What if learning design is standing at a real crossroads - one path toward a golden age of human impact, the other toward machine-paced irrelevance? That’s the provocative question Jonathan Hill, award-winning learning designer and evidence-first practitioner, helped Bill Banham tackle as they dug into how to make digital learning change behavior.
Bill and Jonathan get specific about strategic storytelling and why it’s more than a pretty wrapper. Jonathan explains the difference between illustration and demonstration, showing how multi-perspective scenarios move learners from visceral first-person decisions to reflective third-person analysis. The litmus test is sharp and usable: if you can remove the story and nothing breaks, it wasn’t strategic. From compliance to performance, those stakes matter. We pair that creative rigor with practical production: PowerPoint as a vector engine, Pixabay and Unsplash for visuals, Free Sound for audio, Pixlr for edits, and Camtasia for fast, polished outputs. Budget constraints stop being blockers when every asset points at a clear operational goal.
Working across time zones and cultures, Jonathan shares how to build trust and quality in distributed teams. He sets up virtual spaces for water cooler moments and learning clubs anchored in books by Julie Dirksen and Karl Kapp, using those shared anchors to surface different interpretations and sharpen decisions. Then we tie it all to outcomes that leaders care about: error rates, audits, rework, call waits, CSAT trends, and the qualitative signals inside complaints. Jonathan walks through A/B testing strategies that compare trained teams with control groups and highlights the valuable secondary effects—better morale, lower turnover, cleaner handoffs—that show up when friction drops on the front line.
If you want learning that earns its seat at the performance table, this conversation offers a usable playbook: craft stories that do real work, ship with scrappy tools, and prove the change on the dashboard. Enjoyed the episode? Follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review to help more learning pros find us.
Connect with Jonathan Hill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonhill123/
Connect with Bill Banham: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-banham-a932a0b/
Voices of the Learning Network is the Learning Network podcast connecting the learning and development community. https://thelearning-network.org/
