Your L&D Dispatch Unwrapped
Everyone else is doing it, so we are too!
So this is Christmas, and what have you done? You’ve subscribed to The L&D Dispatch for 2025, and for that we thank you!
Since every other tech app is doing an ‘Unwrapped’ at this time of year, we thought we’d do likewise: ingesting our 2024 content into ChatGPT and asking our future robot overlord to spit out a neat summary of all we’ve been through together.
Enjoy!
🎉 Top Themes of 2024:
The reigning champion of our newsletter themes: Learning Measurement & Impact, appearing in 18 newsletters! Turns out, proving your worth is a full-time job if you work in L&D.
Close contenders included AI in L&D, and the eternal existential crisis of Custom vs. Off-the-Shelf Solutions.
🔍 Most Used Word: "Learning"
No surprises here. It appeared 2,047 times across all newsletters. Runner-up? "Measurement," with 728 mentions.
Our heart belongs to metrics that matter.
😂 Habit We Just Couldn't Break: Using analogies and metaphors.
From "Learning Labyrinths" to "Desirable Difficulty Mazes", we turned everyday concepts into unforgettable stories.
And they say an arts degree has no value…
💡 Most Quoted Wisdom:
"Desirable difficulty” became our mantra, emphasizing the sweet spot between challenge and success.
Honorable mention: The phrase “LTEM” (or ‘Learning Transfer Evaluation Model’). Here’s ChatGPT’s weird take on this:
'It’s the Beyoncé of evaluation models!’
(We’re not sure what this means).
🧙♂️ Our Superpower (apparently):
Turning the mundane into magical. Whether it’s defending "boring" off-the-shelf solutions or reinventing Thanksgiving gratitude, we made everyday moments sparkle (again, according to this ChatGPT analysis…)
📬 Most Meta Moment:
Writing about writing newsletters, especially in Things I’m Thankful for in 2024, reflecting on how this process shaped our professional growth.
🔥 Spiciest Take:
Our contrarian love letter to text content, where we took on the video-first zeitgeist and emerged victorious.
Bonus Fun Facts
Favorite Letter: Clearly "L", thanks to "Learning," "Labyrinths," and "LTEM".
Most Inspirational Analogy: “Off-the-shelf learning is like renting a home; custom solutions are like owning it” – a perfect mic-drop moment for the L&D crowd (for the last time, according to ChatGPT!).
Truly, thanks for sticking with us this year. If you ever fancy a chat about the work we do, or just to kick ideas about, please do get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or by replying to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
When your team are faced with a crisis, you want them to be prepared. But how do you build those capabilities when crises are rare, and you hope they never occur?
In last week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, featuring our new branding(!), Ross G and Owen explored the use of simulations to build this capability.
We were joined by Chris Peschanel, who ran crisis management at Bayer Pharmaceuticals for 12 years, and by Phil Willcox from St8 of Play.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
In Home Alone, young Macaulay Culkin uses Christmas deocrations to deter the Wet Bandits from breaking in. In Jingle All The Way, The Grinch, and Deck the Halls, the characters use them to annoy their neighbors.
It turns out, these films have it all wrong.
In a classic paper from 1989, study participants were presented with photos of houses and asked how socialable they thought the residents were.
When those photos had no Christmas decorations, the raters judgment was pretty accurate - and tended to be based on how ‘open’ and ‘lived in’ the homes looked.
With Christmas decorations, ‘raters actually attributed greater sociability to the nonsociable residents’.
So if you want to spend this Christmas passive aggressively signalling to your neighbors that you want nothing to do with them, take down the lights!
Werner, C. M., Peterson-Lewis, S., & Brown, B. B. (1989). Inferences about homeowners' sociability: Impact of Christmas decorations and other cues. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 9(4), 279-296.
👹 Missing links
🦾 Welcome the LBM (Large Behavior Model)
In two years we’ve become comfortable talking about Large Language Models (LLMs), the chatty AI tools that generate text and images based on our prompts. The next step is Large Behavior Models: AIs that use cameras to observe a behavior, then replicate it. It’s another step towards our own personal C-3PO: able not just to tell us the odds of our impending destruction, but also to… no, that was all he could do. Other applications may be possible.
🤖 It’s not an After Eight, it’s a quantum chip
A new computing chip from Google, about the size of an After Eight mint, is able in minutes to complete tasks that would take a conventional computer 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. I think of it as the opposite of my Dispatch friend-and-co-author Ross Dickie, who takes years to complete tasks that would take another Learning Experience Designer just minutes (I jest, of course!)
👋 And finally…
We thought we’d end this year with a festive banger, Darlene Love’s ‘All Alone on Christmas’, which I just found out (from Ross D!) was written by Steven Van Zandt.
Van Zandt, depending on who you ask, is either Bruce Springsteen’s guitar player or The Sopranos’ Silvio Dante.
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mindtools! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can email custom@mindtools.com.
Or just hit reply to this email!
We’ll be back next year but, if you’re still trying to find the perfect Christmas gift to send to your friends and family, just hit the button below!