I was reminded today by a client how important it is to design reinforcement into every learning journey. While putting the finishing touches on our business acumen learning journey kickoff deck, our client asked me to please take a moment during the kickoff to go over the details and expectations of the reinforcement so there are no surprises and participants will take the time to do it and absorb it.

The key components of this specific learning journey include a reinforcement business simulation that will continue to immerse participants in a follow-up scenario of running their own Consumer products company for several more years into the future so they can practice and fine-tune their strategic thinking, execution, and financial management skills. The tools we use to reinforce their learning include reinforcement simulations, decoding the earnings calls, business application projects, and personal action plans.

As part of my assignment, our clients asked me to share a few points with the participants about why reinforcement is so critical, so I turned my research into this blog.

So, here is a dilemma; you go to the supermarket to pick up a few items, you’ve brought your own bags, and you head to the checkout. There are 3 absolutely empty lines with cashiers “waiting” to help you or there are 6 self-checkout kiosks that you can zip right through. What do you do?

On the one hand, I didn’t want to bother the cashiers as I could certainly do the scanning and bagging myself, but on the other hand, I thought if I went to the self-checkout they might get angry at me because have chosen the option that could eventually eliminate their job. It was an unsettling choice, but I decided to do it myself in support of the good people at NCR Voyix who make all that great equipment.

Coincidently, that morning I had read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the bar code revolutions which got me thinking even further about the business acumen of it all. I really didn’t think there was enough to create a good blog, but I was surprised!

Learning the Business Acumen of the Self-Checkout Revolution

The Juneteenth day of remembrance gave me a chance to do some reflection and to get caught up on some business reading. As a graduate of the Wharton School, I always look forward to the monthly articles from Wharton Magazine and it was great reading about what is new and exciting. An interesting article about Data Driven Analytics in this month’s edition caught my eye and thoroughly enjoyed it coming a day after I wrote a blog on Critical Thinking.

The Wharton Magazine article was a faculty book review of a new book by Stefano Puntoni of the Wharton School and Bart De Langhe of KU Leuven and Vlerick Business School. The gist of the book is based on their hypothesis that many analytics efforts flounder because data analyses are disconnected from the decisions to be made and they argue that the key to making good decisions with data is to start by putting data in the background.

The article got me thinking about Advantexe’s observations and insights into building business acumen skills to utilize data-driven analytics through the work we do with digital business simulations.

I am asked almost every week about the concept of “Critical Thinking.”

Critical Thinking means something different to a lot of people and you only have to go to Google and type in and search for it to find out that in 1/3 of a second, you get more than 2 billion hits!

Let that sink in—more than 2 billion hits.

One of the things I have been working on over the past few weeks is a short and concise blog about developing Critical Thinking Skills in business professionals and this is the culmination of research and years of experience working with more than 10,000 leaders.

The Advantexe Critical Business Framework

Everything starts with the framework that defines the way we view it…

How to Develop the Skills

You’ve just taken a few moments to read the 8 points and if you are like most people, you are shaking your head and thinking, “Yes, that sounds good, I like it.”

And that is part of the problem of developing the skills. You don’t “get it” by just reading it; you only get it by doing it over and over again until you can use the framework meaninglessly in the flow of work.

The question from one of our participants was very straightforward and something I thought would be easy to answer.

Yesterday while conducting a Business Leadership workshop for a global audience we had a module on “Stakeholder Mapping.” This is a core module in our content library and it is used to build skills and capabilities in a digital simulation workshop and then of course back on the job.

We were discussing one of the most basic tools of Stakeholder Mapping tools where you identify and segment key stakeholders by how important they are to the project, process, or change, and what is their level of support. This graphic provides the four quadrants of stakeholder mapping as each quadrant will inform you of what to do and how to do it.