The idiom “eating your own dog food” means you are actually using your own products. In my case the “product” is research, analysis, and insight.

Janet, how does one go about “eating” research, analysis and insight you’re probably asking. Excellent question, as always, and thanks for asking.

Next week at our IMPACT conference (streaming, if you can’t attend this year) David Mallon and I will be presenting new research from a 2011 study on High-Impact Learning Organizations (to be published later in the year). However, we’ll be presenting it as if it’s the year 2021.

We know that today, in 2011, we’re in the midst of a fundamentally changing workplace and workforce. We know there is a staggering amount of new learning technology tools, technologies, and services added to our "learning" toolkit. We know employees’ expectations with regard to learning and development are changing. And we all know that we’ve all got to step up our game to keep pace and stay relevant.

Now it would be crazy to present this session as if it’s back in the day where your big worry was “are there enough ashtrays/donuts/handouts in the conference room?” (Yes, ashtrays. Some of you remember the 70s I’m sure.) It would be a better experience to use the collaborative online tools and methods we advise our members on.

So...here’s what we did. First, David and I used Mindmeister to brainstorm and start putting some structure around the session. Mindmeister is a collaborative online mind mapping tool that is ridiculously easy to use. We then started building our session in Prezi. Prezi is an online tool that helps you collaboratively make insanely great web-based presentation maps that change how you navigate through content. We’ve found it a great way to present research online as a story and I can certainly see its potential as an instructional tool. Prezi helps you to think about content in a different way – how to bring things together on one screen and see how they relate.

We are also using an audience response system from Turning Technologies and Twitter to engage people in the research whether attending live or virtually. But wait! That’s not all folks. We also have four thought leaders presenting by video – Ellen Wagner from Sage Road Solutions will talk about changing roles,  Jay Cross of Internet Time Alliance will talk about supporting employees' fundamental ability to learn, Dan Pontefract, Head of Learning at Telus will talk about the future of the training department and Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning will talk about new approaches to learning like alternate reality games. We’ve embedded those in our online story/presentation.

Just like workplace L&D, the research field is evolving – the way it is reported, the way it is gathered, the way it is published. Exciting times to be in either industry! We hope you can join us.

We’ll be rockin’ the Vinoy Thursday April 28th from 9:30 to 10:45 am ET. Virtually attend here. Come help us "eat our own dog food" and find out what the High-Impact Learning Organization of 2021 will look like.

(This blog post is intended to be a factual statement. )