Nano-learning for busy execs

I’ve had the chance to mentor a few executives from different areas of the world the last 3 years (social collaboration across time zones). The biggest pain from both parties is to find time to communicate the knowledge and receive feedback to ensure a strong loop. Face to face knowledge transfer is ideal, however totally impractical for folks who are always on the move. And the micro learning provided by youtube, MOOCs are still too time consuming (10 minutes is a long time). A possible solution I have decided to adopt this year is to create nano learning.

Aren’t you just playing with words?

Not really, I intend to cut down the learning from minutes to possible 45 seconds.

How?

It’s basically just breaking things down even further and into the pure essence of what is needed:

I would not recommend this as staple diet

Execs tend to grasp items pretty quickly and as long as the main parts are broken down, their experience will fill the rest. In essence, just provide them with the scaffold

It all sounds good, but how do you do it?

Right now I am still experimenting with the concept. But there are a few guiding principles:

1. Familiarity of the communication platform — I have chosen Whatsapp
   - Most folks read and discard emails if the subject titles are not in their priority list
   - The broadcast feature is handy if I want to scale up
2. Have a fixed template for easy absorption:
   - Topic
   - 3 key points
   - Hands-on component if they are free (and state the time needed)
3. If possible try to relate the value of what they are learning with what they are doing
   - The level of customization is huge, so I would avoid promising this unless you have a lot of time

Building rapport and growing the relationship virtually

Building trust virtually is one of the most difficult things to do. There are opportunities where the main face to face team may fail and you could step in to fill the shoes and offer plausible solutions. These are the best time to build rapport.

If you have similar experiences, do reach out, I would love to hear what was the solution you used and would love to learn from you.