When I returned home after three days of learning, sharing, and collaborating with global leaders in the learning and performance space, I was asked if I could summarize the experience in one word. It’s this: Charged! It captures the affect, which consolidated a long list of emotions I felt during the conference, including excitement, passion, creativity, and perhaps the most ever-present feeling that still resonates is relief! 

Early March 2020 was the last time I had had physical contact with people and organizations that comprise my world of work. If you love the work you do, then those with whom you interact and the organizations in which you strive to make a difference are the lifeblood of who you are. We are whole in our work when vision, mission, passion, and action all converge. A colleague once said that there is no sense in working if you cannot have Fun with a capital F every day. The COVID-19 pandemic ripped pieces from these attributes and scattered them to the wind. 

To be sure, the business I founded in 2002 with a handful of employees was virtual from the start, and by many measures, very successful. Nonetheless, we had been able to travel to client sites worldwide and often spend weeks and months onsite in places like Bengaluru, Chennai, Tokyo, Takasaki, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, London, Munich, Toronto, Singapore, Juba, Dublin, and across the United States. The last major activities in which I was engaged for more than five years prior to the pandemic involved over 170 countries worldwide. Then suddenly it all came crashing down.

We all know the aftermath, as organizations struggled to cobble together technological solutions for delivering education and training, with very mixed results. It was not that a foundation for virtual collaboration had not been established. For example, I began my online learning journey in the early 1970s and immersed myself in this exciting field from that point onward. Many organizations had, of course, implemented all sorts of technology to enhance and expand online learning and performance. But for the most part, organizations were caught with their proverbial pants down. It is instructive to recall one of the stories behind the idiom, as reported here:

“Caracalla...who was Roman Emperor from 198 to 217 took a break to urinate on the side of the road. His bodyguards…turned their backs… to give the Emperor a bit of privacy. Julius Martailis took advantage of the situation, rushed in, and stabbed the emperor in the back…”

Caracalla is clearly the metaphorical organization, Martailis the pandemic, and the bodyguards the available technologies that were perhaps capable, but not positioned to help.

A theme that permeated the keynotes and parallel sessions can be summarized by Grudin’s Law:

If technology does not serve the person who does the work, then it will fail or be subverted.

The overwhelming majority of talks addressed attention to one significant domain of learning: Affectivism. Adult learning 101 addresses three domains of learning and performance: Cognitive, Psychomotor, and Affective. In my experience, academia apportions attention to the triumvirate, respectively, as roughly 75:20:5; the business world 20:79:1. In other words, affect is too often given little bandwidth. It is this lack of attention—and our woefully inadequate ability to address it—that caused much of the failures and challenges in learning and performance during the pandemic. TLIC posited activities, protocol, and innovations to close the gap. And I was charged.

It is a fact that there were technical challenges around the presentations, which were, after all, hybrid (live and virtual). A small army of technicians were on hand to jump in and troubleshoot when presentation sharing failed, when screen real-estate was too small to see the slides, when audio failed, and more. I’m not saying this to criticize, as such is the state of these technologies. To the contrary, I am grateful to the organizers of TLIC for having the wherewithal to anticipate the challenges. What made the conference such a success was the live collaboration, which rendered the tech challenges merely occasional nuisances.

I was so excited to be there, to absorb the keen insights of the presenters, and to have opportunities to collaborate. I confess that I perhaps dominated some of the Q&A sessions (apologies to the other attendees) because I was so charged by the experience. It was difficult to hold back my excitement, my interest, and my lust to speak face-to-face. Me—a long-time advocate of technology-based learning—had my passions restored by the experience. The notes I took, references I scribbled, and contact connections are voluminous and meaningful. In many ways, I came back to life because of the collaboration and in spite of the technology glitches.

Jonathan Grudin was right. In this case, the technology didn’t fail when it did not serve us. It was subverted by human intervention, face-to-face. Want a simple example? A slide or video inexplicably disappeared, and a technician’s struggle ensued. Face-to-face, the presenter ignored the problem and pivoted to well-crafted words, Q&A, and extemporaneous collaboration, without skipping a beat. Nothing was lost as we learners remained engaged, and in many cases the technology subversion actually enhanced learning.
Now that I have come back to life because of TLIC 2022, I see clearly where the challenges and where my next work adventure lie: How do we harness Affect (with a capital A) through technology (e.g., rigorous AI, machine learning, ontology…), to deliver even some of the excitement in our virtual learning and performance initiatives that we experience during live events. I’m on it, and I hope you are, too.