Guest: Kayla Nalven, Founder of TED@Work
Published: October 23rd, 2025
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‍Episode summary

A fascinating look inside the human-centered principles that power two of the world's most beloved brands: Sesame Street and TED.

Kayla Nalven is a builder, a connector, and the founder of TED at Work. With a background shaping social impact initiatives at Sesame Workshop before building a new division at TED, Kayla has a unique perspective on how to create content and experiences that genuinely connect with people and drive meaningful change at scale.

This conversation is packed with wisdom on how to build things that truly matter. You'll learn the core secrets that make these iconic organizations so effective and how you can apply their heart-centered approach to your own work.

Key topics

• ❤️ The Sesame Street secret to creating buy-in by making people feel seen and understood.
• ⭐ Why at TED, the "idea is the star," not the speaker—a masterclass in communication.
• 💬 The key to employee-led adoption: using group discussion to foster ownership.
• 🤖 A non-obvious strategy for successful AI adoption: finding the right messengers.

Top quotes

“You cannot dismiss the power of activating emotion when you're trying to change behavior and when you're trying to teach someone something.”

“A misconception is that the speaker is the star… really the idea is the star. An idea shouldn't be self-serving; it should be a gift to your audience.”

“A part of what Sesame did was help children learn to label emotions… kids may not know the feeling in their body and how to label it. It's a foundational part of emotional intelligence.”

“When you invite people to bring their whole experience, it changes the dynamic. There's no longer a hierarchy… it breaks down the silos across departments and roles.”

“Having a VP talk about AI may not be as powerful as having someone in a similar role showcase how they use it to solve similar problems.”

Resources

• Download the One New Zealand Case Study
• Book a Platform Demo

Full episode

Kayla Nalven: The unlock for AI transformation is about scaling role specific use cases and having the right messenger of those use cases. Having a VP talk about all these ways that you can be using AI may not be as powerful as having someone in a similar role as you showcase how they use AI to solve similar business problems. 

Kayla Nalven: When you create a learning experience where it's not just a sage on a stage, it changes the dynamic in the room because there's no longer this hierarchy. Discussion-based learning has this effect. From a change management perspective, it allows employees to feel like they're a part of the process and to feel more bought into whatever that new direction is. It doesn't feel like this inauthentic top-down thing. They actually feel part of the process of the change.

Mike Courian: Welcome to Shapeshifters, the podcast on the hunt for passionate individuals who are discovering and rediscovering the best ways to transform people and organizations for good. I'm your host, Mike Courian, and it's great to be here with you.

This episode I'm talking to Kayla Nalven. Kayla has built an incredible career at the intersection of learning and scale. She's worked with two very iconic organizations, getting her start at Sesame Street before going on to found and lead TED at Work. Today, she's Director of Learning Experience Design at Springboard, helping people transform their careers.

She's a great connector of ideas and someone who's deeply curious about how we really change and grow.

In this conversation, Kayla's going to pull back the curtain on Ted's unique approach to communication and why it's so impactful and how it can drastically change the way we learn.

You'll hear invaluable lessons she gained from her time at Sesame Street, about why we need to embrace the power of emotion when we're trying to change behavior.

She'll reveal why discus-

Mike Courian: based group learning is a powerful tool for AI transformation and pretty much everything else. And you'll learn why the secret to creating real impact is making the idea, not the communicator, the star.

I loved this conversation and I'm confident you're going to walk away with a new appreciation for the power of a great idea delivered with heart. Let's jump in.

Mike Courian: Kayla, welcome to the podcast.

Kayla Nalven: Thank you, Mike. So great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Mike Courian: It's great to have you. I like to kick off by allowing our listeners to get to know you a little bit. And so the way I like to do this is with three words. So, in three words, who is Kayla?

Kayla Nalven: Oh my gosh. Such a good question.

Okay, I love to build things. I love to give me a white piece of paper, give me like a gnarly problem to solve and I, I'm all over it. I do much better from a white piece of paper than like an eight-page proposal where folks come in, they already have all these ideas and to catch up on that and try to add value is harder for me than a white piece of paper. So a builder.

Um, I am a traveler. I actually studied cultural anthropology as a student in college and I was pre-med originally but ended up as a cultural anthropology major and um, traveling is my biggest life passion.

And I am a, I am a, um, you know, people, I'm trying to think of a better word because people say this a lot, they're like I'm a connector, but I see ideas and I like putting the pieces together. Like I like, like connecting disparate things. So I would say I'm a connector. I think people use it and say they connect people. I don't think I connect with people. I like connecting

Mike Courian: ideas. We're going to have a lot of fun because I found a lot of value in the language of StrengthFinder, and one of the strengths in StrengthFinder is called connectedness. And I have that, and I love it. And when I speak with people that have it also, I find we just get to ping the whole time. And so,

Kayla Nalven: Totally.

Mike Courian: So, thank you for having that. It means this.

Kayla Nalven: I love a good ping.

Mike Courian: Yeah. That means this is going to be a lot of fun. You dropped into pre-med just briefly. In New Zealand, it's called health science and that's sort of the prerequisite year before you'd be admitted into a medical program or other health programs. I didn't quite get the grades. I was close.

That's like my kind of, oh you did well enough Mike. Uh, but I didn't quite get the grades, but I also before not getting the grades had decided that that probably wasn't the path I was going to go on. Did something happen for you there that took you in a different direction?

Kayla Nalven: So I was a science nerd proudly, proud, proud science nerd in high school. I competed for the state of New Jersey for biology. That is a true story.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Kayla Nalven: Only girl on my team. I really thought I was going to be a doctor. This is the thing. I never really thought about the fact that doctors deal with blood and guts and things that I had no desire to be around. So that was the first thing that was just getting to college, starting to like really like now, not just like say like, it turned from something that I was talking about wanting to do to something that I actually had to like put my feet to the fire to start to do. And when that transition happened, that's when I really started asking myself, like, is this what I actually want to do? Or did all of my science teachers just tell me that this would be a very good idea to look into? And I think I was just heavily influenced by incredible science teachers in high school and family members who obviously were excited about the idea. But um going to a class with 800 students. Like or like organic chemistry. I was like, you know what?

Mike Courian: Yes.

Kayla Nalven: I'm good.

Mike Courian: So, yeah, that was a little, that was a little bit about my pivot. A friend of my parents had a skiing accident. I was down in the South Island at the University of Otago. And he ended up in the hospital, which was in the same city after the ski accident. I think it was something for his knee. And I went to them, they asked me, they basically forced me to go and visit him as a courtesy. I didn't know him very well.

And it was funny, so I was right in the middle of this year leading up towards medicine, and I walked through the hospital hallways and there was this smell of formaldehyde. And I was like, I just had it hit me like lightning. I was like, I don't really love hospitals. Like it wasn't, it wasn't the, it wasn't like I'm, I really like dissections and anatomy and physiology, all that stuff was totally working for me, and I could have a real tolerance for it and curiosity for it. But I was like, oh, this is a workplace, I don't know if I like being in this building. And then it just dawned on me. I was like, Mike, this is, I mean, if you take certain paths, this is your entire career in a building like this. And if you're going to work in the community, you're still going to have a lot of years here. And I thought,

Kayla Nalven: Totally.

Mike Courian: ah, I I I'm gonna maybe consider other things, which was hard. And that pivoting is hard.

Kayla Nalven: Yes.

Mike Courian: Which might be a theme. I'm going to put that as a post on the wall. I think we might come back to that. But pivoting is hard because you build up all this momentum and then all of a sudden you're like, uh. Okay, I have no imagination for anything other than this. And so I know this isn't right anymore. But I don't know what to do.

Kayla Nalven: I love those light bulb moments where it's like, you just the misalignment is really clear because although it's like, what's next is confusing, at least there's like, it's like, like your ship is now pointed in a different direction.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Kayla Nalven: I have such strong memories around those moments.

Kayla Nalven: with clarity on a personal level and also a professional level where I've just been so grateful for those moments. So, um,

Mike Courian: Yeah. Yeah. I know. There's these amazing gifts. And like you said, it's weird that it takes no effort to remember them. Yeah. Yeah. Even though I'm never, I'm never thinking about my year of pre-med. You over the years have worked for some quite fun organizations. One I'm particularly fond of. Can you tell me what it's like to work at Sesame Street?

Kayla Nalven: Do you have kids, right, Mike?

Mike Courian: I do, but to be honest, I might be the biggest fan in our house.

Kayla Nalven: Okay. I was going to say, if you have kids, I'm sure, you know, I have a two and a half year old niece. I mean, it's just I think I hear the word Elmo probably, you know, when I'm with her like 25 times a day easily. So parents of two to five year olds, uh, have a lot of Elmo energy. But anyway, you asked a question that is just really hard to answer because there's so much to unpack there or like how amazing it was.

I was on the website and I worked for, you know, one of the most amazing teams. The team was called the US Social Impact team and it was in the social impact division. And so basically what we did was we looked at issues affecting kids and families domestically in the US like incarceration, divorce, military transitions, literacy, uh food insecurity. And we actually had philanthropic funding to develop specific child, parent, and provider facing resources to help children through those very difficult and challenging situations.

So how do you talk to a child who's five years old about the fact that their parent is incarcerated? Or how do you talk to a child who's six years old about, you know, their parent who has just been deployed to military service or is coming back from military service and no longer wears a uniform. So all of these are really interesting challenges. And so we built

Kayla Nalven: health these digital toolkits, videos, online courses for kids and families and providers and I was on that amazing team. So I'm really proud of that work.

Mike Courian: That's so cool. And what's interesting is those messages and stories were woven into the main show as well because there are things that as you mention them, I'm like, oh, that's interesting. They do not nod in gentle ways of inviting the whole community into that conversation, not just people that it directly affects.

Kayla Nalven: Exactly. And so actually there would be these new characters that were developed for these initiatives that would become, would have a crossover on the mainstream show. So for example, I would say one of the most famous crossovers between my work and the show was Julia, who was the first mainstream children's character with autism. So Sesame worked for many, many years to develop that character. And so I was on the launch team for that initiative and was fortunate enough to fly around the country and talk to special education conferences and teachers and really kind of be a part of the launch of this historic initiative.

Mike Courian: Can you tell me, you described it as a really special team. You obviously were doing very special work. There's like so much heart behind everything you've said so far that's palpable. But was there something about the team that was worth learning from?

Kayla Nalven: Yes. I love this question so much. Okay, because I think back to some of the principles of that work often. The first principle is Sesame does everything with an extraordinary amount of rigor. The rigor that goes into the research, the convening of advisors, the thought that goes into the detail, every detail of the

Kayla Nalven: his characters of the initiative is heavily scrutinized to make sure that it doesn't truly represent the child's experience of of a child going through this situation or talking with real family that impacted by these challenges and to see the research process, it took it took so much time and effort to do this. And so I would say I learned about what it means to develop content in a high quality, thoughtful, rigorous way at Sesame. I also learned about the power of art. And it sounds really cliche, but I really believe in this and it's been incorporated into all of my work. What resonates about Elmo and these characters, children feel like they are their friends, like they are, they're connected emotionally to these characters. And parents are emotionally connected to these characters, right? They might have grown up with them. They also see their children experiencing positive development. and the power of that heart connection from a learning perspective has been so crucial to the work that I've done since, really. And I think people dismiss the importance of activating the heart, right from a learning perspective we think about head, heart, and hands. You have to know people need to know, you're teaching someone something they need to know, something they need to do, but there's all you cannot dismiss the power of activating emotion when you're trying to change behavior and when you're trying to teach someone something. So that heart centered aspect of the work was something I picked up at Sesame really.

Mike Courian: How did they get the heart right? Was, because I know some, some shows, some stories, there's kind of like one central person and they really give themselves very vulnerably and very openly to it and it's almost like their heart is what is transferred into the show. How did they do it at Sesame?

Kayla Nalven: Yeah, so the first thing, one of the most important elements is

Kayla Nalven: meeting a child where they are, using language that children use. And so everything when I think about that rigor, right, it's all about what is developmentally appropriate, age appropriate for a child, right? So you're not going to use vocabulary that children don't understand. You're going to use very simple emotions to really meet a child where they are because it's all about using the Muppets to actually kind of represent the child's experience. And so actually a part of what Sesame did and what my former team did was actually help children learn to label emotions. That was actually kind of a big part of the initiative because, you know, kids may not know that kind of feeling in their body and how to label it. And so it's actually the whole child approach to Sesame's actually not, it's, it's cognitive, it's social, but it's also emotional. It's literally baked into Sesame's model, which they've always done since 1969 when the show first aired. So I'd say like meeting a child where they are, using age and developmentally appropriate language and just it's just woven into the fabric into their curriculum. It's like literally teaching a child about their own emotions is kind of a core to the approach.

Mike Courian: I think that's quite interesting. We're talking about kids, but we're really just talking about people that are young. And we become people that are old, older and the same things apply. And so the analogies that I'm seeing is if you're not using language to meet people where they're at, you're going to lose heart. And heart impact, I think I'm thinking of, it's not synonymous with, but it's like psychological safety. It's trust, it's rapport, it's and it's also like charm and charisma. I think we underplay those things, but those are other elements of us going, I want to hear from you.

Kayla Nalven: Totally. Another element of this that you just said sparked for me and that Sesame does really well and that has been also a thread post Sesame for me is the modeling of vulnerability, the modeling of expressing emotion and actually modeling how a parent or a caring adult can receive that emotion, right? So there's a whole other layer to Sesame happening around like the co-viewing. That's a very intentional part of the approach. But being able to see vulnerability unlocks the permission for folks, adults, to feel like they can offer, they can be vulnerable too and, you know, I'm I'm sure we'll get into kind of my time at TED, but really something that is so powerful about TED talks also is the modeling of a speaker sharing a vulnerable story and how that can unlock for a group of adults this kind of permission to feel like they can come forward and also share their vulnerable stories. And I have seen this Mike, like, like, hundreds of times having worked at TED for eight years and just being surrounded by a lot of heart opening moments with these talks.

Mike Courian: Glad you went there, cause that's where we were going to go next. I think one of the things that's most fun in my feed is I have no idea what the next thing's going to be. I think the last two that I watched was preserving fruit and vegetables for way longer with this amazing science that they're discovering, using the fruit's own mechanisms. And then one that's really, I can't really walk away from it. It's really stuck with me as I can't remember her name. I wish I could, but she was speaking about the power of giving children space. It was basically the idea of like, hey, when we were kids,

Mike Courian: We just would go outside and play. And like now that as parents are aware of more of the risks that can happen in the world, we've been parenting differently. And it's also easier to keep tabs on our kids with digital devices. And so every day I've been thinking about as soon as the kids come home, I'm kind of like, am I going to default to trying to control this a little bit more than I need to? Or am I going to just go, you know what? Go for it. So anyways, this organization is sending new messages week after week into the world that really do matter.

Kayla Nalven: I just can't speak highly enough about the organization. But I think the thing that's probably more interesting to folks is the TED approach to sharing ideas in a way that's accessible. I think there's a lot to learn from that approach. The organization's mission is spreading ideas. Like that is everything that the organization does and every activity centers around that.

But I think that there's a lot to learn about the Ted approach to doing it in a way that lands with a global audience. How do you take something that clearly had probably, you know, maybe more than a decade of research, right? Or decades of research, and how do you distill it down to make it interesting to a wide global audience so that they are hooked.

And really, what it boils down to is a misconception around TED is that the speaker is the star of the show, or the star of the talk, but really the idea is the star.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Kayla Nalven: And what that the team does is really look for ideas that are fresh that haven't been shared before in a cert- specific way on a large global stage and find the right and most credible person to deliver that idea. And an idea should not be self-serving for the speaker. It should

Kayla Nalven: be a gift to your audience.

Mike Courian: I love that you're bringing language to this because it's palpable for me. I was like, most of the speakers can be from the organization that represents the idea, and yet, like you said, they've fallen into a structure where it's not, the vast majority of the time it's not about them. And I was like, and I was thinking, what is it about? And you're right. It totally is about the idea of and of course it is, but I felt it, but I didn't necessarily know, which is I think sometimes the most beautiful way for ideas to be communicated.

Kayla Nalven: That's it, it shouldn't be self-serving for the speaker. It should be a gift to your audience. And when you think about it in that frame, it really forces you as a speaker to decide what you share, right? Because you may think this, these three chapters are super interesting, and you could nerd out about those three chapters of your research for days, but is that the information that will get rebuilt in a listener's mind and reconstructed in a listener's mind as a gift? Maybe not. You have to think of it as an through that filter.

And another kind of metaphor we, we, we used was like the speaker's the tour guide and you're kind of bringing people through this journey, right? And you have to as the tour guide, you have to get your audience to trust you early on in the journey. And so one of the ways that speakers do that is using story, right? Using vulnerability, using honesty, using humor. It really depends on the speaker's approach and style, but there are ways that you can build trust with your audience. And then of course, like leveraging the human story, which a lot of talks, even science talks about, leverage the story because humans are universally wired to be fascinated by the story. And so, again, I I do think that there's a lot for people in our profession to learn from this approach around like how do you structure communications and think about communications so that they land with impact and they

Kayla Nalven: land with the widest and the broadest audience possible.

Mike Courian: And that's what I'm finding fascinating is these two organizations that are a part of your story have found parts of the center.

Kayla Nalven: Exactly.

Mike Courian: And and are using it really well and it's so universally applicable to communication but also to um just growing people. Because that's ultimately, in a lot of ways what both are trying to do.

Kayla Nalven: cannot underestimate the power. I mean, we all know this, right? Like the power of language and language choice. And it's very hard to do, of course, right? If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. Like it's so hard to be concise.

Mike Courian: I think I've heard that before, but I'm hearing it almost for the, but I'm hearing it almost for the first time. It's so good.

Kayla Nalven: It's so hard to use your words methodically and be concise. I, you know, then I start to get really nerdy and I think about it and this kind of feeds into some of the other work I did at Ted that overlaps with with your work a lot, Mike, in and using those ideas and those messages from a change management perspective inside of a organizations and how leaders can actually learn from that approach to think about structuring their own messages so that they land with impact inside of their organization.

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Kayla Nalven: Can you give us a whistle stop tour of your time at TED?

Mike Courian: So, I was at Sesame for I guess, between two and a half and three years. Moved over to TED as a manager on their distribution and licensing team that oversaw the distribution of TED talks globally off of TED's owned and operated channels. So, TED on airplanes and seatbacks, uh, TED in hotels, publishing, you name it, right? So TED is kind of off, off platform. And then I saw an opportunity to use TED in the corporate learning or organizational learning space in a way that we had started using TED, but I saw that there was a much larger opportunity to unearth there. And so had this idea, pitched it to leadership and after several years of R & R & R & R&D and building it up, it became a new line of business at TED and a new division at TED called TED at Work. And so I founded TED at work officially in 2018, 2019 and it's been around ever since.

Kayla Nalven: Something that my co-founder Dan and I always wonder is, do you know where TED Circles fit into the timeline of these things? And were there cross ideas and and shared between TED at Work and and TED Circles? Because TED Circles was something we came across and we thought, oh, this is fascinating that they're identifying this need to help support groups forming themselves. So it's just like a little bit of support so that people can self-gather for the purpose of discussing these various talks. Talk to me about that.

Mike Courian: It, you know, it's interesting, it was an idea that was germinating at a similar time as TED at Work and we borrowed ideas from each other. The same principles apply around like the power of bringing people together to talk about a TED.

Kayla Nalven: idea and what gets unlocked in that action. And so, you know, a core part of TED at Work is discussion based group learning and what happens when you bring people inside of an organization together to lead their own ideas, anchored by a TED idea. And a part of that was really inspired by what we were seeing happening out in the world. People were convening themselves, right? Like TED TED circles was really inspired by something that was already happening, right? Like people were already doing book club type meetups, wanting to talk about TED talks or the amazing TEDx community, right? That's, you know, 3,000 TEDx organizers around the world coming together to talk about TED ideas. It was really borrowing from these principles that have been around for over a decade and things that people were already doing and self organizing around and and capturing the magic of that.

Mike Courian: Interesting. And so when you had this idea and you're pitching it, what did you see that you felt like could be solved?

Kayla Nalven: I saw there were so many applications of TED in an organizational context, and I felt like I wanted to make work and organizations better using the power of TED ideas. Like I just saw all of these applications for TED and my work had been really focused on spreading TED ideas, like the actual distribution of ideas globally and I wanted more TED ideas to be spread around the world and I just saw businesses as an amazing uh platform and channel to do that. And like what would happen if businesses kind of unlocked the power of TED at scale. You've picked up on something that has been really a through line of my career, which is learning and spreading ideas at scale, right? I've worked for two organizations where scale

Kayla Nalven: what they do. And even the organization I work for now, scale is what we do.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Kayla Nalven: Um, and so I've always thought about things at scale and like how do you unlock ideas in a way that could impact thousands of people, right? Like that was like a really interesting problem that I wanted to help solve. I kind of want to throw it back to you, Mike, like when you were lying awake at night and Makeship was coming into focus. Like, what was the problem for you?

Mike Courian: Well, the first thing I will humbly say is I wasn't thinking about it at all. But my co-founder Dan was and he was watching the opposite happen.

He worked for an organization that supported other organizations with rolling out various types of training. And he was watching them make choices that were for the easy distribution methods, but in his opinion were always moving more towards ticking a box and and less towards the things that delivered tangible impact. And the problem, and he wasn't arguing with this. The problem was that things that delivered tangible impact were really painful to scale.

Like, having the one facilitator who could actually deliver it in an impactful way, get around to everybody in the organization wasn't really viable from financially or viable from a time point of view because we also need this rolled out quickly enough that it actually has an impact on the business and it doesn't take two years to roll it out across a large organization. And so he saw those and and just was like, we've got to figure out how to improve this at least, if not fix it. And so that was really the heartbeat behind Makeship was how do we solve the distribution problem? How do we

Mike Courian: solve the cost problem.

Kayla Nalven: Mhm.

Mike Courian: But all in service of how do we if it wasn't impactful, then it wasn't worth scaling or reducing cost. So it had to be impactful. And if we can make it impactful, then how do we figure out how to scale it and make it cheap enough so that it is something that people can afford to scale within, let's say the current cost modeling. Like, yes, you'll invest more when you start to see the return, but initially for adoption, it needs to be easy to palletize the cost.

But then the challenge became, we can't let happen what in a lot of ways has happened with e-learning, which is that the temptation for efficiency becomes so great that we actually totally forget about how to make it impactful. And that's not, that doesn't apply to all e-learning. I'm not trying to down on e-learning, but it can happen in a lot of instances and then we kind of settle for, well, at least it's getting done and at least we can track it.

Kayla Nalven: Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Yes.

Mike Courian: One of my recent conversations with a woman named Laura, she and a friend of hers, Michelle, are writing this book and they're really calling out to leaders saying, we can't settle there because eventually when we show return on business value, we're just not getting the business value doing that. And so we have to go back to our original calling, which is to be leading the organization in the direction of the things they need to know to deal with the ever-changing landscape.

Kayla Nalven: In my experience, when you create a learning experience where it's not just a sage on a stage, when the media that's being used or the questions that are being asked in the learning experience really invite people to all bring their subject matter expertise at their own first-person experience of life, it changes the dynamic in the room because there's no longer this kind of like hierarchy or this

Kayla Nalven: no longer this kind of leveling and people then regardless of role. It breaks down, you know, the silos across departments, roles, hierarchy and I find those to be some of the most transformative learning experiences. and it can be a container for people. It's like giving people an opportunity to stretch or have a voice or to build their visibility inside of the organization in a really neat way.

Mike Courian: You just gave me a really cool gift that I'd never seen before, but what became really clear to me is that Make Shapes has ended up in this place. The way we design an experience, because the subject matter expert is pre-recorded, they're not there.

Kayla Nalven: Mhm. Yeah.

Mike Courian: And so it's not about them, it's about the idea. Just like Ted. And I hadn't realized that, but that's actually the

Kayla Nalven: Exactly. Exactly. Where we are. I love it.

Mike Courian: It's so cool. I hadn't realized that because you're right. All of a sudden, all the voices at the table are important because that's the purpose of this discussion. The purpose of this discussion is not any sort of seniority. It's about the mutual sharing of the responses to this idea that's been presented to us that then has the compounding flywheel of then all of a sudden, the ideas all snowball on top of each other. And there's this funny thing that growth opportunities grow on top of each other. If a group of people has an aha moment together,

Kayla Nalven: Yeah.

Mike Courian: All of a sudden, everybody gets the benefit of that aha moment. Even though it'll likely only be one person that's sort of helped it germinate. But also, there becomes this really interesting bond where you, the person sitting across from me and and the other people that were just sitting there listening, become welded to that aha moment. So every time I see you, you spark and remind me of that thing and it actually has this life of its own, this momentum, and it can keep going out into the organization and having its effect.

Mike Courian: and how hard that is to measure, but how exponential the impact can be. And so I think there's something magical there.

Kayla Nalven: I love that and I'm coming up like there's no word for this and I it's gonna pop just like my three words, it's gonna pop later. But something that that thought bubble came up for me when you were talking, it resonated with my experience around, so like why does an organization invest in a learning initiative? Because they want their employees to know something new or do something differently, right? And in both of those cases, and obviously those two things also go together, it can feel very top down.

In my experience, group and discussion-based learning has this effect of, from a change management perspective, it allows employees to feel like they're a part of the process and to feel more bought in to whatever that change is, whatever that new direction is that the organization is inviting them to take part in. And so from a, like that space to actually give feedback to this new thing, whatever it is, like this new information, this new direction, this new way of behaving or or or a new action to take, organic space where as an employee, I can give my honest feedback, that space to actually react to the change has been very productive and organizations have seen a positive impact from that because employees feel like it's more authentic, right? It doesn't feel like this in-authentic top down thing. They actually feel part of the process of the change. So anyway, that sparked for me as you were talking. It just resonated a lot with what I've seen as well.

Mike Courian: Yeah, absolutely. TED talks and then distributing TED talks in my mind was still scaling in,

Mike Courian: individual engagement. A common path in my mind is, I watched it on YouTube or like you said, I watched it on the airplane or in the hotel room or a million other places. But I did. And then there was this funny thing happening or going, oh, this is such a big idea. I need to talk about this with some other people. And that was starting to organically happen and you obviously noticed that and people were noticing that. But I'm curious what drove you, was it just that data and starting to notice that signal or was there something that drove you to wanting to shape TED at work to specifically have a like learning together element?

Kayla Nalven: You know, we really spoke with dozens of organizations of different sizes and they were already using it or wanting to use it to really drive discussion-based group learning and because they were seeing these types of results, right? So I would say that that was not a brilliant light bulb of, oh my gosh, discussion-based group learning, like that was not my idea, right? We were hearing from organizations that really wanted to use TED in this way because they saw what could be unlocked. And so again, it was like a not fighting gravity moment. And for me, what excited me about it was really the power of discussion-based group learning from a learning and change management perspective because of all the things that we just talked about. Yeah. And so many others, right? I think about it from an alignment perspective, using a TED speaker's perspective to inspire and align, right? There was something, you know, really sticky there, the opportunity to bring kind of this like innovative spark inside of the organization, to create opportunities for people to practice in public together, to have conversations about what we know we don't know and having a TED speaker with a really fresh innovative out of the box idea, open up an innovation conversation. There's so like you use the group discussion-based group learning kind of vector

Kayla Nalven: in so many different strategic initiatives inside of the organization, whether it's like driving sustainability initiatives or or, you know, change management or leadership development. There's just so many applications for it that it was water rolling down downhill.

Mike Courian: Okay, so you sparked me to stop using that word. I need to find a new word, but you're sparking a lot of things. So I keep using it.

Kayla Nalven: That's a very Ted word.

Mike Courian: Invitational was the word that came to mind for me. And there's something always invitational about a TED talk. So I'm going to add that to our list of things that Ted uniquely does in its storytelling and communication style. What sparked it for me was when you were saying organizations were finding this would spark an ideating culture. Sort of like a culture of ideas.

Kayla Nalven: Exactly. Exactly.

Mike Courian: And I think that's so interesting that it would like, cuz it's true. They all kind of make me want to be more creative cuz I'm like, wow, this person's amazing. I can't believe they thought of that. And they're like, and then you just start thinking that way of going, I wonder if it totally sparks that. And so, I don't know, I just wanted to call out that that's also part of the formula.

Kayla Nalven: One hundred percent. I couldn't have said it better myself. This kind of, uh, invitation to consider what else could something look like, right? Because you're seeing these people who had

Mike Courian: Possibilities.

Kayla Nalven: possibility, exactly, right? Like you're seeing these, these speakers represent possibility. They represent bold ideas, they represent vision. Mhm. Because of the nature of the folks that are speaking on the Ted stage, and I think that there's something very aspirational, inspirational about that. But this is the thing, these are like Ted speakers, right? Ted does not choose celebrities. And so it's because of that, it invites this possibility because it is not self-serving. It invites this possibility for you to then go as like a learner or a listener to be like, hey, I I love

Kayla Nalven: an idea and I could adapt it. I could see how I could, you know, kind of play off of it or build. And so you kind of captured the TED magic in a bottle, I would say in the way you put that.

Mike Courian: Before you were talking about this idea of how group discussion-based learning also allows for practicing things.

Kayla Nalven: Yes.

Mike Courian: And at the moment, there's this weird alien technology that has exploded out of the tech world that we all call AI, large language models. How are people figuring out AI transformation?

Kayla Nalven: You called back practicing in public.

Everyone is learning at the same time. What I'm seeing is that the opportunity for people to see AI use cases being shared from someone who may not be, if they don't see themselves as technical, someone who also doesn't see themselves as technical using AI to improve the same types of tasks that they do is so powerful, right? So this opportunity of democratizing AI learning that like, it's not actually about necessarily, it could be, but it doesn't have to be like your head of innovation giving a spiel. It actually would probably be more powerful for Susie from marketing or, and I don't mean nothing, Susie from marketing may be an AI genius. So that has nothing to do with Susie. But I'm just saying like someone else from a functional area of the organization who to to to have them model practical everyday uses of AI to support tasks that are are, you know, just a part of my everyday work and there's, it can't be underestimated, I would say, like the practicing in public and the ability to share

Kayla Nalven: that at scale and to literally visualize that. I would say the unlock for AI transformation is about scaling domain functional, role specific use cases and having like the right messenger of those use cases. Having a VP or a SVP talk about all these amazing ways that you can be using AI may not be as powerful as having someone in a similar role as you showcase how they use AI to solve similar business problems that they're working on. And so, you mentioned practicing in public and I wanted to just name that, but part of practicing in public is also the humility and the humility of being open to tinkering together, right? And as like maybe someone in a leadership position or or whoever, saying like, listen, I'm still figuring this out too. We're all figuring this out together and actually the humility to be like, hey guys, like, I just learned this thing. Here's how I'm thinking of dabbling. Like, I'm not quite sure yet. I have more learning and work I need to do on this. But um, I think that this is a very humbling moment for everyone because everyone is learning together and I think it's a there's a really important aspect to this of of leaders being humble and inviting that beginner's mindset around AI transformation and this democratization of good ideas coming from and everywhere in the organization because they are they already are. Like, people across the organization are already using AI in really important, potentially hugely cost-saving ways, but they need a platform to be able to actually share those ideas with relevant audiences. And I just, when I think of Makeshapes and like the moment we're in right now, I think of that as like a very compelling use case for AI.

Kayla Nalven: transformation.

Mike Courian: Yeah, because it's so interesting. People need a chance to share, because, Yeah. I. I'm finding a lot of things that are really useful, but nobody's ever asking me. And I'm like, and and it just, the time never gets made to sort of show and tell. And so it's it's that's even that is an idea. I'm just bookmarking that for myself. Just the idea of show and tell is an interesting group experience. And everybody knows what it means. We've been doing it since we started school and so I think that's really interesting. Also, thinking about Sesame Street, I loved getting to go, you've given me the best anchor points to just keep coming back to. So thinking about Sesame Street, I said before, I wonder what if, let's try. And that's a core part of a chunk of each episode, is whatever the problem is that the characters face, they go through this um, ideation process of and experimentation process. And every episode, the main character fails multiple times and it's shared. Everybody sees it flop, they're bummed, like, or or whatever, it's not the outcome anyone expected. And I think when you were just talking about doing it in public, that becomes so helpful as well because people go, okay, it's safe for me to experiment because this person who says it's really useful for them is still finding it bombs out sometimes.

Kayla Nalven: Oh, 100%.

Mike Courian: And so, oh, when it bombs out for me, I'm okay. I know it's not therapy, but it does come down to that. We might not even know that that message is happening at a subconscious level, but like, but we do exclude ourselves from taking risks and experimenting when it feels like we might get it wrong and that getting it wrong might not be okay.

Kayla Nalven: Failing, talking about failures and stuff, obviously like in every business book, but it, it's, it is for a reason, right? Because it's just so important.

Kayla Nalven: talk about when it doesn't go well, and especially with AI, right? I am not an expert. I should probably have said that up front. I'm at AI adoption, that is not, you know, I'm a learning and learning experience design person. But, you know, I think it's almost like what I do. I think about it from the basic principles of how people learn, what inspires people, and how people adopt new things. And so I'm just thinking of how AI is a thing that is very top of mind from an adoption perspective right now.

Mike Courian: That's that's what I heard and I wasn't asking you because you necessarily knew anything about AI, but what you what you've already told us and you've shown with lots of evidence that you do know about and you've been around a lot of people who have been working on it for years is how do we convey ideas in a way that they are genuinely received?

Kayla Nalven: Exactly.

Mike Courian: How do we um, distribute them in a way that they can go wide and broad? And and then the cool thing about layering your experience at Ted at work is how do we then give them a second, third, fourth life in this completely new realm when we shape it just a little bit more with structure and intentionality around what a group will gather to do, that then an organization can take it and deliver it internally themselves and see that power manifest multiple times. And so I think that is ultimately the question we're all asking when it comes to how we adopt this new technology and use it effectively across our organization. We all have to answer these questions of what do I use it for? How do I use it? and uh what happens if I get it wrong? Well, Kayla, I've had so much fun and I'm looking back at your words and I'm going, okay, she's absolutely a builder. She is absolutely a traveler, but you're traveling the human story. Like there's a lot of traveling there and then your connect

Mike Courian: holds it all together. But I think the other word is this word heart. and I hope people aren't letting it slip into that totally trite category because I think over the last hour and a bit, I've really heard this wonderful testimony that when we lean in and open ourselves up in that way, it's just clearly what we were made to do in my mind. It's just that it becomes objective because the impact is so massive and you see people change and you see yourself change. And what more could we ask for? It's almost one of the most wonderful feelings in the world when you can feel it because you know it has just like the TED ideas, you know it actually has nothing to do with you.

It has everything to do with the idea and the change that's happening in the other person and you at the same time. So anyways, thank you for being our guide and our travel guide on this great journey.

Kayla Nalven: Oh, thank you. There you go.

Mike Courian: I love it.

Kayla Nalven: Oh, thanks for the callback. Great callbacks, Mike. Really like

Mike Courian: It's my favorite part.

Kayla Nalven: You uh you're really good at that I have to say. I really think this is such a fun conversation, Mike. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thanks for liking the pings. The pings. Um, it was really, really fun.

Mike Courian: And that wraps up this episode of Shapeshifters. Thanks so much for being with us.

We really want this to become a two-way conversation. So we would love for you to send in any questions or comments that this episode has prompted. You can do that by emailing shapeshifters@makeshapes.com or if you're listening on Spotify, you can drop it into the comments section. We'll be incorporating these questions and comments into future episodes.

Remember, if you want to stay up to date with the podcast, go to the Shapeshifters website, link in the description, and sign up to our community.

I'm grateful for all of you. This is a real joy for me to get to do this. So, thank you for your support.

Until next time, I'm Mike Courian, and this is Shapeshifters.

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