When Combustion shows up at a conference, we show up large! A few weeks ago, President and Chief Fire Starter Leslie Ehm along with the Combustion Training crew took both the exhibition floor and the training rooms by storm at the Institute for Performance &… Read More »Combustion Takes I4PL 2017 By Storm
Brainstorming sucks. It just doesn’t work. It’s a useless exercise that quickly devolves into soul crushing groupthink. At least that’s what so many people and companies think. As a result of my years of experience as a former ad agency Creative Director and now trainer,… Read More »Stop Saying Brainstorming Doesn’t Work
“Training without sustainment is basically malpractice.” Let me rewind for a second. Picture the scenario. As the Combustor tasked with figuring out what the company’s newly minted sustainment program should look like, I had gone to a world-renowned Learning & Development conference in search of… Read More »Confessions of a Sustainment Junkie
Every year, the Combustion team had a week long offsite retreat. We do this mostly because we really dig each others company. (There was a meatball making competition, real-life testing of a beta board game, and other stuff we can’t mention) But it also gives… Read More »Can You Put People Before Money and Still Succeed?
“I know your workshop details say that this is for 10 people, but do you mind if we do it for 15?” Mind? No, we don’t mind. But it’s not about our feelings. It’s about the participants. Always about the participants. When we design a… Read More »It IS a Numbers Game
My mother and uncle bought a children’s summer camp (Camp Kennebec) when I was two years old. From that day on, I spent all of my weekends and summers surrounded by crazily creative activity and lots and lots of kids. The camp office was in… Read More »5 Things Summer Camp Can Teach You About Designing Training
One of the biggest challenges in creating anything original is overcoming the new vs. useful conundrum. When you go through the exercise of innovating, regardless of whether its a radical change to something or simply a new way of looking at an old problem, the first… Read More »The Wrongness of Rightness – Assessing the ‘New’ vs the ‘Useful’