The Talent Forge: Shaping the Future of Training and Development with Jay Johnson

From War Zones to Enterprise: The Power of Micro-Learning with Michael Ioffe

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Imagine transforming complex learning into engaging, bite-sized lessons delivered directly to your phone, just like a text message. In our latest episode on Talent Forge, we welcome Michael Ioffe from Arist to share his revolutionary approach to education. Discover how Michael's experience teaching entrepreneurship in war zones led to the creation of Arist, a platform that redefines learning by making it as simple and accessible as texting. Hear about the impressive data behind Arist's success in increasing user engagement and driving meaningful behavior changes, and learn why user experience and delivery mechanisms are crucial for modern education.

Feeling disillusioned with traditional LMS courses? You're not alone. We address the widespread disengagement among learning professionals and highlight how platforms like TikTok and Duolingo are reshaping the landscape with their captivating, bite-sized content. We discuss the importance of differentiating between foundational and practical training, advocating for a focus on micro-learning or immersive in-person experiences. Discover how AI and real-time data collection can pinpoint knowledge gaps and customize learning experiences, enhancing both efficiency and relevance.

Do you think micro-learning is just about cutting content into smaller pieces? Think again. We bust common myths and emphasize the necessity of intentional design in micro-learning. Learn how to start with the desired behavior change and ensure each segment is complete and valuable on its own. Hear why delivering content through accessible platforms is essential for user engagement and discover the challenges of achieving conciseness. We also explore the future of talent development, discussing how personalized, push-based learning experiences can revolutionize the field and the importance of demonstrating tangible business impact to maintain relevance in organizations.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

All right, everyone, welcome to the Talent Forge. In this episode, we are featuring Michael Yaffe of Arist, and Arist is a really cool company that's been around celebrating its fifth year right now. And, michael, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Yeah, super excited to be here. Awesome, michael, when I got to meet you working with Ford, it was one of the coolest things to hear the story of Ares. Do you mind telling our listeners a little bit about your background and history and how you got to where you're at today?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, of course.

Michael Ioffe:

So, zooming out a bit, I've been obsessed with this question of how do you deliver learning in war zones for a while, and it started initially when I was in high school.

Michael Ioffe:

I started a nonprofit designed to teach people about entrepreneurship and we essentially hosted these three live conversations between students and entrepreneurs all over the world.

Michael Ioffe:

We had about 500 locations in 50 countries, and one of our locations was in the war zone in Yemen, and I became captivated by this question of how do you deliver learning in a place with no laptops, with no internet access, with a sort of education system that wasn't really intact locally, and I started realizing that if we could deliver learning by text message, we could make learning dramatically more accessible because everybody had access to a phone, and so I got really, really excited about sort of this opportunity, and essentially that's sort of where AERIS started. You know, it was initially just a way to deliver learning by a text message, and we started realizing over time that this model that we had created for delivering learning in bite-sized chunks was incredibly, incredibly effective, and if we could find a way to make learning more accessible, you know, at the enterprise level, we could reach a much larger audience of people that in many cases never went to college, never finished high school, but really needed a better and more accessible way to learn. So that's sort of the very quick genesis.

Jay Johnson:

So it's sad that we have to find a way to deliver learning in a war zone still in this modern age, but you've tackled that problem and you have a really unique model with your company and I you know. One of the things I guarantee that most people probably ask you right out of the gate is how do you actually deliver learning by text, and you know what is that. What does that look like in your regard?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, of course. So essentially, yeah, the biggest question we always get is can you actually deliver learning via text message? And we were incredibly skeptical initially. I think the idea of delivering a whole course via text seemed insane, candidly. So what we started realizing is, if you look at sort of most topics right, even relatively complex topics let's say neuroscience right, very, very complex topic the reality is is that that overall complex topic is really made up of a bunch of small individual concepts and case studies and data points that over time build to form a more complex understanding of what a subject is. But the reality is the best explanations are actually very, very simple, right?

Michael Ioffe:

I was chatting with a mathematician yesterday about Fermat's last theorem and even like a relatively complex theorem can be explained in a few sentences if done sort of by a very, very intelligent, thoughtful learning designer, and we started realizing that conciseness was sort of critical to good learning design and that this method really forced conciseness.

Michael Ioffe:

So essentially, a typical text message course consists of a brief lesson so it's 1,200 characters, almost about two screen lengths worth of text, an image or a GIF that can be an infographic, an engaging GIF, and then a series of interactive questions. So every single lesson includes a multiple-choice question with instant feedback, a scenario question with instant feedback and then an exercise that you actually practice in the real world and then come back to Eris and reflect. And so the goal is that you get, you know, a really concise, very digestible piece of knowledge. You practice it, you know, do that scenario practice as well, practice it in the real world then and then come back for reflection. Right, and we found, based on research, that is not only incredibly effective from an adoption point of view but actually drives real behavior change. Right, because it's a digestible space set over time and just dramatically more engaging. If you've ever used a Duolingo, it's kind of the same principles that make Duolingo really effective, but designed for pretty much any topic in an enterprise model.

Jay Johnson:

And that's really fascinating. So it's almost like when we think about the brain as a large, complex organ and there's so much going on in there, but then we can break that down to hemispheres, and then we can break that down to cortexes, and then we can break that down to neurons and then we can break that down to. All of a sudden it becomes a little bit more understandable and digestible. Rather than trying to study the entire complexity of the brain and you're doing that with complex areas like neuroscience and psychology and a number of others how have attendees or participants that have engaged in that, how have they engaged with that concept of micro learning?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, the data has been incredible. So today, eris has the highest completion, adoption, engagement, behavior change, confidence lift and satisfaction rates of any digital learning platform period. So it's been remarkable how something as simple as changing the delivery mechanism for learning changes the entire learning experience. It really doesn't matter how I mean the content has to be engaging right but it really doesn't matter how complex the content is or what the subject is. People are very, very likely to engage and enjoy the experience if the course is delivered in a way that meets them where they are. And that's kind of been the biggest takeaway is delivery and user experience really matters. I think one of the things that we think about often is you know, there's a reason why one click checkout on Amazon works really really well, right?

Jay Johnson:

It's because I was just going to go to that too, so fun it makes it so easy, right, and it's the same principle here.

Michael Ioffe:

How can we make learning one?

Jay Johnson:

click for people. I'm going to comment on something here because, as an old school trainer Michael, there's probably a few old school trainers out there that are going what the hell am I going to do with my life once this all takes over and I'm no longer needed? But I know that we still need content designers, developers, deliverers and all that, so we'll get into that in a second. But what I wanted to bring up was when we think about, say, the time constraints that people are under right Like people are told to do more with less.

Jay Johnson:

So the very idea of having to go to an LMS, log into the LMS, then go to your profile, go to find whatever courses that you want or go to do X, y and Z and then actually watch, pay attention, engage in whatever kind of level of engagement that's built into that course, that's a lot of ask, and when people aren't able to do that sort of in real time, they have to actively behave and think to go to that LMS and do that, whereas yours is delivered sort of almost in real time. It's delivered via text message or by WhatsApp or by and I know that you've got a number of mediums. How has that essentially like when somebody maybe comes in as a non-believer in the concept and then all of a sudden they're hit with these lessons, they're learning important skills in real time. How has that sort of shifted maybe mindsets? Have you seen that occur?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, 100%. So I think the first thing is, when you explain errors verbally, it makes little sense, right. When you try it, it really clicks, and that's been, you know, I think we find we've honestly had a lot of people that have been very, very skeptical until they've tried it and they're like, oh wow, this actually works super well. It makes a lot of sense.

Michael Ioffe:

The question that we always ask is if you are a learning professional, how many courses have you taken in your LMS over the past year? And the answer is almost always zero, right. And so it's kind of this like thing where you know, if it's like a chef who never eats their own food, right, like if you expect, if you're building all this content and you're never taking it, how can you expect anybody else to take it? You are the learning professional. It is your job to create and deliver an experience, learning and make it better, and so, to be completely candid, I think there's a lot of hypocrisy in the way that a lot of learning teams operate and it's uncomfortable to call out and it's uncomfortable to discuss, but it's the truth, and so a lot of the process of helping people sort of believe if you will, is kind of calling out like hey, like you're not actually using the stuff you're creating. Currently, what you are using is Tik TOK and Duolingo, so why don't you do the same thing internally, right?

Jay Johnson:

Well, you know and that's the funny thing, right, like, is it the number of courses that I have signed up for that were on an LMS or on demand? I generally just try to click through, get to what I actually want to look at or anything else like that, and I honestly feel 80% of it is probably not relevant, not useful, not functional for me. In most cases and I'm not going to say in all cases, but that's been particularly frustrating, especially when the system's not operating. This with Airst, and I have taken some of the courses. I love them. They're very much in line with some of the things that I know as a behavioral scientist, like, for example, micro learning.

Jay Johnson:

Right, don't try to feed somebody from the fire hose when you really just need them to maybe act on one behavior or two behaviors. So I wanna go to that in just a second. But stay with the. If you're a trainer and you're somebody who is a creator of content or anything else like that, you're not necessarily saying, hey, get rid of all face-to-face training. You're not saying that there's no space for that, but you are saying that this is a fantastic opportunity for behavioral nudge reinforcement. Can you speak to that just a little bit so that way you know my listeners don't go, I'm out of here, yeah of course, of course.

Michael Ioffe:

So the way that we think about it is that, if you look at the bucket of training that has happened within an enterprise, um, you know 80 of training is really foundational stuff, right, it's compliance, basic leadership development, right, getting people on the same page about company updates, right, really, core skills like giving and receiving feedback.

Michael Ioffe:

Um, right, like core soft skills for core behaviors.

Michael Ioffe:

Um, it's stuff that, like the way that we think about, is everything that you would use like a linkedin learning for, or a udemy for, or like a udacity for uh or a Udemy for, or like a Udacity for or a Coursera for, like.

Michael Ioffe:

All of that stuff exists online and that means that if it exists online, it can probably be done by Eris, right? So that 80% is the stuff that we want to replace with stuff that's more engaging, you know, more in the flow of work, more relevant, it takes less honestly, just waste less time. However, on the flip side, there's 20% of training that's highly, highly meaningful, deeply hands-on and oftentimes has to be either live or in person, and we need more of that, right. So the way that we think about it is we think the middle is falling out, right, there's this huge middle of like e-learning and courses that people just don't take, of like e-learning and courses that people just don't take, and we want everything to either be super bite size in ARIS or deeply meaningful in person, where everybody's super focused on being in the moment right.

Jay Johnson:

Immersive, yeah, Immersive active, engaged, and you know where you're actually exploring, yeah, so well, and I think that that was such a fascinating look at this, right, Like the blending of technology. We know that AI is here. We know that there's a number of other factors here that has every industry going okay, where's my position in 10 years and 15 years and 20 years? But this is, you know, this is not technology that was developed yesterday, and I know that your platform uses AI, but I mean, you're talking about delivery mechanism through text and delivery mechanism that's right on time, right on target. I want to get into that just a moment, because I thought one of the coolest things about the Aorist approach is that you actually get to use the data that comes in from. Are people engaging? Are they answering the questions correctly? Are they, you know? Does this person excel more in this topic than this person? Does this person need more support? What an incredible resource to gather that data. Can you talk a little bit about that, Michael?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, I think that's been one of the most interesting things is that today, if you look at most learning experiences, we really only capture one point of data right, like the exit survey or the assessment at the end of the course.

Michael Ioffe:

Right, with Eris, we capture data, multiple points of data in every bite-sized lesson, right, and so we just have way more data on where the knowledge gaps are, and for our clients, that's enabled them to actually, in time, pinpoint exactly where knowledge gaps exist per team, per location, per individual, and fill those knowledge gaps in in real time.

Michael Ioffe:

So it's just an unprecedented level of data fidelity that you just historically never had, and you can use that to inform the business, you can use that to make adjustments and interventions in real time and, I think to your point, the thing that we get really excited about is the ability to then use that data to automatically create interventions and automatically address course experiences.

Michael Ioffe:

Today we have a suite called Eris Automations that lets you trigger learning based on any data source in Eris or within the organization, and so you can do really cool stuff, like when a manager is first promoted, instantly enroll them in a new manager onboarding course, when a rep is struggling with a discovery based on gong or call recording calls or call recording data, you can instantly trigger a course on how to do more effective discovery, so you can essentially use all the data internally to actually create better learning outcomes and performance outcomes. I think just one thing that I'll mention here is we find that there's an obsession with number of hours of learning delivered with most enterprise learning teams. What we forget is that learning is designed to improve performance. We are enterprise learning teams designed to improve enterprise performance, and the best way to improve enterprise performance is to actually have a very clear understanding of where performance is lacking and then fill in those gaps accordingly, and that's been kind of what's missing for most teams.

Jay Johnson:

Well, it's huge. That's the modern day needs assessment. You know even places like the Association for Talent Development with their ADDIE model, and you know I actually spoke with Dr Esther earlier, a guest who we got really deep into needs analysis, and how cool is it that you're able to actually take a needs analysis from behavioral data within the organization or trigger points within the organization. This person just got promoted. Let's load a manager training for this person and it can be very individualized, which is pretty cool too. I want to stick with this concept of micro learning, right Like. So I know that there's a number of freelance practitioners and even people within organizations which obviously will share your information, so if they want to get in touch with you, but for those that are maybe in that freelance space, what lessons would you share with somebody about the concept of micro learning? Like, how would you help them to maybe think about their redesign of their content, or how would a person that is delivering face-to-face really capitalize on some of the value propositions of your philosophical approach?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, sure, sort of three things that we recommend when it comes to microlearning. The first one is that you have to start with the outcome in mind and work backwards, right? So if you're building a course, you have to start with, like, what is the actual behavior that we want people to take, and then work backwards and then be super, super intentional and very concise from there, right? I think far too many people approach microlearning in the other way, where they're like hey, we're going to have a subject matter expert, give us a ton of content and we're going to chop it up into bite-sized chunks. Just chopping something up into smaller chunks, that's not microlearning, right. That's taking existing learning and just making it Right. Microlearning is being intentional, right, and that's, I think, something that a lot of people miss To that point.

Jay Johnson:

I'm going to come back to your second point, but to that you know it's so interesting because that's true of not just microlearning, that's also true of like those long, deep facilitated sessions. I mean that's one of the questions today. In our behavioral science special interest group at the ATD we actually dug right into that, like when Kirby vacuum salesmen were like hey, we need sales training, we need sales training. And actually somebody came in and said why your numbers are fantastic, you need to knock on more doors. That's the only thing you need to do. The behavior is knocking on doors because when you do that, you've been successful and it's just like okay. So how do we get to that point? So I love what you're saying there. Start with the behavior that you want to change, that you want to modify, that you want to adopt, or that you want to disintegrate from an organization and work from there. All right. Number two go for it.

Michael Ioffe:

Yes, exactly, yeah. Number two is sort of aligned with that, in the sense that, you know, the biggest myth with microlearning is that you can't teach full courses, whatever that means, right? You can't teach complex content, as we mentioned earlier. That's just wrong, right? Like microlearning is a philosophy of just being more concise, right, it's not making things smaller, it's being more concise and more intentional, right? Um, and to me, the thing that frustrates me the most is when somebody's like oh, we made a micro learning and it's like a 20 minute video, right, or like a like a 10 minute video. It's like that's not micro learning, right? Like you're, you're just cutting things up into smaller chunks. It's 20 minutes. It's 20 minutes, it's a. It's a long period, of that, you know, and I'm 25. In my world, that's a hell of a lot of time, you know, and so so I think that's.

Michael Ioffe:

The other myth is is you know, you have to. You have to approach microlearning with the belief that this is all anyone's going to get, right? Even if it's being used as a reinforcement to live session, you should build the microlearning with the anticipation that this is all anyone's going to get and it's an end-to-end course, holistic within itself. And the third core component is and this is we're biased, but my belief is that if you are delivering microlearning via an LMS or via a third-party platform, you are losing all of the benefit of microlearning, right? The benefit of microlearning is that it's small and it can embed into somebody's day-to-day life, and if that's the case, then it should be embedded into their day-to-day life, which is usually via text message, teams or Slack or email on the platform somebody already uses, right, and so if you take a 20-minute video, even a five minute or three minute video, but you send it in a place that takes 20 clicks to access, that, then, like, it's going to take as long to access that micro learning as it is going to be to to actually engage with it, and so that's sort of what we also consider is um, the most important part of bite-sized learning is the user experience of it. It's a user experience challenge, and the last thing that I'll mention here is that conciseness is really hard right, and I think that's the reason why people usually take the easy route with bite-sized learning. They're like, oh, I made this thing smaller, the reality.

Michael Ioffe:

We did this exercise with a client where we gave everybody a group of learning designers three or four paragraphs of text and we're like, hey, make this into? We had people compete to see who can make it as concise as possible and uh, one learning designer got it down to 60 characters with no loss in them. Four paragraphs to 60 characters. 60 characters is like a sentence, right, um? Less. It's a small sentence, right, um? And that that's. That's the reality of what microlearning forces people to do. You can be really really effectively concise in a really short space.

Jay Johnson:

Why say it in a hundred words when you can say it in 10? Yeah, and it's funny, because this is the underlying philosophy of what I try to teach all of the trainers that are coming in is if it's simple, people will do it. If it's easy, people will do it. If it's hard, if there's a lot of friction, meaning that you don't have that one click buy, it takes you 15 clicks to get to the cart and make the sale in the transaction People are going to quit. They're not going to follow through. If it's not happening in real time or when it's convenient for them, they're going to do it tomorrow. And we all know what tomorrow means. It means it doesn't get done, or they cram it all together in you know one evening or anything else like that, to try to just get through it, as opposed to spending the time engaging the content. And this is actually something that I've been doing, even in my face-to-face facilitation. So, like on a four-hour session, we might be having some really deep dialogue, we might be getting into some issues, but instead it used to be where it's like all right, I want 10 things that I want my audience to walk away with. That's not the case, and I've stopped doing that many years ago and I now got it down to. Here are the three things that you need to do to be successful. Now let's spend more time on those three issues so that way you get really good at them and they become really comfortable for you in that four hour session, rather than here's 10 things. Good luck, go, do you know one of those 10 things and it's going to make you better, but it does it.

Jay Johnson:

When you're a learning development and a learning designer or a trainer. You know so much content, but you didn't build that content up yesterday. You built it up over the course of a career, but you want to give all of that idea. How do you help, maybe, trainers when they, when they walk in and they're starting to walk into that microlearning? How do you get somebody to step back and say, yes, everything that you have to teach, all your knowledge is so important, but get it down to three things or get it down to one thing, or get it down to that simple. How do you get somebody to sort of take that step, michael?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, it's really hard and I don't think we figured it out fully yet. I think that the reality of the situation is right. Is that if you are an expert at something, right, you firmly believe that all of your knowledge is mission critical, right? Like you believe that everything that you have to share is really, really important? And it's very, very uncomfortable to be like. Actually, most of what I know is completely irrelevant to this audience, right, this audience will only be able to take away one or two things, and I really want them to do these two or three things, right? So I think it's just like it's an uncomfortable behavioral shift, right, that somebody has to go through, and the only way that we've seen it work is by being super blunt about the fact that, hey, you are about to deliver learning to this audience. No matter what, you think this audience actually only cares about knowing these two to three things, and we've noticed I mean candidly a lot of practitioners don't ask the audience what the audience wants to know, right?

Michael Ioffe:

So we end up in funny situations every once in a while where you know, we talk with a subject matter expert or a learning facilitator or a leader and they're like hey, like, we want to deliver all of these topics on all these courses and people love our training.

Michael Ioffe:

People love it when we go super in depth and then we interview the learners and the learners are like no, this is the worst training I've ever had. I'm sitting in a room for six hours and this is not practical or relevant. This could have been an email and the reality is, if you're a facilitator or a learning leader and you go and ask your audience oh, like, what do you want to learn? You're going to hear what you want to hear A and then B. If you ask for feedback after, people are going to tell you what you want to hear. Like, fundamentally, like you know, people are nice, they're not going to give you blunt feedback and that's where sort of you know, we end up in a funny situation sometimes where we get this super blunt feedback from learners and a lot of our job ends up being kind of communicating that blunt feedback to learning leaders and it's it's that's sort of the only way we've seen it work so far.

Jay Johnson:

So yeah, Well, and it's funny you say that, because when we look at, actually, the stats on training effectiveness and whether it creates behavioral change, nine and this is this is from the research Nine out of 10 trainings absolutely fail to make any impact or any difference. And when you think about that, you start taking a step back and you go well, wait a second, that's not nine out of 10 trainers, but if you're a trainer, nine out of 10 of your trainings, based on a massive study of these different things, did not produce results. You got to start looking at yourself and going I'm part of that nine out of 10. Somewhere in there I am part of that nine out of 10. But that's a difficult lens to look through.

Jay Johnson:

So I love the concept of the sort of like radical candor when it comes to feedback, and it seems to me that people are probably a little more blunt when it comes to feedback. And it seems to me that people are probably a little more blunt when it comes to text message feedback or reactive feedback in that space. So you know, michael, when I, when I'm looking at this and and all that you've accomplished in the last five years and I heard you say that you're 25, which is so impressive. Where do you see sort of if you were to make predictions. What's the future? You know, because we talk about shaping the future of talent development. What are some of the future trends that you see in this talent development and learning development space?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah. So I'm going to start with the sort of optimistic side and I'm going to go into the pessimistic side. Okay, the optimistic side is that I think the technology and the data exists today. Everything already exists. It's just a matter of implementing it, where we can take internal data and deliver the right learning at the right place in the right time for every single individual. So I believe that learning within enterprises will become far more pushed and not pulled.

Michael Ioffe:

What we've noticed with employees is that people don't go into the LMS to learn. People don't go into the LXP to learn. All of these LXP platforms don't have a lot of adoption in the long run. That's just the reality of it. What happens is that they get a lot of adoption in the first month or two and then it falls off a cliff because the typical employee most employees actually don't know what they don't know. They don't know what they need to learn to do better at their job and they don't know what their skill gaps are. I mean, I, as the CEO of my company, rely on feedback from my team members to know where my skill gaps are right and ideally, within an organization, every single individual gets learning. Push to them at the right place at the right time, based on where their skill gaps are right, and so we believe that, fundamentally, you know you'll have knowledge management tools and like tools like ChatGPT where somebody can go and pull knowledge, but the reality is people. Actually, if you look at the data, people pull knowledge very rarely and need to be pushed knowledge a lot, and that's sort of where we see the future going. It's also one of the reasons why TikTok won over YouTube. Right, tiktok won over YouTube because when you pull up TikTok, you get like a feed of content that's perfectly created and designed for you. Yeah, it's easy to engage with. You don't need to figure out and search something or find something Like you know. There's no searching or discovery involved. It finds you, finds you exactly, and so we think learning will go the same way and that reality is doable. Today, it's just a matter of learning, teams catching up and implementing that technology and, from our point of view, I think that's going to be hugely game changing because adoption will go up, engagement will go up and, most importantly, performance will go up, because we're actively filling performance gaps and knowledge gaps in real time.

Michael Ioffe:

Where I'm pessimistic is kind of to the point that you were making earlier Today. The nine out of 10 trainings fail right, and for most trainings internally, because of the modalities that we use to deliver training, we actually don't have any data within enterprises to prove that learning teams are making an impact. And so we have this really unfortunate cycle where, every few years, as soon as there is a market dip, a bunch of learning teams get fired, downsized or lose budget and everybody gets blindsided. Everybody's like, oh my God, this is terrible.

Michael Ioffe:

How is our organization not investing in learning? We're so blindsided and it's like, yeah, but I've seen some of these reports that enterprise learning teams give to their CEOs or their CHOs. They're not demonstrating any real impact to the business, and so if you, as a business unit, are not demonstrating business impact on a regular basis, you are in a very precarious position. I think most L&D teams that we work with don't realize that. They think their mandate is to deliver learning and do what the business tells them to do, and then they're blindsided when they get fired. The reality is, their job is to create performance within the organization right and to prove with the data that their training interventions delivered performance impact, and that today doesn't happen for most organizations, and it makes me very scared for the future of the profession, right? So I hope that that doesn't continue to be the case. But those are sort of my predictions 100%.

Jay Johnson:

Why I started the Elite Training Academy is because every training that's a failure honestly makes it harder for me to do training in the future.

Jay Johnson:

So it's self-serving, but I mean, the reality is is, if we don't fix what has been broken for a while, and if we don't acknowledge it, if we put our heads in the sand and just say no, no, no, no, we'll keep doing it the same way that training has been done since the 1910s and don't actually look at what it is to create behavior change and return on investment. Training is going to get cut, whether it's at the individual organization or whether it's at sort of a more global mass scale of hey, you know, we tried this whole learning and development thing. Let's just give people, uh, you know, let's give people, uh, 48 hours a year to go and, you know, learn whatever it is that they want to learn, and that's going to be the end of it. So, um, yeah, I'm with you 100% and if I, if I'm to wrap a bow on this kind of conversation and this is part of the reason why I really wanted you to join me on the Talent Forge, Michael is because when you and I talked, it was just like wow, this concept of micro learning and getting people to engage, because when it's easy and accessible and when we're asking them to actually do some kind of behavioral change wow, what a novel concept.

Jay Johnson:

Or listening to the audience and actually hearing what it is that you need, want or what's not working for you in solving that pain point. I'm loving these conversations, the inclusion of technology in there. How do people get ahold of you if they want to learn more about Aarist, if they want to learn more about you, where's a good place to catch Michael?

Michael Ioffe:

Yeah, of course. Yeah, super accessible. So I'm on email.

Michael Ioffe:

I'm michael@a rist. com

Jay Johnson:

Thanks for joining the Talent Forge and shaping the future of talent d evelopment. I really appreciate you being on the show and obviously we'll be following along and hope to have you back for another conversation soon. So thanks, Michael!

Michael Ioffe:

Thanks so much for having me, Take care.

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