Each month we are going to publish a challenge. Send us an email explaining why you are the best at that challenge and how you solve it. If you win, we'll splash it all over social media, print it in the next newsletter and send you a $100 Amazon card. Email info@russellmartin.comFor clarification, each winner can only win once every six months so everyone has a chance for moola. July's Challenge: What innovative ways have you helped Project Sponsors and Project Managers work together more effectively?  OPTIONAL BONUS question which means it might strengthen your odds for winning:: How do you measure where you are on a project and communicate that to all? ​

If you want to be a great leader, you must make personal growth a conscious choice and a continuous journey. In the book I wrote with Mark Miller, Great Leaders Grow, we say that growing to a leader is like oxygen to a deep sea diver: without it, you die. Not a physical death, of course—but if you stop growing, your influence will erode and, ultimately, you may lose the opportunity to lead at all. Simply knowing how to do your job today doesn’t secure your success tomorrow. It’s important to keep up with today’s rapidly changing work environment so that you can offer new ideas to keep your organization successful in the future.  Make time to read books and articles, watch videos, and listen to podcasts or audio books. Talk with peers or work with a mentor outside your normal work circle. Sign up for an online course or a workshop at your company. Join an association or a special interest group. The learning opportunities are endless—however, the time to invest in these activities is not. Many organizations enjoy a slower pace during the summer. Or maybe you take your vacation during the summer. Either way, why not utilize some of that time and make this your summer of learning! My wife, Margie, loves listening to audio books. She listens to business books, books that support her photography hobby, mystery novels, and a lot more. The great thing about this is she can do it sitting on a plane, riding in a car, or taking a walk—just about any time. I encourage you to do the same. Use some of your downtime to invest in your own knowledge. Take a book or article you’ve been meaning to read on that long flight or even to the beach. Listen to a podcast while you are exercising or sitting somewhere quietly enjoying the view. Get up a little earlier than usual and watch a TED talk online. Keep in mind that your learning doesn’t have to be focused on your work. Trying new hobbies is a learning experience and exploring new interests stimulates your thinking in general. You might think of a great idea for a home improvement project while you are practicing your golf swing. And that yoga class you’ve been promising to try for the past few months might provide the relaxation and focus you need to come up with an original recipe for dinner that uses healthy ingredients your family enjoys. Be creative and open to life’s opportunities—because when you stop learning, you stop leading!

After living in New York for most of my life, I knew that moving to the Bay Area would offer an exciting new environment. After making the move, I realize that the changes go far beyond the physical. Before the move, I worked in a private office filled with monochrome furnishings, overlooking a sea of sleek black high-rises from the 29th floor of the Sony building in the heart of New York City. Today, I work in a single-story building with an open floor plan, colorful furniture, and floor-to-ceiling windows in the heart of the Bay Area. Instead of black high-rises in a concrete jungle, my neighbors are some of world’s largest tech companies, who are innovating the latest in technology every single day. Neither one is better than the other, they’re just different. Having been pretty involved with the design community back in the Big Apple, I was eager to explore the creative landscape here in the Golden City. And attending San Francisco Design Week was the perfect opportunity to dive-in. A group of Duartians (yes, that’s what we call ourselves) attended the event to meet other creatives in the community and exchange ideas on the ever-changing landscape for design. For me, this was not only a party or an opportunity to press palms, but an exciting social exercise whereby I could really begin to identify the distinctions between these two major metropolises. First, it is worth noting that kick-starting a career in New York is no easy feat — gaining access to other experienced designers and reliable mentors requires lots of socializing, self promotion, and membership fees. San Francisco’s design culture is quite the opposite, seemingly offering more opportunities for inclusion. In general, creative designers in the Bay Area are more approachable. Perhaps it is the shared mentality that, "If at first you don’t succeed, try again" whereas, in other cultures, failure prevents most from even trying. This concept especially applies to ones’ networking approach. While New York is often coveted for its exclusive nature, at SF Design Week it was not uncommon to encounter founders, investors and creatives talking shop and sharing ideas. The energy and aggressiveness of New York does make it a hub for exceptional creative talent, but folks there often move fast, just as the city itself does. Even frequenting the design circuit, it was not uncommon to meet somebody at an event and never see that person again. My first Design Week in SF was anything but rushed or restrictive. At the Yerba Buena Art Center on opening night our whole team mingled with other designers, brand specialists, business owners, and new friends. We even interviewed a handful of exciting young professionals, inquiring about what they enjoy most in relation to the SF design scene. We got answers like, "It’s extremely diverse in SF. People from all around the world come to this one little town. Here there is the the opportunity to work amongst the best. Greatness inspires greatness" and, "I like that here you get a glimpse of what’s next in the world, because we always have our finger on the pulse." (View more from this series of contribute your own conversations using the hashtag #AllDayAIGA). On the following day, a Senior Designer from Butchershop invited me to their agency’s event Booze Your Words: After-Work Wine Pairing. The premise was that Butchershop’s designers teamed up with producer, E16 Wines, to put a unique twist on pairings, coupling reds and whites with a curated selection of complimentary type-faces. Yet another example of an inclusive activity with substantial purpose, connecting and encouraging all who attended to mingle, view the portfolio of work featured throughout the studio, and engage in open dialogue about the enticing theme of the evening. Then on Saturday I participated as a Reviewer at the AIGA San Francisco Portfolio Day along with two other Art Directors from Duarte, where we chatted with recent graduates and aspiring industry professionals. Having become familiar with both sides of the Portfolio Day desk, as a student and then as an Art Director in New York, I vividly recall how intimidating the experience was. Akin to modern-day-dating, the mission was to find the most accomplished person in the room, and present your best elevator pitch with the hope that, by the time it was over, they’d be ready to join your company / offer you a job. Contrary to this objective-oriented approach, the Portfolio Day at YBCA was casual and convenient. I learned a lot from those fresh faces who sat eagerly in front of me, sporting big smiles and impressive technological devises. And they seemed to learn a lot from me, too! Diving deep into each portfolio, the intent was less about whether or not business cards would be exchanged at the end of the conversation, and more about how I could lend a unique perspective in my career at Duarte as a visual storyteller. As the rotation of attendees continued, one girl even sprinted to my station, asserting "I heard you’re awesome - let’s talk!" The remainder of the week was filled with further phenomenal programming and highly enthusiastic happenings. Each of these experiences led to the revelation that here in San Francisco the design community mirrors the same cultural environment that we do at Duarte: "It’s a place to express yourself, find your passion, fuel your creativity, and make lasting friendships."

We've all heard a lot about "microlearning." What is it, why is it, and does it work? Over the last few years we've seen a growing use of the term "microlearning." While there is no clearly agreed-upon definition of this term (and those who doubt its very existence), I think it might be boiled down this way: it is an approach that utilizes mobile platforms and sophisticated multimedia to deliver training in brief, condensed pieces. While the optimal length of a microlearning session is debated, the most ardent proponents of the method seem to prescribe learning sessions that are less than 5 minutes--though I've encountered claims that millennials can only focus for 90 seconds! Most common is a range of 3-20 minutes, but a kind of conventional wisdom has emerged that the most effective length for current attention spans is less than 10 minutes. Proponents also tend to favor video as the most effective medium.Much of the attention has been fueled by a few academic or market studies (one of which we discussed in our last blog post on distracted goldfish and millennials), but interest in the term also arises from the ubiquity of handheld devices and the need for training to keep up with the pace of change in the workplace. When we hear a pitch for a microlearning approach, it tends to be framed by the assumption that attention spans are rapidly diminishing, and thus instruction needs to adjust to reduced capacities. One graphic that seems to have been influential in the wide acceptance of the term was produced by Josh Bersin, of Bersin by Deloitte. Click here to see its web prevalence. What I find interesting about the rationales for microlearning (and by the Bersin graphic) is the fairly pessimistic assumptions about workplace culture and the effects of technology on human behavior. Is it wise to embrace a learning strategy that responds primarily to a dim and overly generalized view of work culture? And, does it makes sense to recommend mobile technology as the solution to a problem that we claim is caused by our use of mobile technology?It seems unlikely that there is a direct correlation between increased use of digital media and decreased human ability to focus (and even less likely that using more digital media would solve that problem). Rather, what we are observing is an excess of available digital media of mediocre quality or interest, to which many consumers of that media respond by clicking away--and clicking away quickly. Additionally, much of the hype about microlearning appears to be based less on precise connections to specific research than on terminology resembling science--and specifically, neuroscience. Terms like "neurolearning" and "brain science" and even "neurology" appear in rationales for microlearning, reflecting the popularizing of of the prefix "neuro." Steven Poole has called this phenomenon "neuroscientism" and, more amusingly, "neurobollocks." Whatever we might choose to name it,  the hype around microlearning participates in this same trend.Despite this, we see usefulness in the basic method of microlearning, without assuming the worst about learners' attention spans. And, we’ve known for decades (long before the ubiquity of digital media) that long lectures to passive learners are ineffective, for reasons that have nothing to do with deterioration of focus. If applied as a tool in the service of the array of methods we’ve been covering on this blog (interleaving, spacing, variability), microlearning can be effective. Pushing instructional content to mobile devices at optimized intervals could be a simple application of spacing and variability, for instance. So, while we are a little skeptical about the microlearning hype, we are confident that it’s a critical tool that can help implement effective learning strategies--no matter how many times a day learners checks their smartphones.

"Cognitive mapping" might be another useful way to talking about Performance Learning. Just a quick addition to the Insight blog here at the beginning of the week. I read an article in The Guardian over the weekend that adds to our use of GPS as a way to think about learning. "Death by GPS: are Satnavs Changing Our Brains?" reports on the alarming number of incidents in which drivers around the world have followed the directions of a GPS device exactly but without attending to the larger context of their location. Stories of people driving into bodies of water, traveling in the wrong direction, etc., all precisely following directions, raise several questions for us about how we learn in the context of readily available and powerful digital assistance. One thing to note is that the anecdotal evidence leads people to believe that our cognitive functions are highly malleable. In this article, and in other reporting on attention spans and focus, the conclusion seems to be that new behavior reflects some change in our brain structure. I'd like to see more actual scientific literature on how directly new behavior physically alters our brain structure. The article points us to one study suggesting that the spatial regions of the hippocampus of London taxi drivers are more developed than those of bus drivers. Researchers have concluded that because bus drivers follow the same routes every day, and taxi drivers are required to know a much greater layout of the city, the taxi drivers' brains are more developed for spatial reasoning. At first glance, this seems like a perfect example of "desirable difficulty" at work.Further, the article references the work of mid-twentieth century psychologist Edward Tolman. His lab experiments with rats in mazes has been influential in psychological circles, and introduced the theory that humans, like rats, have a "cognitive map" in two parts: "strip maps" and "comprehensive maps." "Strip maps" are a simple understanding of how to get from one point to another. "Comprehensive maps" are a more robust form of the strip map, after a larger spatial context has been learned through deeper experience and knowledge of place. As we continue to think about learning and technology, I think Tolman's theory of "congnitive mapping" might be usefully paired with what we've been learning about "desirable difficulty."

I speak at many conferences and over the years have been lucky to see -- and often meet-- some remarkable presenters. I am thrilled  that Training Magazine has booked Temple Grandin to keynote Training 2017. Wikipedia: "... an autistic American professor of animal science at Colorado State University, world-renowned autism spokesperson and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. She is widely celebrated as one of the first individuals on the autism spectrum to publicly share insights from her personal experience of autism. She is also the inventor of the "hug box", a device to calm those on the autism spectrum. In the 2010 Time 100, an annual list of the one hundred most influential people in the world, she was named in the "Heroes" category."From the online conference brochure: Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. Her achievements are remarkable given at age two she had all the signs of severe autism. Many hours of therapy, and intensive teaching enabled Temple to speak. Mentoring by her high school science teacher and her aunt motivated her to study and pursue a career as a scientist and livestock equipment designer.She obtained her B.A. at Franklin Pierce College and has received honorary doctorates from McGill University, University of Illinois, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duke University.She has published hundreds of technical articles, and 12 books including "Thinking in Pictures", "The Way I See It", and "The Autistic Brain".HBO has made a movie about her life starring Claire Danes. The movie received seven Emmy awards, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody Award.In 2011, Temple was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.