Hidden Value: How to Reveal the Impact of Organizational Learning

Introduction

Nolan: Hello and welcome to the Learning and Development podcast sponsored by Infopro Learning. As always, I’m your host, Nolan Hout. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Dr. Keith Keating, Chief Learning Officer at BDO Canada, lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of a groundbreaking new book, “Hidden Values,” which challenges us to look beyond the traditional ROI metrics and uncover the deeper impact of learning and development.

Keith really has an interesting perspective that he’s bringing to this conversation, with years at the intersection of learning, finance, and business strategy. That’s all really tied into the book and the themes, and we’ll talk with Dr. Keating about some of those things. Whether you’re an L&D professional, HR leader, or a business executive wanting to maximize your investments in human capital, this is going to be a really great conversation for you. Speaking of the conversation, let’s make it two-sided by bringing in our guest, Dr. Keith Keating, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Keith: Thank you so much for having me.

Nolan: Wonderful. Before we get into the book and some of the topics that we want to talk about, we always start with learning a little bit more about your origin story, if you would. You’re an established author, a speaker. We just mentioned next week we’ll be seeing you deliver a keynote at a conference. You’re the Chief Learning Officer of BDO, but that wasn’t your start, obviously. What led you down this path to where you are today?

Dr. Keith’s Career Journey

Dr. Keith: Well, it started once upon a time with being born.

Nolan: Okay, let’s fast forward, maybe 15 years forward.

Dr. Keith: Perfect. My journey would start 15 years, actually almost to the day, with my struggle in school. I struggled significantly with learning, but I don’t know that it was really learning as much as I blamed the school for that. A fact is that I am a high school dropout. I finished maybe two months of 10th grade, but I basically have a ninth-grade education and a few months of 10th grade. Being a high school dropout was not just part of my story; it was my story, and it was the beginning, but also the end of how I saw myself. I was so ashamed of it for many years. I hid it. I let it define me. Today, I’ve been able to transform that to the beginning of my story rather than the end.

My view on the value of learning is deeply personal because, for a long time, I didn’t believe that I was capable of learning. I struggled in school, and part of that was because I had so many different schools. I grew up in Europe, in Asia, then came to the US when I was 13 or 14, and my school education just didn’t line up. One teacher would tell my parents, “I’m above average and I should skip a grade,” and the next teacher would tell them that I need to be held back because I have developmental challenges.

It was a deeply struggling time for me where I had to make a decision to drop out to save myself, essentially my mental health. When I did that, I was told the same cliché statements: “You’ll never amount to anything,” “You’ll be destined for a life of fast food,” first of all, as if there’s something wrong with working in the fast-food industry, because there’s not at all. I did that; I actually went and got a job in fast food.

I had been told that I wasn’t smart enough, that I couldn’t be cut out for it, and I just believed that. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized the problem wasn’t me; it was how I was being taught or not taught. The moment that I learned how to learn, everything changed for me. It was like someone handed me the keys to my future. From then, learning stopped being something that made me feel broken, but something that made me feel powerful and empowered. That journey has shaped everything since then and what I believe about learning and development.

When you’ve been the one who’s been overlooked, counted out, or underestimated, it changes how you see people, and it makes you even more hyper-aware of those hidden barriers that others might be facing. It makes you ask questions: Who are we missing? Who aren’t we developing in our organization? Who’s not being thought of in this learning experience? I’m constantly rooting for the underdog because I am one, and I know firsthand what it feels like when you get to unlock that, when you get to change someone’s life through learning, because learning and development absolutely changed the trajectory of my life. In fact, I keep this little Post-it note next to my laptop all the time to remind me of what we do.

Our bigger mission, our bigger purpose, is: We change lives through learning and development. Long story short, my journey has significantly impacted my belief in what we do, and if I believe anything, it’s that learning is the skill, the skill that we need for today, for tomorrow, and for whatever comes next. We’re the ones that get to do that. We’re the ones that get to prepare people for the future. I love what we do, but it started from a very difficult place. Sorry, long-winded monologue there.

Nolan: No, that’s phenomenal. I feel like as I’ve asked this question, there are some common themes. I think one that is relatively common is they felt there was a better way to do it than how they experienced it, and it impacted them so strongly that they felt, “I have to be the one to do something about it. I need to be the change. I need to be that person to change lives in somebody else”. Yours is one of the more compelling stories I’ve ever heard from that perspective of learning really was the pivotal moment in my life, and the second that I realized that’s what I needed to excel, it changed my career trajectory. That’s wonderful.

Inspiration Behind Writing “Hidden Value”

Nolan: Fast forward many years later, you’ve just written this book on “Hidden Values.” Why did you write this book? What was the moment in your mind where it just kind of clicked and you were like, “I’ve got to put some pen to paper here”? I know this is your second book, so maybe this is the, I wouldn’t say leftovers of your first book, but you know, maybe when you were writing your first book, you’re like, yeah, continuation. Yeah, like, hey, I wanted to put more in there, but I didn’t want this to be, you know, like, the Bible. So, I wanted to have two volumes make it easier. But yeah, what led you to hidden values and publishing.

Dr. Keith: I needed a New Testament. We had the Old Testament, now we needed the New Testament. It is a continuation from the first book. The first book is “The Trusted Learning Advisor.” That is about our evolution from being order takers to being strategic business partners, because our industry is largely stuck in this order-taking mindset.

The first book was my culmination of what I did, what my teams did, and how we can share that so that others can continue to evolve. It focuses a lot on our foundational skills being a trusted advisor, consulting, things like that. There wasn’t a lot about the value of what we do, so when I was finished with that one, I found that there’s this gap in the industry. I hear a lot of negativities on LinkedIn and from other people who are burnt out.

And the truth is I want them to fall in love or fall back in love with what we do because what we do is so powerful. So specifically, to answer your question, I wrote this book because I care, and also because the world is changing. I’ve lived that frustration of being unseen, underestimated, unsure if the work I’m doing even matters. I’ve been the learning leader that’s been trying to prove value in a room where people didn’t want to listen. I know firsthand what this is like, but I also know when we get it right, it can transform not just performance, but people’s lives.

I care about where we go from here. For years now, I’ve heard people saying we live in a knowledge economy. We’re no longer in a knowledge economy because this device has more knowledge or more data than I am ever going to have. Because most of the world now has access to Gen AI, it’s almost this democratizer where we’re at this starting line together. We now have all of this knowledge, so what do we do with it? We have to create value from it. We’re moving from a knowledge economy to a value economy. Knowledge is no longer enough. That differentiator for us is going to be: How do we create value? How do I take my experience, my expertise, my knowledge, these tools, how do I put them all together so that I can create value?

And I don’t think that the shift is coming in the future. I think it’s here now. And we have a pivotal role that we can play when we talk about this idea of value.

In summary, this book is my contribution to that future. It’s a blueprint for learning, talent, and HR to become value creators, value seekers. How do you measure value? How do you tell the story of value? Because what we do has tremendous value. We just largely lack the language, the vocabulary, the skill set, the mindset, and the tools to articulate the value of what we’re already doing.

Nolan: I have to say, Keith, when I was reading it, it’s funny you mentioned blueprint. It did seem so, saying it seemed formulaic makes it seem like it was a dry book, and it wasn’t at all a dry book, but it was almost, “If you do this, you will get this out of it”. It was the perfect handbook, in my opinion, a great handbook to have with you. There are things in there that specifically say, “Hey, if you’re looking for something, if you have something great, if you don’t have a way to generate value or to tie what you’re doing back to value, this is a great place to start”.

Dr. Keith: I appreciate that you recognize that, because I think what’s important for me is I want anything I do to be practical. Look, we have a lot of thought leaders out there. I don’t ever want to be a thought leader; I want to be a practitioner who’s doing the work, and I want to share with others what I’m doing: “Hey, this has worked for me in my context. If you don’t have something or it’s not working for you in your context, try this.” I think that practical application is hopefully what comes across as being valuable.

Nolan: I want to call that out because we’ve seen that. I lead a marketing organization, so I’m always tracking what gets the most clicks or the views or whatever. The content that we get the most attendance for, whether it’s webinars or whatever, is the practical application. One of the things that I run is AI. I remember the first AI presentation I ever gave; I looked at the schedule of AI, and everything was strategy, strategy, strategy. I was like, “Don’t people actually want to know how to use it? Aren’t some people wanting to just try, open up Claude, and write a prompt?” This is definitely the book for that, and I think the demand is, I mean, you’ve seen it; it’s all over LinkedIn. The demand is there, it’s a great book, and I think it’s really served that purpose.

L&D–CFO Partnership Insights

Nolan: One of the things you mentioned the value and how you get value. There was one critical role and it maybe comes back to your origins, but anytime we’re talking about bringing value back to the business, one of the things that I thought was interesting is usually the business is, I don’t know, it’s like some being that doesn’t, you know, it’s like value back to the business, something you specifically call out is the relationship of the CFO, the Chief Financial Officer, with L&D. Talk to us a little bit about that relationship and why that was so important, because it’s one of the first chapters in your book as well. Why was that such a thing to stress as important? Because I also am not hearing it from others, although I agree with you that I think it is so critical.

Dr. Keith: Interesting fact: 25% of CEOs were CFOs. So, once upon a time, the CFO, if you look back in the 80s and 90s and you watch like ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ or anything with smart people, you know, you have the tape and the glasses and anybody in finance was looked down upon, or they were a nerd or a geek, fast forward to where we are today, finance are the leaders, to the point now where the job trajectory for CFOs is CEO. That’s how important the CFO is.

To take a step back as to why I am advocating so much for CFOs: The story behind that is I was working for a Fortune 500 company. We had a massive win. We had maybe a $3 million quote ROI, that’s a different discussion and then we had about a $2 million cost avoidance. I was really proud of both of those and I wanted to share the story. My boss pulled me aside and said, “We can celebrate it internally, but do not tell anybody, especially finance.

If you tell finance that we have cost avoidance, they’re going to reduce our budget that same amount. If you tell finance that we have an ROI result, they’re going to expect us to replicate that same amount every year moving forward. Don’t talk to finance”. This fear had built up, and as I thought about it more, I realized that fear has always been there because we have this saying: “L&D is the first budget to get cut”.

All this is happening at the same time that I was starting my doctorate, and I thought, “What better group of people to study to learn about CFOs? Let’s find out, is any of this actually real, or are we creating this echo chamber of beliefs that may not actually exist?” I ended up researching CFOs for my doctorate. I interviewed Fortune 500 CFOs to understand how they think or what they think about organizational learning, what influences their training budget process, and where those disconnects might be.

I found a lot of insightful information. First of all, every CFO I spoke to believes in the power of learning. They see people as strategic assets. They understand that learning can drive confidence, retention, and growth. But here’s the most interesting part of that: They also admitted that learning is not a top priority for them. They also could not tell me how much they invested in their people each year. I could say, “Hey Nolan, how much did you invest last year in IT?” And they would say, “37 million.” “How much did you invest in your people?” “I don’t know, but people are our most important asset.” Really? There seems to be a disconnect there.

What that uncovered was, it’s not that they don’t necessarily care about it. There’s a difference between how they find this concrete versus tangible impact. CFOs are wired; they’re held accountable to prioritize measurable, tangible outcomes, operational efficiencies, client impact all of this stuff that really sits in this world that’s abstract to us. We talk about engagement, we talk about confidence, we talk about collaboration, which is all very valuable, but that’s so hard to see on a financial dashboard. They’re not dismissing learning; they’re just not seeing it in the same way that we see it. It’s not that there’s a lack of belief in what we do; it’s the lack of visibility, and that’s where we have to step up.

In order for us to work with CFOs, first of all, we have to build a relationship with them. We have to connect human impact to their business outcomes. They largely said, “Don’t send me an Excel spreadsheet. I don’t want to see your ROI because that’s not how I translate it into ROI”. My next question was, “How do you?” And they’re like, “Yes, that’s the question you should be asking me: What do I want to see, not what do you see? I don’t care who Kirkpatrick is. I don’t follow that. I don’t follow Phillips’ ROI”. And that’s no disservice to them at all. And in the book, I really try not to discredit anybody else’s theories or philosophies, those are the OGs for a purpose. What I’m trying to institute is taking their frameworks and reframing all of it to the business, and the business includes the CFO. The CFOs would tell me, “Bring me the story. Don’t just bring me your Excel, your data, but tell me better stories that are grounded in evidence. We don’t just want data; we want the story behind it”.

Nolan: I actually found that really fascinating. I realized I never really peeled the onion back, and it wasn’t until I was reading your book that I really understood it from the mind of the CFO. For me, one of the most awe-inspiring things was that it’s not just about the data. Then you outline the three different parameters of which they really wanted to see: economic, personal, and societal. I would have assumed that all the CFO cared about was if I’m spending a million bucks on my onboarding training program, show me that it’s somehow going to save me over four years $5 million, or whatever it is. Can we expand on that a little bit, because at least for me, that didn’t come naturally when I thought, “Speak to the CFO in terms they want to hear.”

Dr. Keith: Part of it is we have to help the CFO to care. One of the quotes that one of the CFOs said to me, which has stuck with me, is, “I have so many fires at my feet. I don’t care about this. I can’t care. This is not a priority to me”. So, it’s our job to build that relationship to make it a priority for them. The CFO’s sole responsibility is to understand the value of every aspect of that organization. If you ask yourself, especially if you’re a learning leader, “Has my CFO ever asked me what the value is of what we’re doing?” And the answer is no, that is hugely telling, because how are they calculating what value you’re providing? The answer is: they’re not. We have to help do that work for them by building that relationship with them so that they know what the value is.

Nolan: How do you even go about that introduction? What have you found to be the best strategy to get that dialogue opened when maybe in the past, in the culture of the organization that you’re in, if you went to the CFO and said, “Hey, the head of learning is out here,” he goes, “The head of who? Where do you even start? Do you just approach it, bull in a China shop, barge in?” Where did you find work?

Dr. Keith: It starts with curiosity, being truly curious about who they are as an individual and getting to know them. Ask them questions: “How did you get to where you are? How did you learn how to be a CFO? And what was the most impactful part of that learning journey for you? Was it your university degree? Did you take a course somewhere? Was there a professor that stood out to you? Tell me about that professor. What did that professor do that made that professor so memorable? What was the best program that you’ve ever taken in any organization? And what was the worst?” Just doing qualitative research into them to find out their experience. That’s my technique, because it also gives me insight as to whether or not they’re going to immediately be an ally or not.

Then digging into more about what they would like to see different in the organization or how about their own team? Every CFO has a team behind them, so, “Hey CFO, is there any specific learning programs that are missing right now that might help your team, might help do X, Y, and Z?” I would focus on those.

The other questions I might focus on are understanding the budget process. I mentioned earlier that we have this echo chamber statement about how L&D is the first budget to get cut. Who else thinks they’re the first budget to get cut? Marketing, HR. We think we’re the first budget because that’s our world, but I can tell you, from at least the CFOs that I interviewed, they wholeheartedly said we have never specifically cut the L&D budget. What they’re targeting is service-centric service lines, which is what we are. We are not typically revenue-generating. We’re seen as cost centres for the most part, and cost centres tend to be the first budgets that are cut, but it’s not targeted directly towards us.

Moving Beyond ROI: The Value Creation Compass

Nolan: So, we’ve got this relationship with the CFO. They’re telling you what they want to see, and part of what you’ve talked about is the idea of going beyond just an ROI number. Tell us a little bit about how you go about going beyond ROI and how that’s worked for you in your experience and maybe outline some of the things that you present in your book as well for those that haven’t read it yet.

Dr. Keith: The tool that I put together that I follow is the Value Creation Compass. This is built on the language of the business, not the language of L&D. The Value Creation Compass also reframes value through the lens of how your organization typically defines success so that we can show impact in the way that your leaders already care about. The compass is the directional point, because you can turn in any angle with a compass and it’s going to point somewhere.

I’ll start with North really quick. North is Empowering People. This is our default state in talent development. Everything starts with our people, and that’s why I’ve captured it in the True North. It’s our familiar ground: skills, leadership, engagement, retention all things people-related.

So, I’m not going to dig too much into this. I want to jump to the other three. So, we start with North, focus on the people. Then we move East: This is where we’re Driving Business Growth. East is about connecting learning directly to things like revenue, innovation, market expansion. It’s where we prove how L&D can fuel the business, not just support it. All programs that have reduced the time to market or reduced the time for your new hires to be upskilled, or you’re supporting innovation all of those are growth levers. This is where credibility really accelerates.

For example, at BDO, we have a program called the Business Growth Academy. Our partners and our managers go through this program, and it’s explicitly designed to help strengthen their sales capability and revenue generation, so there’s a clear link there: pipeline development, all this stuff. That’s East.

Then we go South: Building Organizational Resilience. South is about strengthening the organization’s ability to adapt, align, and endure through change. When we focus on resilience, it’s about making learning essential. You might have programs around change management or a transformation. When we help our talent be agile, adaptable, and resilient, we’re helping to strengthen organizational resiliency. That’s South.

Then we move West, which is Delivering Customer Value. This is where we go outside of the walls of our organization. It’s about how we equip our employees so that we’re helping to improve the experience, trust, and the loyalty of our customers not just the employees, but our customers. When employees learn better, customers benefit, but a lot of times we don’t connect those dots. This is where a big part of our hidden value actually lives, because the customer value is often overlooked, but once we reveal it, there’s a really powerful story there.

For example, we have recently taken one of our internal programs called “Speak with Impact.” We’re delivering it internally, but we’re also offering it for free to our clients. That’s delivering customer value.

The compass isn’t about doing everything at once; it’s about broadening how we define how the business measures value. The goal with the compass is not for you to sit in your office by yourself spinning the compass, figuring out what to do. It is a perfect tool to take to your business and to have a conversation with them. Ask, “What is the most important area where you want to start focusing on for value for you?” Use it to drive the conversation with them.

Nolan: I can see how this book really dovetails from your previous book, where you’re actually giving really practical advice on how to have those conversations, how to get yourself in that mindset. Then here is this book, “Hidden Values,” that is giving you the playbook to go and practice those skills. When you mentioned the customer angle of it, I feel like that gets lost in the noise, but as you said, it is actually what drives most value to a company. I think learning really has the ability to be the advisor in that space, the business advisor, to say, “Let’s not forget why we’re doing this, which is the customer”. And I think you come to the table, like you said, with that, not you sitting down and saying, let me map out the four. And then, I’ll go to my CFO and I’ll say, here’s my four, but no going to who are the stakeholders at each of the points of your compass? Who are those going to impact? Get their buy-in, get their approval. You now have at least two or three allies with you to go present this solution. It’s just really a phenomenal model that you outlined.

Dr. Keith: And here’s the thing, you, the listener, the royal you, royal we, you’re doing a lot of this already, but you may not be following the bouncing ball or the ripple effect, because we often stop at that first level of, “Here’s the metric that I’m measuring,” not where the value is truly impacting. I guarantee if you sat back, you looked at the framework and you followed it through, you would start to realize, “We are helping organizational resilience down here with these three programs. This is actually linking out, rippling out to our customers”. It’s to empower you to have the language and the tools to have those conversations to get to those two, three, four level down so that you’re speaking in a way that resonates with your business.

Nolan: One question I have, and we kind of have to wrap up soon, but one thing that I always like to think about, especially whenever I read a book, I am so fired up to do that thing. I’m like, “I can’t wait to implement this,” but then I hit a roadblock, and I put it back in the burner. What are those roadblocks? If you’ve read “Hidden Values” or if you’re listening to this and you, we’re going to give away some copies actually. So, that will be fun, so you have your chance to win a copy of the book. what are those potential roadblocks that people need to be on the lookout for? As they’re listening, as they’re going to implement this, if you’re going to fail? I’ve always felt it’s really helpful to kind of plan out what might go wrong, so at least I’m prepared.

What are those potential roadblocks that people need to be on the lookout for as they go to implement this? Where is the potential to hit some roadblocks here?

Mastering Organizational Context

Dr. Keith: I’ll expand the question a little bit because I think what I’m going to say is something that all of us need to remember in that if you’re ever reading a book or listening to a case study, or you’re at ATD or TICE or wherever you’re watching somebody present, please remember this single word: context. Context is crucial. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve sat in somebody else’s keynote and they’ve talked through this beautiful story and I leave feeling less than because in my head I’m like, that doesn’t work for me. That tried that and it didn’t work. So, my, my cliff note or Cole’s note for those in Canada is Everything has to be contextualized to your organization.

Just because it worked for me is not a guarantee that it’s going to work for you. You have to take a step back and look at where your organization is in that maturity level. Do they want you to succeed? Do you have a learning culture? Does your stakeholder allow you to have a voice? What I did at General Motors I could not have done at Arch well. What I’m doing at BDO would not have worked at HSBC.

The idea is for you to read the books, do the keynotes, do all those things, put them in your toolkit to know these are tools that you can choose from, but it has to be the right problem at the right solution at the right time with the right tool. The answer to your question is: Where are you going to fail? You’re going to fail if you assume that this is going to always work regardless of your context. You have to first take a step back and figure out things: Are you brand new? If you’re just starting out, first, you have to build your credibility and you have to build the trust before you come in guns blazing with the Value Creation Compass and all these things. Step back, take time, listen, build a relationship. Does your company have a learning culture? Maybe they don’t. Now you’re having to push even harder uphill.

So, I guess that feels a little bit negative and it’s not intended to. It’s to say, look, start with the context. Make sure that everything is through the lens of your organization and where you are in that journey because you may not be as mature as somebody else. The next piece of where you can fail is not spending time understanding the business. Our job is to know our business just as good, if not better, than our stakeholders, so that they don’t get a chance to say, “You don’t know my business,” and then shut us down. With tools like Gen AI, you have no excuse at this point. Use Gen AI, the World Economic Forum, McKinsey Global Institute as unbiased as possible, it’s free research firms. Go out, understand the industry, understand your competitors, understand your stakeholders. Bring them your ideas, bring them some of the research, rather than just going to them as an order taker and saying, “What can I do for you?”.

Nolan: I think the role of the learning and development professional is one of the hardest roles to be in, depending, whichever hat you want to put on, right? So sometimes learning and development gets related to like a marketer because they’re both after engagement, right? You’re trying to get people engaged to buy in. Well, you have to create an ad that works for the 18-year-old intern in the 80-year-old, whatever, in the 50-year-old, in the 20-year-old, in the male, in the female, you don’t have a target demo. Your target demo is the whole company. You’ve got a tough job, and as you said, knowing that context of what the business is that I’m trying to operate in.

And you’ve said it twice now, and I think I will now make it a third time because I think it is that important. One of the critical things that we learned as we started implementing AI in our organization. We significantly undervalued the democratization of our subject matter expertise, how important that was going to be. Our biggest time suck is getting context, it’s getting subject matter buy-in, and it is getting that information of what we’re trying to solve, getting the points of the compass and then getting the details about it. No longer do I need to go to the one person in the company who understands this very complicated technology. I don’t need to go to that person anymore and say, I can start with, “I know everything about your world. Is this accurate?” I believe that is so darn important. You will save yourself so much time if you allow yourself to get that context.

Positioning L&D Strategically

Dr. Keith: I have one last one that I would share. As I think about the future of our industry, you have to get outside of your box. You have to get outside of this L&D box: “I’m just an instructional designer,” “I’m just a facilitator,” “I’m just in learning”. If you met me on the street and you said, “What do you do?” I would say, “I’m a problem solver. I happen to use learning and development as one of my tools to solve problems for people”. I’m a CLO. I spend less than half of my time on formal learning stuff.

I am personally moving away from hiring traditional L&D people who are so stuck in Kirkpatrick and all the lingo that nobody wants to use, because we’re so much more than that. Continue to evolve past just that. Marketing is one of the most important skill sets that we have to develop, because you are marketing. We get frustrated because others don’t care about what we do as much as we do. We’re paid to do this. Stop taking it personal when people don’t care and make them care. You make them care by understanding why it’s valuable, relevant, and necessary for them, and you market it to them.

Nolan: Yeah, now we’re going way over time, but I gave us a presentation on this. Said, it was fairly math driven. So, I think I lost some people in the math, but I said, listen, if you’re going to spend. I’ll just do a round number. If you’re going to spend a million dollars on pre-built content, your Skillsoft, LinkedIn Learnings or whatever of the world. You spend a million dollars on that, and we have 10,000 learners. That’s $1,000 per learner. That’s pretty reasonable Cause look at, we’re getting a 1 million courses and that’s how we calculate costs per learner. But if we said, well, what was the consumption of the, even get to whether it had ROI back to what they applied or anything. Just take it that one, just one baby step further. How many people consumed that?

Do you know the benchmark is 10 to 20 %? That’s what they’re considering great. And 10 to 20% means one person access the course one time. That’s how most of these metrics are right. I said, “If you leverage that, your cost per learner has now grown by nine times, because they didn’t take it”. And I said, instead, I’m not saying don’t take, it’s not a knock-on LinkedIn learning or whatever, I’m saying, take the million dollars, but spend maybe $800,000 on the courses, save out a couple of things, and spend $200,000 marketing it. Because if you spend $200,000 marketing it, you’re getting more value. The cost per learner actually goes down with consumption.

So, it was a really like a fun experiment that we ran with a lot of people because I, especially today, I think that’s the real, I think a lot of people are scratching their head at: How do I get that engagement to my learning program? Are they only going to want to learn be an agent? How are we going to get that information? I think is like the very big top of mind for everybody because it does solve that problem of if I just, you know, if I create content just to create content and nobody takes it, what’s the value?

Dr. Keith: The model has to change. They’re going to quickly need to switch to a consumption model, because at this point, I’m ready to drop it until that happens. I’ll pay for what people use, but I don’t want to pay the million dollars to have it sit there. I think as more people push the market that way, the value is going to go up.

Nolan: And that’s what I think a lot of leaders like yourself are pushing. And some of these organizations are making those changes. They’re trying, starting to say, you know, pay for performance. If you take it, we did this program for a company and we actually implemented that. We said, this was, it was a massive leadership program where people signed up to take it right. It was part of a series.

And we said, listen, we’re not going to charge you a cent for the building it. We’ll actually help promote it, will get people to it, will manage it on the back end, and you’re only going to pay when somebody shows up to the classroom. And for them, why would they not sign that? You know what I mean? It’s like, so I’m only paying when people actually learn? That’s a great model. I think as more people like you kind of push the market that way, I think the value is going to go up.

Closing Thoughts

Nolan: So, thank you so much for spending even more time than we had allotted for.

Dr. Keith Keating, your amazing book, “Hidden Values,” will be offering some to our listeners here to check it out. Hidden Value, you can see there. It’s a phenomenal, phenomenal book. know I don’t want to guarantee, but I can almost guarantee if you pick it up and even skim through some of these things, go to the Compass and just kind of have that out, you will start to see some value.

Definitely the $20 or whatever it is, the value of the book. I can tell it’s a phenomenal book. I can almost guarantee if you pick it up and skim through some of these things, go to the compass and just have that out, you will start to see some value. The value of the book I can tell you, you’re going to get that back. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

Dr. Keith: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Nolan: Thank you.