Kirsten:
00:00:09
This week I talk with Ryan Austin of Cognota about storytelling, public speaking, and why learning and development needs to be part of design and operations from the beginning. Let's jump into it. Hello everyone. Welcome to Ongoing Mastery: Presenting Speaking, the podcast and the interview. And today we have Ryan Austin from Cognota. How are you today,
Ryan:
00:00:40
sir? I'm doing great, Kristen. Thanks for having me on your podcast. Excited about this.
Kirsten:
00:00:46
So you've got a really interesting, I'm in the L&D, Learning and Development world. So are you, and you've got a really interesting venture that you're doing right now. Can you tell people a little bit about what Cognota is and who you are and what you're doing?
Ryan:
00:00:59
Sure. Happy to do so. So I'm the CEO and founder of Cognota. We're the first purpose-built operating system for corporate learning and development teams. So for those of you who are in learning and development in the ecosystem, you're gonna be very familiar with. Content like off the shelf content providers or authoring tools, you're gonna be familiar with those delivery systems. Your LMS, your LXP Cognota has nothing, uh, to do with any of that. We're actually infrastructure software for, to power your infrastructure, your operations for the actual learning and development function. How do you manage your workflows, your priorities, your resources, and get data and insight behind all of that to show business impact and ROI to stakeholders.
Kirsten:
00:01:45
Yep. And the reason I wanted to have you on is because I am now connected to Cognota, so I'll say that upfront on the podcast. And I just really love the very practical point of view, the workflow, the sort of, let's look at how it is that we're actually working in teams and working in departments and the thought process. So it's much more of no really what in the nitty gritty needs to happen. So this podcast focuses on presenting and speaking, but that touches. Pretty much every profession except for perhaps being a mime. That's the only one I can think of that would not, would not have it. So how valuable, I mean, you do a lot of public speaking. How valuable is it for your team to get that skillset? Or do they have to come in with that ready to go and kind of hit the ground running? What's your process for that?
Ryan:
00:02:39
It's a good question. So, you know, I look at public speaking as a very important skillset. For any role. If you think about it one way or another, you're almost always selling. Or if not selling, telling stories. Forget about work, right? Like anything in your daily life, when you go and buy milk at your convenience store or grocery store, gonna have a conversation with somebody, somebody's gonna tell some sort of story and whatnot, and this all comes back. To public speaking and how you present information. And the more you learn about that, the more these communication skills can actually benefit you in in life in anything you do, not just your professional career. You know? So from being a CEO, like myself, all the way down to even some sort of frontline skillset, maybe a sales development rep. It's important how you tell the stories, and the clearer, the more concise, the better communicator you are. The more people feel like you're respecting their time and the message is clear, the more they're gonna listen. And then everybody loves a good story. So if you can tie in storytelling into that, you're gonna have a very captive audience who wants to hear more of what you have to say.
Kirsten:
00:03:52
Fantastic. So obviously you have encountered as we all have the death by PowerPoint of just the presenter who goes up and starts kind of reading slides at you and completely missing the point I. When you are doing presentations, obviously you're doing pitches, you've dealt with vc, you've dealt with lots of different settings. What advice do you have from sort of now somebody who's receiving a lot of this for people on what they should think about and keep in the front of their mind when they're doing presenting and speaking professionally?
Ryan:
00:04:28
So I think for people who are just starting out. It's okay not to be sharp around the edges. In fact, I appreciate that more so than trying to perfect things. Trying to perfect anything puts a lot of pressure on yourself. And believe me, public speaking was not always easy for me. I. Sometimes it's still not like I, I might go and do a shot of tequila before I get up on stage. Right. Um, but the first few times that I had to do it, my hands were like this. I was very nervous, very scared. Yep. And if I think back on why that is, it is because the immense amount of pressure that I was putting on myself and trying to perfect things, trying to memorize a script, trying to know every single word in that PowerPoint. And the way you should look at it is if you had. The wisdom to put the PowerPoint together in the first place. That's all coming from tacit knowledge and you already know the information. It's better for you not to read the slides, not to read word for word, and think about like how you're gonna tell that story. And there's a lot of good places to learn that. One of my favorite books is called Tell to Win. Really encourage that. It really helped me on how do you form stories to win in business, in life, et cetera.
Kirsten:
00:05:43
Fantastic. Yeah. Storytelling is incredibly powerful and it's so necessary when people are coming to things. The mistake I often see is that people sort of have a rote script of like, I need to hit these points. How would you encourage people who are kind of stuck to get out of that and get towards storytelling to be able to connect better with their audience? How can they sort of step away from, but I have to say these 12 things.
Ryan:
00:06:10
Well, sometimes those 12 things might be important, like deliverables. So first off, you know, practice makes perfect. I wouldn't try and practice a script. I'd try and practice on just those 12 points. Doesn't matter, like if those are really, really important to your audience, then I would practice towards just those 12 things. 'cause technically you could stand up in front of a room and say, there's 12 things I want you to remember. 1, 2, 3, 4, go to 12. And if they remembered that you had a successful presentation, right? So. If that's the task at hand, then focus on the outcome. That would be my advice, not just on presentation skills, but anything you do, it's like, what is that main outcome I wanna deliver? In this case example, the 12 points in a presentation, and what's that roadmap? Getting to those 12 things, and in this case for a presentation would be, what's the story I'm gonna tell to keep people engaged, to remember those 12 things. And so really starting with the outcome first, which will take a lot of pressure off. It's like this becomes easier. I just need to teach people these 12 things and then working backwards on how you're gonna do that. You know, maybe not sure what those 12 things are in this case, but maybe it's a presentation on walking your dog. And step one is like leashes, right? Yeah. So, so just talk about leashes, like the colors, all the things that people relate to and you know how it's easy to, to put on, and I know that sounds stupid, but. Imagine somebody was telling you about that. It actually captivate your attention because they're telling you a story the way they're describing it, rather than just saying, put on a leash. So I think focus on the experience on, on versus the
Kirsten:
00:07:56
script. I love it. I love that you focused on the experience of it because making an emotional connection is, is so crucial. One of the things that in the learning and development world I've seen, and I know that you've also seen, is that there is a little bit of a disconnect between where a lot of the L&D folks tend to be centered in businesses and to where the business decisions get made. One of the problems is, is that a lot of times folks don't have a seat at the table until later on in the process. So they're more doing cleanup or they're more doing triage on something or going, no, you don't need to teach them 14 million ways to print a document. You know, try and get people on board. Getting into the room earlier is a very specific skillset. How do people get that skillset and what do you recommend they start to do to develop the confidence and the practice to be able to say, no, I really need to be there. I need to be in the room when the decisions are made because I'm gonna be able to impact the bottom line.
Ryan:
00:08:59
Yeah, so it's a tough one. I've actually, this will be the third time in one week that I use this line. So if you've seen me talk about this before, I apologize. But it actually, you know, I have this one slide in a presentation I've been doing recently around something I call a partner operating model, and I'll explain what that is. But a partner operating model is how can learning and development partner with the business to effectively prioritize? Ensure that they're being collaborative in how they partner with the business versus being order takers. And there's two parts to it. How do I structure the partnership from a top down perspective to support corporate business objectives? These are things that are the highest priority items inside of a company. And generally those are described in One year, three year, and five year goals, right? So bigger companies will have a five-year outlook. Smaller companies will say anything past one year, it's just not gonna be effective. 'cause we're still learning. So depending on your company, it's really around how do you get aligned to those one year, three year, and five year goal. As an l and g professional, you don't necessarily have to have a seat at the table. You might want a seat at a table. I would argue that either way, having a seat or not having a seat, you're gonna be really, really effective if you develop that partnership model from a, from a top down perspective to just know what those high level priorities are, one year, three year, or five year in those cases. Now, if you wanna seat at the table and you don't have a seat at the table, you gotta ask yourself. Do you know what's being discussed around the table? First and foremost? Mm-Hmm. Because how can you expect to have a seat at a table if you don't even know what's being discussed around the table? So it's your job to go out to. Actually build those relationships. A good way would be to approach the budget holders. The, you know, if, if you're a part of a function, then you'd go to maybe your director of finance. If you're part of a smaller company, you can talk to the CEO or CFO. You might not have that access if it's a bigger company, but in bigger companies you have hierarchy. So you still have kind of those people who have the insights into what's being discussed on the table to build those relationships and. It's simple in my opinion, having that encouragement to go out to them and say. We want to have strong learning and development partnerships across the business. This starts top down. I and my team need to understand what the most important initiatives are over the next 12 months, 24 or whatnot, so that we can align and as we are collaborating with business functional leaders and those bottoms up partnerships, we can prioritize your money much more effectively and help you get to those end results. So once they start opening up about those things, because now there's alignment on why you're asking to do that. You wanna be a better steward of capital, more efficient and effective on how you're investing time and money to help the company get to their goals. It would be stupid for them not to share those insights. So once you learn those things, you're gonna also be able to start presenting yourselves more strategically. Well, what are the skills that you're trying to accomplish in those one, three or five year? Do you know? I can help you determine those scale. Let's workshop that out. So now you're getting more face time with these stakeholders, building transparency and trust, and you're becoming part of that planning right away, which essentially is starting to give you that seat at the table, right? So that's one way to start doing it top down. But you have to take the initiatives just like, you know how I described my hands were shaky first few times, or actually first three years that I started doing public speaking engagements. Sometimes it even still happens today. Just the nervousness. You know, the nerves that get you about. Breaking through the door to have those conversations. You just gotta do it. 'cause what's the worst that can happen? You say, no, who cares? Your life's going to be the same the next day. Right now on a bottoms up perspective. It's actually a a little bit harder because you have many business functional leaders in bigger companies. Often l and d already has that partner model. You know, one of our customers is one of the biggest manufacturing companies in the world, and the person who we first started working with was the director of l and d who supports the procurement business function. So that is already their business partner is just procurement in other companies. They might not have that partner model from a bottoms up perspective, or they still need to build it, or they're supporting multiple business functions. So those are your bottoms up business functional partnerships. What you wanna do is build something called a learning culture committee or an advisory board, basically finding those champions inside those business functions. We become the voice of problems in their business function, and they're coming to you for help. So that's when L&D starts positioning themselves more as a product management function that is there to solve problems, not be order takers. Right. Nice. So when a VP of supply chain comes to you and says, we're having this problem, we're having too many recalls, we think we need to train people, whatever that business problem is, that's your opportunity to start doing a consultation. Okay, let's take a back step. Here's the problem. Going to outcomes thinking. What do we think success would look like? Like if training or learning and development was the right solution to solve this problem? Forget about how we get there, what's success look like? Let's define that together. And then together with that business functional champion, you work back into the roadmap on what's gonna get there. And it could be off the shelf content, the problem could be solved maybe by sending people to an event. Like do that. If it's cheaper and faster it solves a problem, do that. Or it could be a program and you have to combine things like coaching content, mentorship, right? But Once you define the problem and that outcome, you're gonna be able to work with the partners in between. The best part about this is those business functional leaders came to you with the problem. That means that they have something in it for them that they wanna accomplish. So they're gonna spend more time with you on doing this. Fantastic.
Kirsten:
00:15:36
So what I wanna do, and I wish we had more time because this is absolutely perfect, well, Cognota does something. Really, really well. A lot of things really well, but there is a whole community piece to your work where you are bringing the sort of learning and development infrastructure to a whole bunch of people and saying, okay, let's talk about what worries you or what concerns you have, or what's the latest research? Or, Hey, do you have something fun to share? So you've got this whole piece. Can you talk for a minute about what that is and how people can encounter that? Sure.
Ryan:
00:16:09
So one of the things you're talking about is a community that essentially we sponsor, but you probably won't even know. Cognota sponsors it if you jump in there because we on purpose don't brand ourselves in there. It. Really is coming from a sincere place to help drive the industry and thought leadership further around operations, which, you know, some would argue is boring, but without sound operations, everything else will crumble. So today that community, it's on a domain called www.Learn Ops. So. Just learn and then ops.com, and there's about 5,000 community members growing quickly. It's all L&D professionals helping each other on important topics and people like yourself who are investing time with the community to help them get ahead in certain topics and whatnot. So, you know what we talked about was you doing a coffee chat, a virtual coffee chat with people on these very important presentation skills, for example, and. You know, we'll have over a hundred virtual events next year. So there's a lot of topics not inclusive of something we do that's called the Learn Ops Summit, which is bringing together the best thought leaders in the industry to do a free summit event for the industry. So that's one plate. But to answer your question, I. Cognota is a software company, right, first and foremost, but we really try and focus on how do we help build the ecosystem around learning operations, drive thought leadership. So a lot of the times when you come across Cognota, you won't ever feel like you're being pitched to. We just wanna help you and in helping you, we think you'll come across our software and if it helps to solve the problem that you'll partner with us on that. We don't lead with software sales, we lead with ecosystem and thought leadership, hoping that it builds enough trust that you wanna partner with us one day.
Kirsten:
00:18:01
Yeah. And this is why I, again, why I wanted to have you on here because I just, I find it really refreshing. I. I have been, you know, you and I have both been in the world for a while. I've been in the business for a long, long time, and I'm used to community being sort of an add-on, and you've really baked in community to the core of the company to where just every place that I've encountered Cognota is very much a, Hey, we're all in this together. You know, come on, let's move forward. Because the L&D folks, we as a people tend to be kind of tilted the windmill, let's go solve problems, but that can be very isolationist and very lonely. And so I'd love the fact that there's this, I. Community around it and I encourage everybody to check out Learn Ops, to check out Cognota. Are you gonna be doing anything coming up? Anything you wanna share before we wrap up? Any new surprises or fun things?
Ryan:
00:19:01
Yeah, I mean, Al always doing a lot and sorry about taking my focus off here for a second. I, a two and a half year old show me his firetruck and it's a great firetruck. It's perfect. It's a great firetruck. So look, we're doing a lot of things and. Again, really focusing on building ecosystem and awareness around learning operations or learn ops as we call it. No shorter version, which is abbreviated from like Rev Ops and DevOps, et cetera. But a lot of events. Next year we're gonna do maybe around 10 to 12. In-person community meetups where we do three hour workshops on everything, learning operations, and then there's drinks receptions, after all for free can get certified. We're doing something called Learn Ops Academy, where we're partnering with Chief Learning Officers and providing an accredited curriculum where you can get a coach to help you learn these important concepts and how to apply them while you're learning content, which is pretty cool. And again, we'll have over a hundred virtual events throughout the year on the learn ops.com community, not led by Cognota, led by people like yourself, Kirsten, and other community ambassadors and things like that. So, as you said, this is something that we're doing together as thought leaders and professionals in the industry and doing our part to build up the ecosystem and more awareness around learning operations. So that this whole concept of how do I get a seat around the table no longer exists in five years, like we've helped each other to accomplish that.
Kirsten:
00:20:32
I would've, I would love that. And thank you so much for making the time. And please share, share that the firetruck was awesome, Fantastic. I really appreciate you making time. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so
Ryan:
00:20:44
much for having me.
Kirsten:
00:20:45
Anytime and anybody watching and listening, go ahead and do the like, do the subscribe, do the YouTube thing, leave comments, and let us know what your main thing that you wanna be achieving in the next 3, 5, 10 years with your businesses and how perhaps partnering with different agencies could help you do that. Give us some thoughts. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening. Bye. If you enjoyed this conversation about the entrepreneurial journey, check out season two, episode number 21, my conversation with Kristen Spencer about why storytelling is so powerful. The link is in the show notes.
00:00:09
This week I talk with Ryan Austin of Cognota about storytelling, public speaking, and why learning and development needs to be part of design and operations from the beginning. Let's jump into it. Hello everyone. Welcome to Ongoing Mastery: Presenting Speaking, the podcast and the interview. And today we have Ryan Austin from Cognota. How are you today,
Ryan:
00:00:40
sir? I'm doing great, Kristen. Thanks for having me on your podcast. Excited about this.
Kirsten:
00:00:46
So you've got a really interesting, I'm in the L&D, Learning and Development world. So are you, and you've got a really interesting venture that you're doing right now. Can you tell people a little bit about what Cognota is and who you are and what you're doing?
Ryan:
00:00:59
Sure. Happy to do so. So I'm the CEO and founder of Cognota. We're the first purpose-built operating system for corporate learning and development teams. So for those of you who are in learning and development in the ecosystem, you're gonna be very familiar with. Content like off the shelf content providers or authoring tools, you're gonna be familiar with those delivery systems. Your LMS, your LXP Cognota has nothing, uh, to do with any of that. We're actually infrastructure software for, to power your infrastructure, your operations for the actual learning and development function. How do you manage your workflows, your priorities, your resources, and get data and insight behind all of that to show business impact and ROI to stakeholders.
Kirsten:
00:01:45
Yep. And the reason I wanted to have you on is because I am now connected to Cognota, so I'll say that upfront on the podcast. And I just really love the very practical point of view, the workflow, the sort of, let's look at how it is that we're actually working in teams and working in departments and the thought process. So it's much more of no really what in the nitty gritty needs to happen. So this podcast focuses on presenting and speaking, but that touches. Pretty much every profession except for perhaps being a mime. That's the only one I can think of that would not, would not have it. So how valuable, I mean, you do a lot of public speaking. How valuable is it for your team to get that skillset? Or do they have to come in with that ready to go and kind of hit the ground running? What's your process for that?
Ryan:
00:02:39
It's a good question. So, you know, I look at public speaking as a very important skillset. For any role. If you think about it one way or another, you're almost always selling. Or if not selling, telling stories. Forget about work, right? Like anything in your daily life, when you go and buy milk at your convenience store or grocery store, gonna have a conversation with somebody, somebody's gonna tell some sort of story and whatnot, and this all comes back. To public speaking and how you present information. And the more you learn about that, the more these communication skills can actually benefit you in in life in anything you do, not just your professional career. You know? So from being a CEO, like myself, all the way down to even some sort of frontline skillset, maybe a sales development rep. It's important how you tell the stories, and the clearer, the more concise, the better communicator you are. The more people feel like you're respecting their time and the message is clear, the more they're gonna listen. And then everybody loves a good story. So if you can tie in storytelling into that, you're gonna have a very captive audience who wants to hear more of what you have to say.
Kirsten:
00:03:52
Fantastic. So obviously you have encountered as we all have the death by PowerPoint of just the presenter who goes up and starts kind of reading slides at you and completely missing the point I. When you are doing presentations, obviously you're doing pitches, you've dealt with vc, you've dealt with lots of different settings. What advice do you have from sort of now somebody who's receiving a lot of this for people on what they should think about and keep in the front of their mind when they're doing presenting and speaking professionally?
Ryan:
00:04:28
So I think for people who are just starting out. It's okay not to be sharp around the edges. In fact, I appreciate that more so than trying to perfect things. Trying to perfect anything puts a lot of pressure on yourself. And believe me, public speaking was not always easy for me. I. Sometimes it's still not like I, I might go and do a shot of tequila before I get up on stage. Right. Um, but the first few times that I had to do it, my hands were like this. I was very nervous, very scared. Yep. And if I think back on why that is, it is because the immense amount of pressure that I was putting on myself and trying to perfect things, trying to memorize a script, trying to know every single word in that PowerPoint. And the way you should look at it is if you had. The wisdom to put the PowerPoint together in the first place. That's all coming from tacit knowledge and you already know the information. It's better for you not to read the slides, not to read word for word, and think about like how you're gonna tell that story. And there's a lot of good places to learn that. One of my favorite books is called Tell to Win. Really encourage that. It really helped me on how do you form stories to win in business, in life, et cetera.
Kirsten:
00:05:43
Fantastic. Yeah. Storytelling is incredibly powerful and it's so necessary when people are coming to things. The mistake I often see is that people sort of have a rote script of like, I need to hit these points. How would you encourage people who are kind of stuck to get out of that and get towards storytelling to be able to connect better with their audience? How can they sort of step away from, but I have to say these 12 things.
Ryan:
00:06:10
Well, sometimes those 12 things might be important, like deliverables. So first off, you know, practice makes perfect. I wouldn't try and practice a script. I'd try and practice on just those 12 points. Doesn't matter, like if those are really, really important to your audience, then I would practice towards just those 12 things. 'cause technically you could stand up in front of a room and say, there's 12 things I want you to remember. 1, 2, 3, 4, go to 12. And if they remembered that you had a successful presentation, right? So. If that's the task at hand, then focus on the outcome. That would be my advice, not just on presentation skills, but anything you do, it's like, what is that main outcome I wanna deliver? In this case example, the 12 points in a presentation, and what's that roadmap? Getting to those 12 things, and in this case for a presentation would be, what's the story I'm gonna tell to keep people engaged, to remember those 12 things. And so really starting with the outcome first, which will take a lot of pressure off. It's like this becomes easier. I just need to teach people these 12 things and then working backwards on how you're gonna do that. You know, maybe not sure what those 12 things are in this case, but maybe it's a presentation on walking your dog. And step one is like leashes, right? Yeah. So, so just talk about leashes, like the colors, all the things that people relate to and you know how it's easy to, to put on, and I know that sounds stupid, but. Imagine somebody was telling you about that. It actually captivate your attention because they're telling you a story the way they're describing it, rather than just saying, put on a leash. So I think focus on the experience on, on versus the
Kirsten:
00:07:56
script. I love it. I love that you focused on the experience of it because making an emotional connection is, is so crucial. One of the things that in the learning and development world I've seen, and I know that you've also seen, is that there is a little bit of a disconnect between where a lot of the L&D folks tend to be centered in businesses and to where the business decisions get made. One of the problems is, is that a lot of times folks don't have a seat at the table until later on in the process. So they're more doing cleanup or they're more doing triage on something or going, no, you don't need to teach them 14 million ways to print a document. You know, try and get people on board. Getting into the room earlier is a very specific skillset. How do people get that skillset and what do you recommend they start to do to develop the confidence and the practice to be able to say, no, I really need to be there. I need to be in the room when the decisions are made because I'm gonna be able to impact the bottom line.
Ryan:
00:08:59
Yeah, so it's a tough one. I've actually, this will be the third time in one week that I use this line. So if you've seen me talk about this before, I apologize. But it actually, you know, I have this one slide in a presentation I've been doing recently around something I call a partner operating model, and I'll explain what that is. But a partner operating model is how can learning and development partner with the business to effectively prioritize? Ensure that they're being collaborative in how they partner with the business versus being order takers. And there's two parts to it. How do I structure the partnership from a top down perspective to support corporate business objectives? These are things that are the highest priority items inside of a company. And generally those are described in One year, three year, and five year goals, right? So bigger companies will have a five-year outlook. Smaller companies will say anything past one year, it's just not gonna be effective. 'cause we're still learning. So depending on your company, it's really around how do you get aligned to those one year, three year, and five year goal. As an l and g professional, you don't necessarily have to have a seat at the table. You might want a seat at a table. I would argue that either way, having a seat or not having a seat, you're gonna be really, really effective if you develop that partnership model from a, from a top down perspective to just know what those high level priorities are, one year, three year, or five year in those cases. Now, if you wanna seat at the table and you don't have a seat at the table, you gotta ask yourself. Do you know what's being discussed around the table? First and foremost? Mm-Hmm. Because how can you expect to have a seat at a table if you don't even know what's being discussed around the table? So it's your job to go out to. Actually build those relationships. A good way would be to approach the budget holders. The, you know, if, if you're a part of a function, then you'd go to maybe your director of finance. If you're part of a smaller company, you can talk to the CEO or CFO. You might not have that access if it's a bigger company, but in bigger companies you have hierarchy. So you still have kind of those people who have the insights into what's being discussed on the table to build those relationships and. It's simple in my opinion, having that encouragement to go out to them and say. We want to have strong learning and development partnerships across the business. This starts top down. I and my team need to understand what the most important initiatives are over the next 12 months, 24 or whatnot, so that we can align and as we are collaborating with business functional leaders and those bottoms up partnerships, we can prioritize your money much more effectively and help you get to those end results. So once they start opening up about those things, because now there's alignment on why you're asking to do that. You wanna be a better steward of capital, more efficient and effective on how you're investing time and money to help the company get to their goals. It would be stupid for them not to share those insights. So once you learn those things, you're gonna also be able to start presenting yourselves more strategically. Well, what are the skills that you're trying to accomplish in those one, three or five year? Do you know? I can help you determine those scale. Let's workshop that out. So now you're getting more face time with these stakeholders, building transparency and trust, and you're becoming part of that planning right away, which essentially is starting to give you that seat at the table, right? So that's one way to start doing it top down. But you have to take the initiatives just like, you know how I described my hands were shaky first few times, or actually first three years that I started doing public speaking engagements. Sometimes it even still happens today. Just the nervousness. You know, the nerves that get you about. Breaking through the door to have those conversations. You just gotta do it. 'cause what's the worst that can happen? You say, no, who cares? Your life's going to be the same the next day. Right now on a bottoms up perspective. It's actually a a little bit harder because you have many business functional leaders in bigger companies. Often l and d already has that partner model. You know, one of our customers is one of the biggest manufacturing companies in the world, and the person who we first started working with was the director of l and d who supports the procurement business function. So that is already their business partner is just procurement in other companies. They might not have that partner model from a bottoms up perspective, or they still need to build it, or they're supporting multiple business functions. So those are your bottoms up business functional partnerships. What you wanna do is build something called a learning culture committee or an advisory board, basically finding those champions inside those business functions. We become the voice of problems in their business function, and they're coming to you for help. So that's when L&D starts positioning themselves more as a product management function that is there to solve problems, not be order takers. Right. Nice. So when a VP of supply chain comes to you and says, we're having this problem, we're having too many recalls, we think we need to train people, whatever that business problem is, that's your opportunity to start doing a consultation. Okay, let's take a back step. Here's the problem. Going to outcomes thinking. What do we think success would look like? Like if training or learning and development was the right solution to solve this problem? Forget about how we get there, what's success look like? Let's define that together. And then together with that business functional champion, you work back into the roadmap on what's gonna get there. And it could be off the shelf content, the problem could be solved maybe by sending people to an event. Like do that. If it's cheaper and faster it solves a problem, do that. Or it could be a program and you have to combine things like coaching content, mentorship, right? But Once you define the problem and that outcome, you're gonna be able to work with the partners in between. The best part about this is those business functional leaders came to you with the problem. That means that they have something in it for them that they wanna accomplish. So they're gonna spend more time with you on doing this. Fantastic.
Kirsten:
00:15:36
So what I wanna do, and I wish we had more time because this is absolutely perfect, well, Cognota does something. Really, really well. A lot of things really well, but there is a whole community piece to your work where you are bringing the sort of learning and development infrastructure to a whole bunch of people and saying, okay, let's talk about what worries you or what concerns you have, or what's the latest research? Or, Hey, do you have something fun to share? So you've got this whole piece. Can you talk for a minute about what that is and how people can encounter that? Sure.
Ryan:
00:16:09
So one of the things you're talking about is a community that essentially we sponsor, but you probably won't even know. Cognota sponsors it if you jump in there because we on purpose don't brand ourselves in there. It. Really is coming from a sincere place to help drive the industry and thought leadership further around operations, which, you know, some would argue is boring, but without sound operations, everything else will crumble. So today that community, it's on a domain called www.Learn Ops. So. Just learn and then ops.com, and there's about 5,000 community members growing quickly. It's all L&D professionals helping each other on important topics and people like yourself who are investing time with the community to help them get ahead in certain topics and whatnot. So, you know what we talked about was you doing a coffee chat, a virtual coffee chat with people on these very important presentation skills, for example, and. You know, we'll have over a hundred virtual events next year. So there's a lot of topics not inclusive of something we do that's called the Learn Ops Summit, which is bringing together the best thought leaders in the industry to do a free summit event for the industry. So that's one plate. But to answer your question, I. Cognota is a software company, right, first and foremost, but we really try and focus on how do we help build the ecosystem around learning operations, drive thought leadership. So a lot of the times when you come across Cognota, you won't ever feel like you're being pitched to. We just wanna help you and in helping you, we think you'll come across our software and if it helps to solve the problem that you'll partner with us on that. We don't lead with software sales, we lead with ecosystem and thought leadership, hoping that it builds enough trust that you wanna partner with us one day.
Kirsten:
00:18:01
Yeah. And this is why I, again, why I wanted to have you on here because I just, I find it really refreshing. I. I have been, you know, you and I have both been in the world for a while. I've been in the business for a long, long time, and I'm used to community being sort of an add-on, and you've really baked in community to the core of the company to where just every place that I've encountered Cognota is very much a, Hey, we're all in this together. You know, come on, let's move forward. Because the L&D folks, we as a people tend to be kind of tilted the windmill, let's go solve problems, but that can be very isolationist and very lonely. And so I'd love the fact that there's this, I. Community around it and I encourage everybody to check out Learn Ops, to check out Cognota. Are you gonna be doing anything coming up? Anything you wanna share before we wrap up? Any new surprises or fun things?
Ryan:
00:19:01
Yeah, I mean, Al always doing a lot and sorry about taking my focus off here for a second. I, a two and a half year old show me his firetruck and it's a great firetruck. It's perfect. It's a great firetruck. So look, we're doing a lot of things and. Again, really focusing on building ecosystem and awareness around learning operations or learn ops as we call it. No shorter version, which is abbreviated from like Rev Ops and DevOps, et cetera. But a lot of events. Next year we're gonna do maybe around 10 to 12. In-person community meetups where we do three hour workshops on everything, learning operations, and then there's drinks receptions, after all for free can get certified. We're doing something called Learn Ops Academy, where we're partnering with Chief Learning Officers and providing an accredited curriculum where you can get a coach to help you learn these important concepts and how to apply them while you're learning content, which is pretty cool. And again, we'll have over a hundred virtual events throughout the year on the learn ops.com community, not led by Cognota, led by people like yourself, Kirsten, and other community ambassadors and things like that. So, as you said, this is something that we're doing together as thought leaders and professionals in the industry and doing our part to build up the ecosystem and more awareness around learning operations. So that this whole concept of how do I get a seat around the table no longer exists in five years, like we've helped each other to accomplish that.
Kirsten:
00:20:32
I would've, I would love that. And thank you so much for making the time. And please share, share that the firetruck was awesome, Fantastic. I really appreciate you making time. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so
Ryan:
00:20:44
much for having me.
Kirsten:
00:20:45
Anytime and anybody watching and listening, go ahead and do the like, do the subscribe, do the YouTube thing, leave comments, and let us know what your main thing that you wanna be achieving in the next 3, 5, 10 years with your businesses and how perhaps partnering with different agencies could help you do that. Give us some thoughts. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening. Bye. If you enjoyed this conversation about the entrepreneurial journey, check out season two, episode number 21, my conversation with Kristen Spencer about why storytelling is so powerful. The link is in the show notes.
