Kasey May

Picture this: You walk into a high-end restaurant, prepared to pay top dollar for a memorable meal, when the waiter saunters in and plops a sack of raw potatoes atop your minimal tablescape and says, “There you go! Plenty of value in there!” You’d probably walk out mumbling a few choice words. And that’s only if you were feeling generous. But when you think about it, corporate learning and development (L&D) used to operate on a very similar principle.

Sometimes designing corporate training can feel like trying to shove an elaborate, three-tiered wedding cake into a teeny tiny lunchbox. You have all this compliance data, leadership philosophies, and technical jargon you want to teach, but your learners only have so much bandwidth between meetings and projects to take it in. If you try to force the whole proverbial cake in their faces at once, you’ll be left with a yucky, incomprehensible mess.

I used to have the perfect watch. The shape of the face was a little unconventional, and the strap had this really cool stitched leather that captured the essence of my personal style. It was so cute, I wore it for months even after it stopped working. But after a while, I stopped wearing it. I got tired of people asking me (in vain) for the time. Sure, it was a good-looking, but it was failing at its main job: telling me what time it was.