One of the most important things leaders do during times of significant disruptive change is to understand the change, identify the impacts (both positively and negatively) of the change, and then embrace the change.

As a lead designer of artificial intelligence enabled learning solutions, I have had the opportunity over the past six months to explore and share the future of talent development with our clients and the reactions have been what you would expect from something so potentially disruptive to the status quo of talent development where a significant amount of the $100 billion spent on training is still done in a classroom environment. 

3 Things to Know to Avoid Bankrupting Your Company

Something very interesting happened to me and my team while co-delivering a Business Acumen / Business Leadership workshop for a client in South America this week.  After months of careful, detail oriented preparation, we realized we hadn’t anticipated something that could have been very important to participants of the customized digital business simulation we were using to develop the Business Acumen and Business Leadership skills of our learners.  Over dinner with our client and wonderful co-facilitators @BarbaraHauser and @MichelleHollingshead, we were reviewing the week and talking about the key learnings of our participants and ourselves.  Somewhere around mid-meal I shared that I had a valuable learning because I should have anticipated the need for participants to have a new report generated by the business simulation that provided market share by customer segment in addition to market share by product line.  My colleague suggested that we weren’t “prepared” which led to an awesome and robust discussion about the difference between preparation and anticipation.  The center of the debate was my notion that we were actually extremely prepared to execute the training session; we just didn’t anticipate the need of our audience for that particular report.

As most organizations are realizing, Business Acumen is a critical skill needed to achieve business success. Everyone has their own definition, and hopefully your organization has a strong program in place that provides it to every employee.

The other day as I was finishing the review of our Business Acumen learning solutions and fine-tuning the core business simulations we use to teach business acumen skills, I started to listen to the background noise about tariffs and trade wars.  I realized we needed to increase the amplitude of these tariff issues in everything we do that’s related to Business Ac