was the eLearning Guild's 2016 Learning Solutions Conference. I love going to this conference because it consists of kindred spirits; people who get learning, what works, and are passionate to share those ideas. It's a community of practice that gathers in Orlando to learn. Yeah, I'm a learning junkie. I fly to Orlando and sit in hotels to learn about learning and love every minute of it.  

During this year's second day opening session, the 2016 Guild Masters were announced. I was stuck in Orlando traffic, so I missed the announcement. In reading the back channel Twitter feed, I saw that the late Jay Cross was honored with this title and that made me cry. Jay is credited with inventing the term elearning, and taught us that most of the learning occurs outside of training - informally. He was truly one of my heros. 

In 1997 when I was working at Bank Boston, my manager had me read Performance Consulting, a few years after it was published. I thought it was interesting, but didn't do much with it. It wasn't until I got involved with MASS ISPI and attended a workshop by Tina Teodorescu that I really understood what this concept was all about.  Since then, I've been doing a lot to connect the dots with the business need and teaching my students and staff to do likewise.

Design Thinking has become pretty trendy in business. It's a way to bring about innovation by leveraging the principles of design, which basically is iterative problem solving. There's a lot of research coming out of Stanford about Design Thinking and they even have a 90 Minute Crash Course you can take to learn it. 

When I arrived in town I picked up my rental car and began to grumble about how uncomfortable it was and WHAT! It didn't have power windows and locks. It's a Kia Rio, and definitely NOT a car I'd ever buy for myself because the headrest pitches you toward the windshield and it's really hard to get comfortable.

I drove from the airport to the timeshare I'd rented for the week. RCI had a special promotion of an extra week of vacation for $249, so I cancelled my reservation at the Hyatt, right next to the convention center, and booked a week at the High Point World Resort. The pictures looked good, and the reviews were mainly five star. I'd always had wonderful resorts whenever we'd stayed at RCI places, so I had great expectation, especially after the resort we stayed at for Learning Solutions with its full service, incredible food, poolside restaurant by the enormous pools with multiple hot tubs and posh accommodations.

This place was a little different. My GPS sent me to the strip with all the cheap souvenir shops and down a tiny road to what looked like a pre-fab housing development of budget townhouses. The welcome center was two guys at a desk. One checked me in and the other handed me a stack of paperwork about the "amenities" which included a hot dog roast by the pool in the middle of the complex on Wednesday night.

I found my unit and walked into 1980 complete with the brown canvas couch, the VCR and the Formica furniture in the bedroom, complete with mirrored closet doors.

It looked clean anyway, so I settled where I met the lizard running around the walls of my living room. Oh boy. Could this get any worse? At least it wasn't a mouse. 

I posted something on the ATD Facebook page about the lizard and Michele Lawson suggested I give him a red feather and invite him for networking. So I named him Richard, after someone I'd met at dinner, and decided I could deal with him.

It's funny, how that little bit of perspective changed everything. Last night when I got back Richard was no where to be found, despite his very visible dashing presence the night before. I was kind of sad about that.

This morning I woke up and realized that this place would be luxurious if I were in India and decided that it's not so bad after all, even though the wi-fi is not working. I have a hot spot on my phone. What's the big deal? What was so annoying yesterday is not so much of a bother. I realized that I needed to get down off my high horse and be grateful for having a place that saved me a ton of money and a car that gets me to the conference safely. I have sneakers to wear to be comfortable in the marathon walk from the parking lot, and can walk off some of the calories from the fabulous meals we've been eating. So first lesson learned: In the moments of tiredness, annoyances are bigger than they really are. Get over it and put things in perspective.

I was invited to dinner gatherings by two people I'd never met before, and I'm so grateful to Michelle Lawson and Megan Torrance, who gathered together random groups of people to go to dinner. I ate at Margianno's Italian restaurant and Fogo de Chao Brazilian Steak Houses; both places I wouldn't have stumbled on. The food was great but the company was really fascinating.

I met Richard and Austin from Sage Media out in Denver. They do video, which was pretty interesting, but the conversation evolved to elements of film, which is something I know next to nothing about. It was really interesting piecing fragments of the conversation together with my little knowledge store in this area. I wonder how often that happens in our training classes? Definitely something to think about to make sure that I attach new concepts to something familiar.

On Sunday I had breakfast with Aaron Silvers, a long time Twitter friend of mine who is an expert in xAPI, and his friend Russell Duhon. It was interesting hearing the geek side of the process and the evolution from SCORM, something no one really understands, but we are expected to conform learning in our LMS to it. I wish my friend Jason Kramer would have been there. He'd have eaten that up. Perhaps another conference.

I've been focusing on instructional design at this conference. I attended a workshop on Design Thinking for Instructional Designers with Angel Green from Allen Interactions. She walked us through some exercises we could use with our SMEs, which generated an oh duh! moment for me: Leverage Design Thinking Principles with our SMEs. I'd recently taught the principles of Design Thinking to my team of IDs and never thought to have them use that with their SMEs.

After teaching my session, I went to a workshop with Dick Handshaw and Jim Robinson called When Instructional Design Meets Performance Management. I'm trained in both disciplines, but it was really nice to have a refresher from the people who were key influencers in practices we use today. I'd never thought about the importance of getting to the right SME to identify the business issue, and that often means escalating a level or two. I plan to share their slides with my team and work a little harder to dig out the business issue around the behavior problem or need we need to solve for. When training addresses and corrects a business issue, the business sees training as a valued partner. I returned to Dick's ID workshop today and was reminded yet again how important that is.

Today I attended Ken Blanchard's presentation on the new One Minute Manager. His original book is over 20 years old. Business has changed, but paying attention to employees has not. Connecting, praising and redirecting toward the goal go a long way in developing people. It's amazing to have been able to see the pioneers and leaders in our discipline in person. 

Hadiya Nuriddin
Focus Learning Solutions

Hadiya presented on leveraging non-fiction writing techniques for writing elearning scenarios. I'd never thought about that before. Thinking about the constructs of plot, story line and context made a lot of sense. Thinking about whose perspective you are writing from and for was a big keeper as well. 

As a bonus, I learned about RACI charts on her website. Definitely a keeper for project management role definitions!

David Glow
Business Critical Learning

I've been chatting with David on Twitter, where he is @criticallearner, for several years so it was really fun to meet him in person. He taught us a slew of training hacks. My two favorites were using Siri to transcribe audio, and to change the extension of a PPTx file to .zip and it will extract all of the images in the file into a folder called Images. That is super helpful when you are moving things over from a storyboard.

Ty Marbut
Ty Marbut Instructional Videos

Ty is a twenty-something who ran circles around me. For those of you who know me well, that takes some doing. Ty showed me a bunch of neat video tricks and introduced me to the concept of interactive videos, which isn't nearly as hard as one would imagine. I love the concept and can't wait to try this one out. 

Dave Anderson
Community Manager, Articulate

I'd read Dave Anderson for years, so it was fun to come and learn some tricks from him in person. He taught us to leverage mindmapping to create a design treatment for an elearning piece. We walked through six steps, and came out with the colors, fonts, elements and people types that belong in a piece. That was fun and complemented Hadiya's piece really well. 

Jason Kramer & Naomi Pariseault
NECB eLearning

This was their first conference presentation, and it was fun to watch their creativity unleashed.

I've spent the last couple of days at Training 2015 sharpening the saw in my talent toolbox. As a trainer and instructional designer, I'm continually looking to improve my craft. I've learned a ton in the different sessions, much with direct applicability to my job, and look forward to trying out the new ideas.