Most performance challenges are diagnosed as gaps in knowledge, skill, or will. But what happens when employees already know what to do, have the ability to do it, and want to do it - yet the behavior still doesn't happen?

This session introduces a practical extension to traditional performance diagnosis: access. Participants will explore how hidden barriers - such as unclear workflows, competing priorities, cognitive overload, or friction in systems - can prevent action, even when training is effective.

Through real-world examples and interactive application, attendees will learn how to more accurately diagnose performance gaps and determine when training is not the solution. Participants will practice identifying common access barriers and apply a simple framework to redesign tasks, workflows, or supports to make desired behaviors easier to execute.

Attendees will leave with actionable tools to shift from over-relying on training to designing for behavior, resulting in more effective learning strategies, stronger performance outcomes, and skills that actually stick.

About Allegra

Allegra is a Learning & Development Specialist at Northern Bank, where she designs scalable onboarding and development programs that drive real behavior change. With a background in high-volume operations and training, she specializes in diagnosing performance challenges and building practical, accessible systems that make learning stick. Her work focuses on bridging the gap between training and execution, helping leaders move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions to design environments that enable success. Allegra brings a human-centered, systems-driven approach to talent development, informed by both professional experience and real-world application.

As AI rapidly transforms how work gets done, the value of learning is shifting from knowledge acquisition to critical thinking in action. Success now depends on how effectively people interpret information, ask better questions, and make sound decisions in real time. Yet many learning experiences still prioritize content delivery over thinking development—leaving a critical gap between training and performance.

We’ve seen this happen: a live session sparks rich discussion where the answer is often “it depends,” but when it’s converted to eLearning, that complexity gets flattened into a single correct answer.

This session explores that tension and introduces a practical approach to designing learning that builds critical thinking and metacognition as observable skills. What makes this approach different is not just a focus on critical thinking, but a deliberate effort to make thinking visible within learning design itself.

Through real examples and hands-on redesign, participants will learn how to embed structured questioning, reflection, and decision-making into training and eLearning experiences. They'll leave with concrete strategies to surface thinking, strengthen decision-making, and hold up in the complexity of real work.

About Amy

Amy Morris, CPTD, is an Instructional Designer at Withum, where she focuses on how learning shapes the way people think, not just what they know. Her work is driven by a deep curiosity about how individuals navigate ambiguity, make decisions, and apply knowledge in real work. She is especially passionate about helping L&D professionals move beyond content delivery to design experiences that make thinking visible, practical, and impactful. Amy blends learning science, instructional design, and experimentation to create learning that drives meaningful performance.

You designed a learning program that delivered. Not everything went as planned, but you adapted, delivered strong results and your stakeholders noticed. Now the question is: does that work deserve a wider audience?

External award programs are often underused tools in a learning professional's toolkit. They build marketplace eminence, validate your team's work, and demonstrate the business value of what you do, but most practitioners don't know where to start or how to frame their story compellingly.

In this session, you will evaluate one of your own completed projects against award program criteria so that you can start to outline a plan for your submission narrative. You will learn proven best practices and the next steps to take for preparing a winning entry into an award program.

This session is ideal for L&D professionals who have led or contributed to a successful program and want to build external recognition for their work and their organization.

About Betsy

Betsy Kvedar is a senior learning and development strategist with 28 years of experience at IBM, where she has designed and led enablement programs for different products in IBM's infrastructure portfolio. She built an organizational external awards recognition program to help peers showcase their great projects, guiding more than 13 winning submissions to programs including the Brandon Hall Excellence Awards, Stevie Awards, and Canadian CIO Awards. Betsy holds the Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD) credential from ATD and served as President of the ATD Vermont Chapter from 2021 to 2025, leading the chapter through post-pandemic reinvention.

The modules and in-person learning experiences that stick aren't the prettiest ones or the ones that are the most entertaining. They're the ones built using stories.

In this hands-on session, we’ll walk through the story narrative structure which turns dense, often boring content into training that is relatable and actionable. You'll learn a basic story spine that every story ever told uses and how to apply it in real time to course content you bring, (bring the boring!) or one I provide.

You'll leave with three things: a story-structure template you can drop content into and fashion for your next training, a quick diagnostic checklist for auditing what's already in your library, and an honest take on what story can (and can't) do to transfer knowledge and change behavior.

If you've ever felt the gap between training that sticks and training that just gets seen or heard—this is the workshop for closing that gap. So, bring your SME's most boring learning content, a coffee, and a willingness to play. We'll have fun! And tell some stories, of course.

About Bridget

Bridget K. Brown is the founder of StoryMatters, LLC, where she helps individuals and organizations make the complex clear through story, improv and great learning design. Known as the "Geek Translator," she designs e-learning, virtual training, and live workshops for Fortune 500 companies, and organizations in the healthcare sector, and coaches TEDx speakers. A Certified Applied Improvisation Instructor trained at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and Duarte Academy, Bridget is a former adjunct in the Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science where she taught storytelling and public speaking. Her work has been featured on Articulate's E-Learning Heroes and in Training Magazine.

Most facilitated sessions fail not because of poor design, but because the person leading the room hasn't developed two capacities that the room is quietly depending on: discernment and presence.

Discernment is a dual awareness: reading what is happening in the room — beneath the stated positions, in the emotional charge and the silences — while simultaneously noticing what is happening inside yourself. Which interpretations are you making? Which heroic tendencies are rising? Is your inner state clarifying what you see, or distorting it? Presence is what becomes possible when that inner work is done — the ability to stay with what you and the room are both carrying, without collapsing, over-controlling, or managing the discomfort away. Together, they are what allows a convener to hold space when things get hard. Without them, even a well-designed session defaults to performance.

Discernment and presence are two sides of the same movement — one inward-facing, one outward-facing — and both are always operating at once. What makes them more available under pressure is the development of three inner capacities: seeing more (expanding how we make meaning beyond our own assumptions), staying with the heat (working with anxiety rather than fleeing it), and standing solid while staying connected (maintaining a clear sense of self in close relationship with others). This session helps participants develop all three — and experience discernment and presence not as sequential stages, but as simultaneous expressions of the same inner work. Participants will explore their own defaults under pressure, practice the moves that open the room rather than close it, and leave with a working design for a real upcoming conversation.

Grounded in adult development theory, organizational development research, and real case examples, the session offers both a conceptual frame and immediately applicable practice for L&D professionals who lead learning in high-stakes, complex environments.

About Charles

Dr. Charles Tweedly is a Senior Consultant and certified Senior Action Learning Coach at Thornbird Consulting, with a Doctorate in Human and Organizational Studies from George Washington University. His research specialization in Transformational Learning informs his work in change facilitation, leadership development, and organizational design. A former board member of the World Institute for Action Learning, Dr. Tweedly brings both academic rigor and extensive practitioner experience to his facilitation work. He holds certifications in MBTI, FIRO-B, Leadership Agility 360, and ESCI, and has guided organizations through complex transitions using evidence-based, whole-system approaches to learning and change.

Research consistently shows that most training fails to translate into on-the-job performance. Too often, organizations rely on knowledge-heavy programs that look efficient but don’t build real capability. Knowledge alone doesn’t equal skill. Compounding the problem, many evaluation efforts focus on superficial metrics that offer little insight into whether behavior changed or performance improved.

In this session, you’ll explore how to identify industry-demand and job-aligned skills. Grounded in research, we’ll examine factors that most influence whether learning shows up at work. You’ll learn how to design a learning journey that prioritizes relevant skills, real-world practice, and reinforcement, rather than content overload.

The session will also demystify training evaluation. You’ll walk through how to plan evaluation upfront using logic models, select appropriate evaluation instruments, and report results that lead to meaningful action, not just data.

You’ll leave with a practical, research-based approach and tools for designing and evaluating learning that builds skills, drives behavior change, and strengthens L&D’s credibility and impact.

About Elham

Dr. Elham Arabi is an award-winning global learning strategist and researcher in corporate and higher-ed with more than 15 years of experience in the US, South-East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Elham’s career spans teaching, instructional design, and strategic advisory roles. She has championed better design and evaluation practices in several organizations such as the World Health Organization and done practical research to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of training that leads to learning transfer and impact. She holds a PhD in Curriculum & Instruction. Her thesis was on enhancing training design through training evaluation to investigate the effects on training transfer.

This talk explores how integrating advanced assessment techniques, and the data it provides, can revolutionize professional training.

This session empowers trainers and training organizations to harness technology and assessment tools, enabling them to foster deeper learning and drive measurable organizational success.

Attendees will learn how AI-driven analytics, flexible OnDemand modules, and dynamic live sessions work together to create personalized and effective learning paths by highlighting practical strategies for leveraging assessment data to identify skill gaps and customize one-on-one and classroom instruction for maximum business value.

About Eric

Eric Bloom is the Executive Director of the IT Management and Leadership Institute, the governing body of the ITMLP® and ITMLE® certifications, and a leading provider of IT leadership, interpersonal communication, and business skills training.

Eric is also an Amazon #1 bestselling author, former nationally syndicated columnist, Certified Professional Speaker (CSP), TEDx Talk speaker, trainer, executive coach, former ITworld.com contributor, and past President of National Speakers Association New England.

Prior to founding the ITML Institute, Eric held senior IT executive positions at various firms including Monster Worldwide, Independence Investments, and Fidelity Investments.

Learning impact rarely comes from content alone. It comes from the quality of attention, practice, shared understanding, and partnership around the learner. In this interactive 55-minute session, participants will experience a hands-on, inquiry-based reflection process using elements of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method to explore how learning creates impact.

Participants will engage in a brief skill-building activity followed by two guided reflection activities focused on learning impact, application, and the conditions that help learning translate into action.

The session addresses a common challenge for L&D professionals: designing experiences that engage people in the room and connect to behavior change after the session ends. Participants will use metaphor, storytelling, and group dialogue to surface practical insights about learning transfer, manager support, relevance, follow-through, and observable outcomes.

Participants will leave with a simple facilitation structure they can use to design more engaging learning conversations and identify clearer indicators of impact.

About Erica

Erica Mattison, MPA, JD, is the Founder and CEO of Erica Mattison Coaching & Consulting LLC, where she helps purpose-driven professionals, leaders, and teams clarify direction, strengthen leadership capacity, and take purposeful action. She brings experience across higher education, sustainability, public service, nonprofits, and social impact, including teaching career development courses and coaching MBA students and alumni. Erica is a certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator, Gallup-Certified CliftonStrengths® Coach, Everything DiSC® Certified Practitioner, Five Behaviors® Certified Practitioner, and Certified Career Services Provider. She is the author of Clarifying What Matters.

As AI tools reshape how work gets done, L&D professionals face a critical question: How do we design learning that prepares people to work alongside machine intelligence?

This session applies neuroscience research to help you build more effective training for AI-augmented workplaces. You'll learn how the social brain maintains connection and performance when cognitive work shifts between human and artificial intelligence, and why traditional change management approaches often fall short.

Dr. Jeanine Stewart will share practical strategies to help you address common challenges in AI transitions: cognitive overload, team disconnection, and uncertainty about which human skills matter most. You'll discover how to leverage social neuroscience principles to design learning that strengthens collaboration, trust, and adaptive thinking in environments where humans and AI work together.

Whether you're supporting leaders who manage AI-augmented teams, designing upskilling programs, or building change readiness, you'll leave with evidence-based frameworks you can apply immediately. This session focuses on the human side of AI integration, giving you tools to help employees maintain performance, connection, and confidence as workplace cognition becomes increasingly distributed between human and machine intelligence.

About Jeanine

Dr. Jeanine Stewart is an organizational neuroscientist and executive coach who helps leaders navigate workplace change through brain science. With a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Virginia, she served as Chief Behavioral Scientist at the NeuroLeadership Institute, where she developed evidence-based learning and leadership programs for Fortune 100 organizations. Her research on neural synchrony and team performance has informed her work with clients in technology, government, healthcare, and education. She created the NeuroMighty™ framework to help L&D professionals design human-centered learning that strengthens connection, adaptability, and performance in complex work environments.

In marathon running, conditions rarely stay perfect—and leadership is no different. Changing priorities, unexpected setbacks, shifting expectations, and periods of uncertainty can challenge even the most capable professionals.

In this interactive workshop, participants will experience The Marathon Mindset™, a practical framework for sustaining leadership, learning, and performance over time by adjusting pace, priorities, and expectations as conditions evolve. Through storytelling, reflection, peer discussion, and an experiential simulation, attendees will explore how adaptable goal-setting, support systems, and resilience strategies can help leaders continue moving forward even when the journey does not unfold as planned.

Using the ABC Goal Framework (Aspirational, Baseline, Completion), participants will practice redefining success under changing conditions while identifying what fuels sustainable growth and long-term performance.

Attendees will leave with practical tools, reflection strategies, and adaptable planning techniques they can immediately apply to leadership development, career growth, team dynamics, and navigating uncertainty in the workplace.

Whether participants are facing burnout, change, competing priorities, or ambitious professional goals, this session will help them build leadership endurance for the long run.

About Matt

Matt Ames, CPTD, SPHR, is the Founder & Chief Endurance Officer of Learning Endurance, a leadership development consultancy focused on sustaining growth, learning, and performance for the long run. He serves as Head of Learning & Development at Northern Bank, leading enterprise learning, leadership development, onboarding, and culture initiatives. Matt is also a National Advisor for Chapters (NAC) with ATD and Past President of ATD Greater Boston. A three-time Boston Marathon finisher, he blends storytelling, experiential learning, and reflective practice to help leaders navigate changing conditions with adaptability, resilience, and purpose.

Learning teams are awash in data, yet often struggle to translate it into influence or action. This session reframes learning analytics as a decision-making capability, focusing on how credible data and disciplined analysis can shift conversations with the business. It challenges the assumption that dashboards equal insight, showing how learning data can be used to question assumptions, guide priorities, and improve performance.

Learning teams have more data than ever, but far less influence than they should. Too often, learning analytics stop at dashboards and reports that describe activity without shaping decisions or performance.

About Megan

Megan Torrance is the CEO and founder of TorranceLearning, where she leads a team of learning experience designers & engineers in reimagining workplace learning. Her firm has served Fortune 1000 companies, major research universities, global professional associations, and federal agencies for over two decades. Megan brings a strategic vision that helps TorranceLearning bridge vision with execution—delivering innovative, data-informed, and learner-centered solutions.

Megan is the author of Agile for Instructional Designers, Data & Analytics for Instructional Designers, Making Sense of xAPI and The AI Implementation Guide for L&D.

Most training doesn’t fail because of bad content; it fails because learners aren’t engaged, don’t practice, and can’t apply what they’ve learned. In this fast-paced, hands-on session, participants will learn how to design learner-centered training that actually sticks with the help of AI tools like ChatGPT.

The session will tackle common challenges such as information overload, passive learners, and limited time to design effective training. Participants will explore how AI can help quickly transform traditional content into interactive, real-world learning experiences.

This isn’t a lecture — participants will actively build. Bring a training topic you currently use, along with a laptop or other device and access to an AI tool. You’ll use a simple framework and practical prompts to redesign existing training and create a ready-to-use activity that engages learners and supports performance.

Along the way, you’ll learn repeatable techniques for using AI as a co-designer while keeping the human element at the center. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for saving development time, improving engagement, and creating learning experiences tied to observable on-the-job outcomes.

About Melissa

Dr. Melissa Wilson is a learning and development professional and business owner with hands-on experience designing and delivering training that drives real results. Through her work with clients across industries, she has redesigned traditional, content-heavy training into practical, learner-centered experiences that improve engagement and on-the-job performance.

She regularly uses tools like ChatGPT to streamline development, create realistic scenarios, and build interactive learning more efficiently while keeping the human element at the center. With a background in organizing and process improvement, Melissa brings a practical, real-world approach to her work and equips participants with strategies they can immediately apply.

Businesses and organizations invest heavily in engagement, performance, and retention—yet many interventions fail to produce lasting change. Why? Because the problem is often misdiagnosed.

In this session, participants will explore a critical shift in thinking: what looks like disengagement, low performance, or resistance/"quiet quitting" is often a response to workplace conditions—not a lack of motivation or capability. When learning and talent strategies target the wrong problem, they create more activity without meaningful impact.

Drawing on leadership research and real-world experience, this session introduces a practical framework for identifying behavioral signals as data. Participants will learn how to distinguish between skill gaps and environmental barriers, and how to align learning and leadership strategies with the conditions that actually drive performance.

Through case-based discussion and guided reflection, attendees will leave with tools to improve learning relevance, strengthen leadership effectiveness, and design interventions that lead to measurable behavior change within their organizations.

About Michelle

Michelle Courtney Berry is a leadership expert, best-selling author, and global speaker who has delivered over 5,000 presentations across four continents. Known as The Workplace Doc™, she helps organizations identify the hidden cultural dynamics driving disengagement, burnout, and turnover.

Her work bridges research and real-world leadership, equipping HR and talent leaders to improve communication, strengthen trust, and design learning strategies that drive measurable performance outcomes.

Organizations have moved fast to deploy AI tools like Microsoft Copilot—yet real adoption remains stubbornly low. Usage data shows a familiar pattern: initial curiosity, sporadic experimentation, and then a stall. The problem isn’t the technology. It’s the assumption that access plus training equals behavior change.

This session examines why most AI rollouts fail to translate into daily, productive use—and why L&D is uniquely positioned to fix it. Drawing on enterprise adoption data, case studies, and short real-world vignettes, we’ll explore the human and workflow barriers that quietly suppress uptake: lack of practice loops, weak leadership signals, and learning experiences disconnected from real work.

Participants will see how high-performing organizations shift from “AI training” to AI habit-building by aligning learning design, leadership behavior, and reinforcement. The session emphasizes a people-first approach—where technology enables change, but does not drive it alone.

Attendees will leave with a clear, practical model for moving AI from rollout to routine use, along with concrete strategies L&D teams can apply immediately to create sustained, viral adoption that sticks.

About Mike

Mike Song is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and CEO of GetControl.net. He specializes in helping organizations turn technology—and now AI—into measurable performance and behavior change. Mike has worked with 20% of the Fortune 500 and has delivered thousands of sessions focused on productivity, adoption, and leadership effectiveness. He is the author of How to AI, a practical guide to building real AI habits at work. Mike’s sessions are known for pairing data, real-world examples, and hands-on practice to create learning that actually sticks.

The rapid growth of AI tools is creating new opportunities for L&D leaders to rethink how impact is defined, measured, and demonstrated. In this session, participants will explore five AI tools and examine how they align with five key areas of the L&D function to measure impact. Participants will evaluate how these tools can support impact in areas such as learner engagement, skill development, performance improvement, operational efficiency, and business results. By the end of the session, participants will develop an action plan they can apply within their own organizations and teams to better measure impact and demonstrate the strategic value of L&D.

About Miko

Dr. Miko Nino is an educator, researcher, and learning innovation leader. His most recent work specializes in the intersection of artificial intelligence, online learning, and learning and development. He has led initiatives focused on AI integration, digital learning strategy, faculty development, and scalable online education. Dr. Nino is a frequent speaker on AI in learning and development, especially for program development and management. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at national and international conferences. Dr. Nino is Assistant Vice President for Adult and Online Education at Rhode Island College and President of ATD Rhode Island.

Most L&D practitioners want to measure. The gap between that intention and successful execution is where things break down. More often than not, it comes down to five of the most common structural traps that show up across organizations regardless of size, industry, or maturity.

This session walks through each one and the shift in practice that breaks it:

- Dashboards multiply, usage doesn't (Dashboard Graveyard)
- Measurement as an afterthought, added once the program is done (Bolted On Not Built In)
- Data that informs but never drives decisions (Informing Without Managing)
- Too much data, no story, no call to action (Lost in Translation)
- The data matters, but so does the ecosystem around it (Your Measurement Iceberg)

You'll leave with three things: a Reality Check showing which traps hit hardest in your work, a starter set of measures that shows what you have and what you're missing, and a 90-day plan you can use immediately.

About Peggy

Peggy Parskey is a consultant, author, and measurement strategist with over 25 years of experience advising talent and learning leaders on building measurement practices that stick. Her next book, Measurement Simplified, co-authored with David Vance, comes out in 2027. She also co-authored Learning Analytics, 2nd Edition, Measurement Demystified, and the Measurement Demystified Field Guide. Through her firm, Parskey Consulting, Peggy works with talent teams on the practical question most measurement work skips: how to launch measurement that takes hold and grows stronger over time.

Knowledge is walking out the door. Training gets delivered, but behavior doesn’t change. Culture work launches with energy and slowly fades. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

The issue usually isn’t effort. It is alignment. Learning & Development, Knowledge Management, and culture are often treated like separate initiatives when they are actually one interconnected system. When that system is out of sync, even great programs struggle to land.

This session introduces a practical ecosystem view that connects those three domains and helps you see your organization more clearly: where it is strong, where it is fragile, and where a small shift could unlock outsized impact.

We will walk through a simple framework you can actually use without jargon or theory for theory’s sake. You will do a quick, real-time reflection on your own environment, pressure-test where knowledge is and is not flowing, and leave with one concrete next step you can take back to your work.

We will also talk about how to translate this into the language of impact so you can better connect your work to outcomes that matter and make a stronger case for investment.

Future-ready is not a buzzword. It is what happens when the system actually works.

About Rachel

Dr. Rachel Teague is a KM strategist, global speaker, change facilitator, and organizational learning consultant who helps teams build smarter systems and stronger cultures. She specializes in knowledge management, HR, change leadership, and training and development with a practical, people-first approach. Through consulting and facilitation with ATD and other organizations, she supports teams in turning complexity into clarity and ensuring knowledge gets used, not just stored. Rachel brings curiosity, clarity, and a bit of quirk to every engagement, helping organizations design solutions that stick and cultures where people and knowledge thrive.

The Learning Ecosystem Framework introduces a learner-centered model that makes that environment visible through four interdependent learning quadrants: Training, Body of Knowledge, Learning Community, and Community of Practice.

In this session, attendees will discover how the framework reveals the full ecosystem surrounding the learner and why each quadrant matters in the development of capability over time. Rather than viewing learning as a single event or isolated intervention, participants will explore how content, communities, formal learning, and informal practice work together to influence performance, growth, and ongoing development.

Attendees will leave with a practical lens for interpreting their own learning environments, recognizing imbalance or fragmentation, and identifying ways to strengthen the conditions that support learner success, performance, and long-term capability development.

About Rick

Rick Valdez is a learning and development leader with deep expertise in building high-impact learning ecosystems across healthcare, technology, financial services, and global enterprise environments. Over his career, he has led large-scale instructional design and learning experience design functions, modernized learning operations, and aligned performance consulting strategies with business outcomes. His work spans product education, technical training, customer learning, and enterprise talent development, with leadership roles at organizations including Boston Scientific, UKG, athenahealth, Fidelity Investments, and Bank of America. Rick’s work has been recognized with a Brandon Hall Award of Excellence.

Leadership development is under pressure to prove its value - but too often, impact is measured by attendance and satisfaction rather than real business outcomes. Many talent development professionals struggle to clearly connect leadership programs to the results that matter to senior leaders.

This session tackles that challenge head-on by exploring the critical link between how leaders show up (voice) and the measurable results they drive (value). You’ll discover how leadership behaviors such as communication, presence, and inclusive influence directly shape team performance, engagement, and retention.

Through a practical, easy-to-apply framework, you’ll learn how to design leadership development with impact in mind, identify meaningful metrics beyond “smile sheets,” and translate behavior change into credible business outcomes. You’ll also gain tools to tell a compelling impact story - combining data and narrative to influence stakeholders and elevate the role of L&D.

Walk away with actionable strategies you can immediately apply to demonstrate the true value of your leadership development efforts and position yourself as a strategic partner in building a future-ready organization.

About Rosemary

Rosemary Okoiti, CPTD, ACC, is a Talent Development expert with extensive global experience in three continents. She has been a facilitator, speaker and coach for 20+ years focusing on intercultural leadership development, performance management, succession planning, and DEIB in the banking, pharmaceutical and non-profit sectors across the globe. She combines her passion and skillset to empower individuals to grow to their highest potential while driving achievement of organizational strategic goals.

She is the founder and CEO of Rosemary Okoiti Consulting, an organization that focuses on coaching and training professionals who have relocated to other countries to successfully navigate “new country” challenges as they drive their career growth.

Rosemary co-founded “Making Diversity Stick”, an organization that is dedicated to offering coaching & training services to leaders on how to start and sustain DEIB initiatives.

She also co-founded the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Community of Champions for ATD Chapters.

A current member of the ATD Chapter Recognition Committee (CRC), she is the past Chair of the ATD Leaders Conference Programs Advisory Committee (ALC PAC 2023/24) having served as a committee member from 2022 to 2023. Prior to that, she served on the Executive Board of the Association for Talent Development New York City (ATD NYC) chapter as the Vice President of Talent Management from 2019 to 2021.

Rosemary has been a Speaker at various conferences since 2020.

She holds a Masters of Education in Entrepreneurship Development from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelors of Education in Economics & Business from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.

She is a Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD) and an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ICF-ACC).

AI and emerging learning technologies are flooding the L&D landscape with bold claims, polished demos, and rapidly evolving capabilities—but separating real value from vaporware has never been harder. At the same time, L&D professionals are being asked to move faster, justify investments more rigorously, and navigate increasingly strict IT, security, and compliance requirements such as SOC 2 and data governance standards.

This workshop introduces a practical decision-making framework—STACK (Solve, Test, Articulate, Connect, Keep)—to help L&D professionals evaluate learning technologies with clarity and confidence. Participants will learn how to move beyond vendor promises to assess real capability, build credible business cases that stand up to both leadership and IT scrutiny, and ensure new tools can be responsibly integrated into their existing learning ecosystem.

Through hands-on application, attendees will work through a realistic AI-in-L&D adoption scenario, applying the framework to decide whether to reject, pilot, or adopt a tool. By the end of the session, participants will leave with a repeatable evaluation approach they can immediately use to make stronger, faster, and safer technology decisions in their own organizations.

About Sarah

Sarah Martin is the Senior Manager of Learning Solutions and Design at Withum, where she is responsible for shaping learning design strategy across the firm, including instructional design governance and learning technology evaluation.

She leads a team of instructional designers who use the learning technology stack to deliver scalable, high-quality learning solutions that support the firm’s business priorities. That work requires her to make practical and defensible decisions about learning technology—including emerging tools and AI—balancing innovation, impact, and risk. She regularly partners with IT and business leaders to help design learning ecosystems that support real business needs.

Organizational change often fails, not because of poor strategy or lack of training, but because leaders misinterpret how people respond to it. What looks like resistance, disengagement, or confusion is often something deeper: a response to loss.

In this session, we'll briefly acknowledge familiar change models, then move beyond them to explore a more practical and human-centered approach. Using The Hidden Loss Framework™, attendees will learn how to identify what employees may be losing during change, including a sense of self, capability, control, connection, and stability, and how those losses directly influence behavior.

Through an interactive activity, attendees will apply this framework to a real workplace scenario, shifting from reacting to behavior to understanding what's driving it. This shift enables more effective communication, stronger leadership conversations, and more successful adoption of learning and change initiatives.

Attendees will leave with a simple, actionable tool they can use immediately to reframe resistance, support their teams, and improve the impact of their talent development efforts.

About Sheila

Sheila D. Adkins, CPTD, M.S. in Adult Learning, is a talent development leader with over 25 years of experience helping individuals and organizations grow through learning, coaching, and change. She supports enterprise learning initiatives for the State of Maine and is the founder of Swim to the Sky, where she brings a human-centered approach to leadership and development. Known for her approachable style and real-world perspective, Sheila focuses on bridging the gap between learning and everyday work, helping leaders create meaningful, lasting impact.

FOBO, the Fear of Becoming Obsolete, is the unnamed anxiety driving most AI conversations in organizations right now. But underneath the fear is a more precise problem: most managers were never prepared to lead people through complexity, and now they're being asked to lead them through one of the most disruptive shifts in modern work history.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that the strongest predictor of employee AI adoption, after technical integration, is whether their direct manager actively champions it. Fewer than a third say theirs does. This isn't an AI problem. It's a leadership development problem that AI has made impossible to ignore.

The answer isn't choosing between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. It's HIxAI: human intelligence multiplied by AI. Each amplifies the other. But that only works when managers are developed to bring what AI cannot: judgment, presence, the capacity to develop others through uncertainty.

In this session, participants will experience the FOBO Flip - a structured mapping exercise that identifies which skills AI is coming for first, and which ones are uniquely human skills. They'll leave with a reframe, a practical tool, and a question to bring back to the leaders they support: not "how do I survive AI?" but "what does it mean to lead with what is beautifully, uniquely human?"

About Stephanie

Stephanie Goodell is a leadership and career development strategist at Ripple and Flow Leadership. She works with organizations to build leadership ecosystems that unlock human potential at scale. A certified coach and experienced facilitator, Stephanie brings a people-first lens to the most pressing questions in organizational life, including how managers develop the deeply human skills that AI cannot replicate. She has facilitated AI and human intelligence workshops for professional communities and consults with organizations navigating leadership development amid accelerating change. Stephanie is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Business Administration at Babson College and plans to research the connection between leadership development skills and what's uniquely human in an AI-fluent world.

What if your leadership training was as engaging as the leaders it's meant to develop?

In this hands-on, high-energy session, you'll experience a toolkit of interactive activities designed to bring every stage of leadership development to life — from self-discovery to strategic thinking. No lectures. No passive note-taking. Just real tools you use immediately.

We'll move through the core pillars of leadership development — self-assessment, emotional intelligence, team dynamics, and decision-making — using activities that get participants thinking, talking, laughing, and leading. You'll walk away with:

* Ready-to-use tools for every phase of a leadership program
* Techniques grounded in brain science that make learning stick
* Fresh ideas to transform your next leadership session from forgettable to transformative

Come ready to play. Leave ready to lead.

About Susan

Susan Doctoroff Landay is President and Owner of Trainers Warehouse, where her mission is simple: make learning more fun and effective. With nearly 30 years in the talent development industry, Sue has built a thriving community of practitioners through her WorkSmart blog, a LinkedIn group nearing 100K members, and her popular bi-weekly Trainers Warehouse Show & Share. Prior to joining the family business, she consulted and trained in negotiation. Sue holds degrees from Yale, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern — and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. She brings that same spirit of play to everything she does.