Quality Grind Podcast

Entertaining Better Training, Part 1

MEDVACON Life Sciences Season 1 Episode 17

Send us a text

In this episode of the Quality Grind Podcast, host Mike Kent sits down with Ronnie Feldman, founder, CEO, and Creative Director of Learnings & Entertainments. Ronnie shares his unique journey from improvisational comedy at The Second City to transforming the effectiveness of compliance training through engaging and entertaining approaches.

The conversation delves into the application of improvisational principles like 'Yes, and...', the importance of psychological safety, and the real-world impact of blending humor with serious topics to foster better learning outcomes in regulated life science industries. Tune in for part one of this insightful discussion and discover how creative solutions can reshape traditional training paradigms.

00:00 Introduction to The Quality Grind Podcast

00:48 Meet Ronnie Feldman: From Improv to Compliance Training

02:45 The Power of Humor in Corporate Education

07:38 Breaking Stereotypes in Training

22:47 The Importance of Psychological Safety

31:37 Conclusion and Teaser for Part Two

32:30 Medvacon Services and Contact Information

Contact MEDVACON:

  • Message us at @MedvaconLifeSciences on LinkedIn
  • Visit our website at www.medvacon.com/contact
  • Email us at qualitygrind@medvacon.com

Thanks for listening! Don't forget to follow us @medvacon on all platforms for updates on blogs and podcasts!

Ep 17: Entertaining Better Training, Part 1 - Ronnie Feldman

Jessica Taylor: [00:00:00] This is the Quality Grind Podcast presented by Medvacon. Conversations that go beyond compliance, sharing insights geared toward helping you navigate the everyday grind of regulated life science industries. Here are your hosts, Joe Toscano and Mike Kent.

Mike Kent: Welcome back to The Grind, everyone. Mike Kent along with you here today. Uh, before we get started, I'd like to encourage everyone to go get their energy drink or that afternoon cup of coffee or whatever. Aw, the heck with it. No, you're not going to actually need that for this session and neither will your colleagues anymore after meeting today's guest.

Ronnie Feldman is the founder, CEO and Creative Director at Learnings & Entertainments, a creative services and learning content provider made up of a unique blend of [00:01:00] professionals. Comedians who do corporate education, taking all of those snooze sessions and making them, dare I say, interesting? 

So with that, I'm incredibly pleased to introduce Ronnie Feldman. Ronnie, welcome to the Quality Grind Podcast. It's tremendous to have you here with us today.

Ronnie Feldman: Hey, it's good to be here. Hopefully we will keep everybody wide awake and with some interesting ideas and options.

Mike Kent: I guess a great place to start would be to talk a little bit about your background, how you got started and your journey into the compliance training world, because it is a bit different than a lot of our colleagues here in Life Sciences. How did you get started and interested and find your way here?

Ronnie Feldman: Yeah, it's definitely been a circuitous path. One that I could not have predicted, which... Oh, everyone has their own origin story. Mine started with, um, I live in Chicago. [00:02:00] There's a place called The Second City. Are you familiar with The Second City?

Mike Kent: I am. Yeah.

Ronnie Feldman: Yeah, so it's sort of a famous improv comedy brand. It's, you know, a 60 year old comedy institution. It's where most of the people from SNL get their origin from. So it's a lot of comedians from around the world come to Chicago to study sort of this graduate university of improv and humor. 

And so I came across that place, and went to see some shows and immediately fell in love with the art form, quit my job and entered into that world of improv, comedy sketch, not so much stand up. And it's a little slightly different skill, improvisation. 

When that didn't quite take off for me, when I did not make it to SNL and become, you know, Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, or Amy Poehler, John Belushi, or any of those people, and it started happening for some of my friends, I ended up reinventing [00:03:00] myself as a producer at The Second City. And which I didn't even really know what that meant at the time. It was basically the business side of comedy. 

And what we stumbled into back when I was doing that was that, we had a fledgling corporate education, excuse me, corporate entertainment division. Like we would do shows at the end of your sales meeting, stuff like that. 

Mike Kent: Oh, cool! 

Ronnie Feldman: Yeah, so that was like a growing business and we started realizing that, well, if we can do social satire and political satire, can't we use the same muscles to highlight different learning points and different teachable moments in the body of the meeting? And quite frankly, from a revenue standpoint, there was more money in actually doing something that helped learning as opposed to just entertainment. 

So long story longer, we end up creating a corporate education business within this comedy theater and I start making [00:04:00] videos about conflicts of interest, corruption and bribery, you know, privacy issues, all of these things. And I'm like, gosh, we just did it for that company. It's the same issue as that company. And it's the same issue as that company. And I became the de facto head of this corporate risk division within The Second City. And we started realizing that yes, you can use humor, comedy, entertainment, all these tools in service of a learning message.

Me and my team broke off eight years ago to start Learnings and Entertainment. So we are the de facto old legacy Second City business. We all, me and all my friends who do the business all have a comedy background, but we just apply it towards these very specific, important risk subjects.

Mike Kent: I get the sense that, and from your excitement level, that doesn't feel like work most days. It may be hectic and crazy, but does it really feel [00:05:00] like work when you're able to have your buddies there and doing the types of creative things that you're doing every day? 

Ronnie Feldman: Well, you know, it's funny you say that. I think about this all the time. I try and remember to take the work seriously, but not take ourselves seriously. There's an old interview with Conan O'Brien that I always remember. And this is what it resonates with me. He said back when he had his show, Conan O'Brien said, "Pretty much everyday people will bring me these really fun and interesting ideas.

And I find my reaction like this. Yeah. That's really funny. That might be the funniest thing I've ever seen." But he does it like that. And that's how I feel.

Mike Kent: Yeah.

Ronnie Feldman: Like, sometimes you're like, all right, how do I make harassment and discrimination and the importance of speaking up really, uh, not funny, but use these [00:06:00] tools on such a subject? And you have to really like, flex some different muscles and it's really fun to try and find solutions for that, even if it's really, really serious. So I enjoy it very much.

I also remind myself every day that it's not brain surgery. You know, at our best, we're making an important resource. You know, we're welcoming and approachable. We're making more employees understand that they're supported and they have all these support systems in place and we're having a smile while we do it.

And so I'm very fortunate that I get to kind of be the, the fun guy in this very serious space.

Mike Kent: I had a nickel for every time I heard somebody say, well, this is serious stuff. We have to be serious in the training environment, because people have to know that their everyday decisions are impacting life and death of a patient. And that's absolutely true. And [00:07:00] at the same time, the way that we go about presenting information in this dry, serious way, and here it is, you'd better learn it, you'd better understand it, and oh, by the way, don't make a mistake or else. That doesn't work. And all of these different approaches of being creative and mixing things up and using different dynamics work. But we get into our heads and we get into these routines in life sciences. I'm sure you've experienced it elsewhere where traditional training just continues to perpetuate itself.

So in spite of all that information, knowledge, and practical, "hey, this stuff works!", one of the things I'm really interested to get into with you today is about how we can break those stereotypes and really try some things, see if they land. And in the spirit of improv, maybe try something different [00:08:00] or go a different direction. I remember a couple of improv classes and a couple of actors that did an awful lot of improv work. One of the things they were fond of saying is the fundamental concept is ""Yes, and...". You just continue to build on what works and build on what works and build on what's working. And if it isn't, then you react and maybe go a different direction. Does that have any application to what you're talking about taking a different approach to trying different things in the training environment with a serious topic?

Ronnie Feldman: Well, yeah, I can answer your question a bunch of different ways. First of all, I love talking about improvisation, and for the, for your audience that hasn't had that experience, we're talking about improvisation as like, making things up on the spot off the top of your head without a script. And, "yes, and..." is the fundamental principle of improvisation.

So on stage that means if you have a couple actors who come together on stage. And neither of you know what you're going to [00:09:00] say, you don't have a script. You get a suggestion from the audience, and you both have ideas. One of you has to make a statement, because a statement gives information and a question draws information, so you don't want to ask a question to start an improvisational sketch.

The other person has to drop their idea, agree, and add one thing. And the other person goes, "Oh, that's interesting. I got to drop my idea, agree and add one thing." And then what happens is you build solutions together. So following that path, I very much consider my company a "Yes, and..." kind of company where we're trying to figure out how to build upon and find solutions together or to make a solution that makes a serious topic more accessible.

The "yes" doesn't always have to be agreement, by the way. The yes can be affirmation. So a lot of times when I'm creating content, I think of [00:10:00] how does the employee feel right now? How does the employee feel going into this training? And they're probably, when it comes to clients, they're dreading it, right?

So you can actually get a laugh or build trust by acknowledging their pain, by "Yes, and..."-ing their truth. Their truth is, "Why do I have to do this? They're just pushing liability on me. They don't care." You know that that's not always, that's actually not true, but that's what they think.

So you have to acknowledge that. And that actually gets them to listen to the very important thing that you are then about to say. 

Mike Kent: Because that, because connection is there.You've immediately made that connection on their terms. And so the learner engages with some trust in that environment. "Oh, this guy or this gal gets me. They understand that this is a 30 minute box checking exercise when I'm checking my email or doing my laundry or [00:11:00] whatever, and the program's running in the background, right? And all I have to do is get through it. And then I'll worry about the quiz or the knowledge check at the end when I get there," right?

Ronnie Feldman: That's what they think. That's what they're expecting. So it's funny you say that. We just made, uh, for my company, we just made a bunch of new micro learning. So a bunch of little 10 minute short trainings that are trackable. But we start each one with something surprising. And so one of them is, "Question number 1: While I'm taking this short, mildly entertaining training, I will be checking my lawn, checking my laundry, be clearing out my inbox." Like we literally just say that and they have to click on each one. And then it says, "or take 10 minutes to actually try and learn something new and interesting." You know, this isn't, you know, hilarious, but it's... 

One thing I learned from when I used to tour in comedy all the time is what's interesting to people is specific to them. You would get a laugh at a conference by [00:12:00] referencing an acronym that they know about that's not funny to anybody else. So it's all about finding some connection. Sometimes we make little songs and jingles for companies, you know, around things that you wouldn't normally have songs and jingles about, and part of that is like, you get a quick, like, wait, what am I, what am I looking at here?

Mike Kent: Sure. I didn't expect to hear somebody talking about or singing about this particular topic. Like they're delivering a Coca Cola commercial or something along those lines, right? It's sparks that and re-engages the brain. Now, I, the nerd in me is going into the neuroscience and, can, you know,

Ronnie Feldman: that's good.

Mike Kent: the research that shows that this is the stuff that works, that engages, that ultimately builds the retention and the capacity for retention longterm.

Ronnie Feldman: Yeah.[00:13:00] 

Mike Kent: So how do we convince, and for folks that are out there saying, you know, I'd like to have more fun in training, or maybe there's a training manager who's out there or a trainer out there that says, you know, I'd like to try and do something different. But I'm not sure that my manager or my director or, you know, the VP has to take this training for crying out loud.

What are they going to think if they're hearing a jingle about something that they told us we should take really seriously?

Ronnie Feldman: Yeah. Well, let's have a conversation about this. There's a, we can go deep onto this, this subject and slice it a lot of different ways. 

I'll start with this. We have to know, remember that all the behavioral science and social science backs up the fact that being short, fun, and interesting is a more efficient and effective solution. Like we are right when we say it, [00:14:00] like they are wrong when they think, "Oh, we're, we have to take this seriously because, uh...", and there's a variety of examples of why. 

So one is we have to present a better business case. We all know growing up, by the way, that, you know, why do they sing songs when you're, when you're kids? You know, why do you remember, like, I still remember this: "My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies". That's how I learned that acronym to remember the planets. 

I want to remember "Where's the beef!?" Or the commercials or whatever - you pick one that you like, uh, because it works. It taps into the emotional connections of your brain. There's sort of like the cognitive side and the emotional side and the best learning has both.

One phrase that I love is [00:15:00] there's a difference between having a difficult conversation and a conversation about a difficult thing. Meaning you can take a very serious subject and wrap it in a more entertaining style, not for the sake of fun. Like fun has is really not important.

What's important is that you need to engage people in a way that they will be engaged. You know, in a way that you need to communicate, i.e., I'm a lawyer and I want them to understand HIPAA laws. Who cares? They want to know what to do or what not to do to make their jobs easier and lives simpler.

So don't communicate in what you think they need to say, communicate in a way they need to hear it. And that means short and some entertainment value with more frequent reminders. You don't need to, you know, we're not pythons trying to swallow a warthog all in one sitting and then not eating for a year, you know.

Mike Kent: Right.[00:16:00] 

Ronnie Feldman: like,

Mike Kent: I'm December 18th before the holiday and I've got to check this box or else I don't meet my annual requirement. Right.

Ronnie Feldman: yes,

Mike Kent: to worry about it until next December.

Ronnie Feldman: That's right. So like, there's a lot behind this, but back on the sort of the business case of it. 

So you have to remember that this is a more effective solution to be interesting and fun. And, you know, you can have a conservative company. It's the most common thing that I hear when people approach me in my company, they go, well, I love it, but we're really conservative.

And I kind of hate that a little bit because it's sort of saying that you're not a part of your culture. You're saying like, I'm cool, but they're not. I guarantee that your boss or your boss's boss, they all go home and they watch TV and they listen to podcasts and they sing songs to their kids, like we are all human beings. This is how human beings consume information. [00:17:00] 

So what we need to do is build a better business case. And the business case is, people need reminding more than they need instruction. That if all you have is a stick, you know, which is what most of compliance is. This is compliance: do this, learn this. People don't, they check out on that stuff.

Mike Kent: Right, right. 

Ronnie Feldman: People want to be involved in a decision. One thing I often say to compliance officers is, to use the "Yes, and..." analogy, is if somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, uh, am I allowed to hire my cousin's company?" And the answer might be no, but you should find a way to "Yes, and..." that conversation, even if the answer is no. So the yes is, "Oh, that's interesting. You have a company that you really believe in and you want them to provide better services to our company. I'd like to bring up some other things to consider. It might be considered a conflict. It might be considered this." And then [00:18:00] you're now solving problems together. 

Compliance officers tend to be 'no' people. They tend to be like, no. Can you do it? No. Here's the law, here's why. And they go, screw you, man. And then the next time when they really have a problem, they're gonna bury it. Because when you scare people, they bury their problems.

If you involve them and treat them like human beings and treat, if you are, want to be an advisor and a coach and not the 'Office of No', well, you got to be an advisor and coach and spend that time to engage them in a conversation so you can solve problems together, whether that's live in person or online through a training.

Mike Kent: Finding that way to find that common ground, engage it, explain it in a manner in which that individual isn't turned away immediately, and find a solution that may exist. To your point, like you said, the answer may still be no. [00:19:00] 

The other thing that comes up for me is scientists will stop being creative and engineers will stop looking for improvements if they're constantly told no that won't work, or no we can't do it because X, Y, Z. And it may be a very viable answer. But if you're constantly telling a person no, they're going to shut down and their immediate response is, well, I've got this great idea, but, oh, my boss is just going to, they always say no. So why even bring it up? And that's where things get stifled and we missed out on those opportunities. The same thing in a learning environment, right?

Ronnie Feldman: It's, you know, the more serious the subject or the more senior you are in your organization, it becomes more important because people are afraid of your title. People do not speak up or [00:20:00] learn when they're bored, annoyed, or afraid is the way I like to say it, they don't if they're bored and afraid, right? 

So, an anecdote I'll share with you. I was working with sort of a, I'll say, top five insurance company in the world. It was the compliance officer I was speaking with and his team had said, has wanted to use our videos. And he's like, all right, I'll give it a try, you know? 

So it was an all-hands meeting. There's, you know, 800 people in the audience, and he's like, I'll play one of the videos. So he played one of the videos, and, he told me the story. He goes, "Uh, and then nobody, nobody laughed. And then I'm like, Oh gosh, what did I do? Why did I listen to these guys?" And then he says, somebody raised their hand and said, "um, uh, excuse me, is it okay if we laugh?" And he realized in that moment how they're not here, and like they were in their phones or they were like, ah, they were just dreading it. [00:21:00] And he goes, "yes, it was, I thought it was pretty funny." And then everybody had this tension relief of laughter. And then next thing, you know, he's now having a connection with these people and then talking about the very serious thing that he wanted to talk about.

I have to acknowledge the tension in the room and pop it, right? 

There's something called a, a theory called a theory, a scientific thing called Pattern Disruption. And it's the idea of like... I kind of hate sort of corporate comms who always want everything to look and feel the same in your organization. Externally I get it, you want things to look... But internally, everyone's got a sea of emails, a sea of things coming at you. You need things to spike and you go, wait, what is that? And we need to do that in training and communications so that people will pay attention to it. And then you have to engage them in some way so they'll remember it.

Mike Kent: Absolutely, that recognition. It [00:22:00] bothers me when all the training slides have to look exactly the same for every single program. When I get up in front of a group to deliver a presentation and the slides look exactly the same, I know I'm going to have a snooze factor. And so intentionally I would mix things up, different color schemes, different everything, and each program looked different. And it was funny because I had a more engaged audience each time and something that simple makes a huge difference. Huge difference.

Ronnie Feldman: Well, and again, acknowledge the fact that it's a serious subject. But remember, if it's all sticks and no carrots, they come away thinking that you don't care. They already think you don't care because of the long history of boring, bloated, infrequent training. And so you, do you know the term psychological safety? Is that a term that you guys use in your world?

Mike Kent: It is.

Ronnie Feldman: I think about that a lot [00:23:00] because there's actually a lot of ties to improvisation in this, strangely enough. People who are listening, who they find this interesting at all, I know I talk about improvisation a lot. 

Mike Kent: Yeah, please.

Ronnie Feldman: But, I'll talk about improv in the theater and then bring it back to our point.

But like improv in the theater is we don't practice the things that we're going to say, but we do rehearse. You know, we rehearse all the time and we're not practicing the funny lines. What we're practicing is this psychological safety, that we know that no matter what we say, we will be supported.

So me and my ensemble, we're practicing the idea that I can go up there and I got nothing, but guess what? My partner's going to come in and support me and say something interesting. And then I'll say something interesting. And then they'll say something interesting and we'll work our way through it.

And you start to realize that I'm going to be there for them and they'll be there for me. And that's what, in this case, psychological safety is. There's no [00:24:00] risk of being on stage and not knowing what, you know, I can put myself out there. The audience may not react at all. I can go out there and say nothing. And normally you'd be like, ah, and you're like, I'll be fine because you know, my team's got me. 

Yeah 

Mike Kent: Sure. Absolutely. They'll pick me up if I stumble or anything else. Okay. Got it.

Ronnie Feldman: So now in the world of, I'll start in compliance and we can maybe broaden it to other topics. Actually, the, I'm forgetting the woman's name who wrote the book about psychological safety, but she, she wrote it about like, the most effective leaders constantly ask for people to bring up bad news.

So you're in your normal reporting out meeting. And they're like, how's it going? And your direct reports go, Oh, this is going great. And this is going great. And we just nailed that. And the best leaders go, I don't care. Tell me what's wrong [00:25:00] so that we can start working on it together. Cause the default is that people do not like to bring up bad news.

Mike Kent: Right.

Ronnie Feldman: So you have to, or they don't want to talk about it. You have to remind them constantly, constantly to get to the point where people will actually do it and feel safe doing it. 

This is really important in compliance because the default is they're not going to ask for help. They're going to bury their problems. They are not going to trust that there's a sense of organizational justice. You know, there's a Speak Up Help. Most companies, big companies have a Speak Up Help Line, a hotline that you can call. It's anonymous and confidential that you can report bad news. Nobody uses it, and it's because people don't trust it. And so you have to constantly remind people to bring up bad news, that it's encouraged that you have to weed out bad behavior. And it's each of our responsibilities to do it. And that's a [00:26:00] hard message. 

So that's why the entertainment, because if you want to say things over and over and over again, better be fun and interesting or else no, who's going to let you play that message over and over again, that no, they won't let you play it. And if you certainly play it, they ain't going to listen. 

So to me, the value of entertainment is increased frequency and increased access to training and communication so that you can say these important things more frequently.

Mike Kent: And to that end, you're encouraging, and I don't want to say conditioning, but you're creating, we've got these catchphrases. I caught myself going down that road, right? We're creating an environment where it's okay, as you said, to bring up that bad news. 

I think about operators who are afraid of getting fired or afraid of getting yelled at on the manufacturing floor because something in the manufacturing process doesn't go as [00:27:00] intended. "Oh my gosh, this somebody told me once that if we had to throw out a batch of this material, it's $10 million for the company and we could tank it. And I don't want to be the person that delivers that news because I'm going to be out and all of these things." Right?

If you create that environment where the leader says, "No, no, no, tell me about all the stuff that's going wrong. Because then nobody has to get in that space where they have to decide if they want to bring up that bad news or not. The more often a leader does that or a group of people do that for each other, then that becomes the norm and the fear goes away because people have experience of not having to be fearful with what comes next. Have I, am I following that and correctly? 

Ronnie Feldman: This again, this isn't my theories. This is the concept of psychological safety. And I think it applies really well in the [00:28:00] compliance space. And, you know, more broadly in leadership in general. There's several natural phenomenons that we all have. People don't like to bring up bad news.

So you have to work harder to jump, you know, to change that. Not saying this is easy, but this is why being entered... You know, I use the term 'entertainment' very intentionally. I sometimes promote comedy and compliance for my company because that's provocative and then people call, but really it's not about the funny.

It's, uh, these are all about being able to stand out and get noticed, to have higher content retention rates, to get access to more training and communication channels that you wouldn't otherwise get at, to play things in higher rotation. Essentially, we always... like, you'd rather have somebody not understand the rules and issue spot and ask for your help. You'd rather have that, than to pass [00:29:00] the test and then have a problem come up and bury it. Right?

Mike Kent: 100%.

Ronnie Feldman: And the unspoken secret that we all have and who people who work in the corporate risk community is: we push out a boring bloated training because it's the easiest way to track that you did something.

And that's a really cynical way to say it, but you know, like the... To me, there's always a balance between evidence and engagement. Evidence that you did something for the regulators. Although again, there are certain laws and regulations where you have to, they say you have to show that you did it, but most often they just say, "Hey, we want you to show me what you did and why you thought it was effective."

My whole argument that I'm making, and it's backed up by pretty good science is that just doing that annual training [00:30:00] is an ineffective solution to these problems. It's just the simplest way that you can push it out through your LMS and show that everybody did it. 

But it's an open secret that they're not learning. And I would argue that not only are they not learning, they're not learning the material. They are learning that you don't care. And that's what... it's worse.

Mike Kent: And when that arrives at their doorstep or arrives in their email inbox, they're going to say, oh, here we go again. Something that I just have to bear through and whatever. How do we frame the intention? Is our intention to check the box and generate evidence? Is our intention to make sure that when an issue arises, people are handling it appropriately in doing what we want them to do? That relies on our message getting through. Yeah. 

So, the "wrapper" as you're fond of saying [00:31:00] and reading through your website, which is amazing by the way. We'll provide a link to that in the show notes for folks that can go and check it out. And I highly encourage you to check it out. That's my shameless plug for everything that you're doing, because I really believe you're onto something here. 

But you talk about wrapping important topics in more creative wrappers and those creative examples. You touched on your intention around the word 'entertainment' over fun and goofing off and everything else.  

Aw, just when it was getting to the good stuff! That's right, Quality Grinders, this concludes part one of our conversation with Ronnie around Entertaining Better Training. 

So far we've discussed the science, the application of "Yes, and..." from improvisation, and how psychological safety plays a leading [00:32:00] role in improving the effectiveness of compliance training in regulated environments.

In part two, Ronnie will describe more of the creative wrappers he's used to package compliance training. These wrappers help open people up to the important messages and concepts we relay, and that the audience needs to adopt back on the job. 

So join us for part two of Entertaining Better Training with Ronnie Feldman, next time here on The Grind.

Joe Toscano: If Medvacon can help you and your organization, we're happy to do so. We specialize in the following areas: Quality and Compliance, Validation and Qualification Services, Project Management, Tech Transfers, General and Specialized Training Programs, Engineering Services, and Talent Acquisition. If you have general questions as well, feel free to give us a call at any time.

We can easily be reached at 833 633 8226 or via our website at www. medvacon. com. [00:33:00] Thanks so much, and we look forward to speaking with you. 

Jessica Taylor: Thank you for listening to the Quality Grind Podcast presented by Medvacon. To learn more or to hear additional episodes, visit us at www. medvacon. com.