Chris Taylor is a writer, speaker, and the founder of Actionable. His organization aims to reinvent professional learning as we know it. Whether it’s supporting organizations or individuals, Actionable believes learning should be collaborative, measureable, and habit forming.

We love Chris because he understands the importance of turning insight into action – a crucial, but often missing, component to success.

Years ago, Chris found himself completing four to five personal development books a week. But, he wasn’t seeing much “development.” Something had to change. 

Chris cut back to one book a week and focused on incorporating one thing he learned into his everyday activity. The results were remarkable. Chris started to see meaningful changes by simply shifting his focus from information to implementation. Which was the genesis of Actionable.co.

From this experience, Chris learned that “Ideas are only valuable when applied.”  We couldn’t agree more. Keeping this in mind, we met with Chris to dive deeper into topics including industry trends, innovation, and employee engagement.

What’s the biggest trend?

“HR and culture spending are on the rise, while employee engagement remains flat. Over the past 20 years, corporate learning and development has turned into a $140 billion dollar industry, but it’s still not moving the needle on employee engagement.”

“Employers are now realizing that they need a new approach to see real changes.”

How do you stay ahead of the curve?

“Its all about innovation, not efficiency. Six Sigma is important, but woefully insufficient. We need to understand the new, “VUCA” world of work and operate within it.  VUCA stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous and was first used during the Gulf War to identify previously-unseen combat scenarios; ones in which military personnel needed the autonomy and training to make their own decisions in a rapidly changing environment.  If the US military can change the operating structure of their massive entity, so can most companies.”

Coolest Thing You’ve Done Recently?

“We’ve shown that you can impact just about any corporate metric through employee engagement.”

“We take the learnings from popular business books and turn them into actionable insights – hence our company name. But, the amazing thing we’ve been doing lately is tracking the results of implementation.”

“Through tracking software, we have found that higher employee engagement drives performance on a whole host of metrics, including the bottom line. It’s something we’ve known intuitively for a long time, but now we have the data to support it.”

Since Gin with a Genius, the MacPhie team has signed on to be an Actionable Consulting Partner. We look forward to sharing updates with you!