The secret to learning design success
Last week, our colleague Claire Gibson won Gold in the ‘Learning Designer of the Year’ category at the Learning Technologies Awards. It’s a tremendous achievement, and our fifth trophy in this category. But what is it that makes her so good with clients?
In large part, I think the answer is ‘vibe management’.
‘Vibes’ are a somewhat hazy concept, somewhere between stakeholder management and personal branding.
They’ve been in the news lately because we’ve just waded through the ‘vibe election’.
For proponents of vibe theory, Donald Trump won the US Presidency for two reasons: people felt worse off during the Biden years, and felt that Trump was ‘on their side’.
‘Feelings’ here are key. We humans like to pretend that we’re making decisions based on facts, but there’s substantial evidence that we actually base them on emotions, then seek out facts to justify how we feel.
Early in this election, the vibe set in that ‘Joe Biden is too old’. Once established, every stumble or stammer that in others might have been ignored as inconsequential became evidence of fragility.
And, crucially, vibes are not bullshit. Food inflation for Americans was higher than usual during the Biden administration. Joe Biden is the oldest US President to date.
This concept of ‘vibes’ isn’t limited to politics. It’s equally powerful in professional contexts, like project management or learning design.
Let’s explore this from the point of view of the client (and I know some of our clients read this newsletter!).
Scenario one: Imagine that you’re working with a learning designer. They’re clearly passionate about your project, deeply committed to the user experience, provide regular progress updates, turn up to calls on time, and follow through on expectations.
One day, they send an email to say that a deliverable is going to be late. An issue was identified during testing, and needs to be fixed.
In my experience, most stakeholders will thank them for catching the issue and resolving it.
Scenario two: Now imagine a second learning designer. They seem uninterested, don’t communicate often, and show up late to calls.
What do you think when they tell you about an issue? ‘Why was this not caught earlier? Why am I only hearing about it now?’
These two learning designers could be managing the exact same project, and taking the exact same actions. But they’re managing vibe differently.
When the vibes are good, the learning designer can challenge, make suggestions, justify hiccups and discuss the cost impact of potential scope changes.
When the vibes are bad, the designer is difficult, doesn’t listen, error-prone and constantly trying to swindle me.
And remember, vibes are not bullshit. The learning designer does have to be excellent at their job. But, more than this, they need to be constantly signalling their excellence and credibility by over-communicating, meeting expectations and building trust.
Claire is exceptional at all of these things.
I haven’t always managed it quite so well.
A few years ago, my Dispatch friend-and-co-author Ross Dickie and I were kicking off a project with a familiar client but a new set of stakeholders.
By the end of the first call, the vibe was clear: My overly-friendly ‘cheeky chap’ approach was grating on them, while Ross D’s more mild-mannered sensibilities were reassuring them.
I hadn’t tailored my approach to this particular client, and the vibe was bad.
I discretely withdrew from the project and Ross D, of course, crushed it.
This was a humbling moment for me, and a formative one. I realised that ‘vibe’ is everything. Once established, it’s almost impossible to shake.
Like Claire, make sure yours is a good one!
How are the vibes with your current custom learning partner? If you’re not happy, get in touch with us to find out how we can help. We specialise in custom and bespoke blended learning programmes, campaign-based learning and impact measurement.
Just reply to this newsletter from your inbox or email [email protected] to schedule an initial chat.
Are you an over-committing over-achiever? In Toxic Productivity, author Israa Nasir argues that you can only maintain that approach to productivity for so long.
Eventually you’ll burn out, exhausted by all those ‘time management hacks’ that well-intentioned organizations (like us, to be fair) keep suggesting.
So last week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Israa joined us to discuss:
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
What are the biggest challenges that your managers face?
In our survey of 2,000 UK managers across 12 industries, we asked participants to rank their challenges (on the left) and each topic of conversation (on the right) from least to most complex.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, having difficult conversations topped the list, where the % refers to the number of managers who ranked each challenge and topic as the most complex.
For L&D professionals, this insight can help inform management development programs as well as your wider learning offering.
How do you give your managers opportunities to practice difficult conversations?
How do you help them manage conflict, before it takes place?
How do you help them develop influencing skills?
Mind Tools (2024). ‘Building Better Managers’.
🤖 Success isn’t always satisfying
In a new paper, PhD student Aidan Toner-Rodgers has studied the impact of AI tools on scientific researchers. Whether the results are good or bad depends on your perspective. While AI-assisted researchers discovered 44% more materials, filed 39% more patents, and saw a 17% increase in innovation, they weren’t necessarily happy about it. 82% reported reduced satisfaction due to decreased creativity.
🦾 Practical AI and the future of humans in the workplace
According to Udemy’s 2025 Global Learning & Skills Trends Report, organizations have two clear learning priorities as we approach the new year: practical applications of generative AI tools, and soft skills. In practice, that means no more experimenting. Organizations are looking to see real practical applications of new technology, while soft skills are key to getting the fleshy human bit to work better.
🏆 We won TWO awards!
We always want to make sure that this newsletter is useful, so I didn’t want to lean into this too much, but we actually won two awards at the Learning Technologies Awards last week. As well as Claire’s win for ‘Learning Designer of the Year’, our client South Western Railway won Gold for ‘Best Use of Blended Learning – Commercial Sector’, a project led by Claire and my guy Ross Dickie. Well done team, and to South Western’s Becky Eason for working with us.
Despite the ‘let-the-awards-fall-where-they- may’ attitude I’ve tried to evoke in this newsletter, that’s not how I reacted when Claire won. See below!
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