The Stretch – Electing Better Learning: Developing leaders and talent in the era of AI

Jason Lavender 
Not a lot of actuary to entrepreneur stories that that come up to you often.

Kevin Fyock 
How managers have a really important role in shaping wellbeing.

Jason Lavender 
We used to see a lot of employees go to their managers and say like, Kevin, can you proofread this real quick before I send it out? And now people are just going to AI to proofread. And so, we're missing some of those small human moments.

Kevin Fyock 
And then finally, just being human is actually the best thing that you can do.

Jason Lavender 
I don't think we need more content. We actually need more connection and more human engagement and time to actually apply it. My co-founder has this great expression where he'll refer to Electives as kind of the island of human connection.

Kevin Fyock 
So today's conversation, I am joined by Jason Lavendar. And, Jason is the CEO of Electives, which is really a modern learning and development company. So Jason, I'm super excited to have you.

Jason Lavender 
Thanks for having me here, Kevin.

Kevin Fyock
So, I just have to maybe for the benefit of our listeners and the benefit of you and I, Jason, I'll share a quick story. Jason and I started actually as interns many, many years ago at at a benefits consulting firm.

We were at the same internship class, so I couldn't be more excited to have an old friend on our podcast to tell us about what he's doing.

Jason Lavender 
Yeah, it's come full circle, so thanks for having me. 

Kevin Fyock 
It sure has! Yeah, so Jason, you and I started in healthcare together, right? 

Jason Lavender
Yep. 

Kevin Fyock
And you made the deviation away from healthcare to start your own venture, right? So tell us about what you're doing, tell us about Electives and maybe your joining, your your journey there.

Jason Lavender 
Yeah. so yeah, started as an actuary and there's not a lot of actuary to entrepreneur stories that that come up too often. but was in benefits consulting for about 10 years, kind of pivoted from actuarial work to innovation work, which I think kind of gave me the entrepreneurial bug.

Kevin Fyock
Sure

Jason Lavender
So I went to a healthcare startup for a couple years, which you know about, and while I was at both those places, I always found that the corporate training experience just wasn't hat's great. And there was one training in particular that kind of stood out to me, and I'll never forget the person who came in to do the training said, “We announced a new product feature this week, and we're super excited to share with you.” And I kind of leaned in, I got really excited, and the new product feature was they disabled the fast-forward button on the training videos. So you had to actually watch every training video and take the quiz, and I sat there and I was like, “there's got to be a better way to do training at work.” 

Long story short, I was in business school at the time at MIT, met a classmate there who's now my co-founder, and we just became obsessed with making training something people love in the workplace.

Kevin Fyock 
Yeah, well, the fast forward button on training is certainly resonating with me, and I think has most of my career. So now I'm really excited to dig into more about about how you're doing it and why the lack of the fast forward button is a good thing, I'm assuming. 

I'll also say you hinted at that Health Tech company that you worked at. I also was at that health tech company. So Jason and I in many ways have just pretty much followed each other in different circuitous ways throughout our career. So how fitting it is that we're sitting down here today. So again, you started in health, well actually you started as an actuary and then you went to health and then now you're doing your own venture. 

What parallels can you draw between the world of health and the world of learning and development? Because candidly, Jason, most of the conversations we've had have been focused around health and benefits and well-being and women's health, and the list goes on and on. So this feels like a deviation, learning and development, but maybe for the benefit of our listeners, it's probably less of a deviation than they think.

Jason Lavender 
Yeah, it's funny, even when I started in L&D, I felt like I was kind of pivoting. And a lot of friends and colleagues were like, whoa, you really pivoted so far away from HR within L&D. There's a lot of parallels. I would say the first thing is all of our clients still are in the HR human capital space. So whether they're learning, leading learning and development, they're leading people teams. And I would say the common throughput from clients from benefits consulting to the healthcare startup to Electives.

Is our clients are just so people centric. So every conversation we're having is centered around how do we help people, whether that's in their healthcare or whether that's in their development. So that's probably one thing. The other thing I would say is just from a benefits perspective, we've run into the same kind of challenges that point solutions and healthcare solutions run into in terms of we know we need this, but can we actually get people to use it? And so as much as we're B2B, there's definitely a kind of a B2B to C angle there.

Kevin Fyock 
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So, you know, a lot of the solutions and folks that we have on this show, you know, really focus on, as you said, employees not just using benefits available, but translating to sort of an undervalued employee value proposition. So, you know, with the work that you're doing at Electives, and I also want to give you an opportunity to talk more in more detail about what you're all doing, but when you think about the work that you're doing, how do you think you're helping to solve some of the utilization problems on the learning side that I think as you mentioned, before, we're seeing across point solutions, we're seeing a across health tech writ large.

Jason Lavender 
Yeah. so I'll go back to when we were first starting the company, we did about six months of market research and we just we told everybody transparently, we're like, we don't know anything about this space, so like let's just be sponges, we'll ask a lot of questions. And one of the stats that we saw in the early days was in the pre-recorded kind of world of training, utilization rates are typically three to five percent. And so the bar was pretty low, and one of the kind of requests that we kept hearing from meters in L and D or HR was, can you scale live virtual interactive learning. So just as a medium that became interesting to us. And then the second thing that was interesting was we started asking questions in terms of the moment you need manager training, where do you go? The moment you need sales training, where do you go? DEI training, where do you go? And there was this kind of one-to-one assumption in terms of if I need manager training, I need to go find people called manager trainers. 

Kevin Fyock
Sure. 

Jason Lavender
And we had experiences back in school where we were learning from mountaineers and historians.

And we're like, there's no way that Mountaineer has a decision making trainer on his LinkedIn profile. And so those two kind of ideas started to kind of percolate to us in terms of if we can scale live virtual learning and if we can redefine who we get to learn from, there's something interesting there. And that's what we're seeing on the engagement and utilization side. People want to show up when they get to learn from an astronaut or a spy recruiter or a Broadway performer. They're not just showing up to Bob the sales trainer who's never sold anything.

Kevin Fyock 
Jason, it's interesting because if I go back to my university days, we all started with a syllabus. And the syllabus laid out like what you're gonna learn week by week or month by month. and it was very regimented. And it it sounds like what you're talking about, maybe the way that people are experiencing these folks that you are working with might be a little bit different. Maybe less regimented and maybe it touches people in different ways. Is that fair?

Jason Lavender 
Yeah, it's totally fair. I think there's always some framework, but it's really wrapped around storytelling. And we think, I mean, people have been learning through stories for, you know, ever since the beginning. And so we just found early days, it's less about walking through 30 pages of PowerPoint slides and describing every single framework, but it's really bringing that to life in terms of how does that framework apply in a story from a lived experience. And then that becomes shared language for the employee that they can always reference and say, “Remember how the Olympic coach, you know, builds connected teams? Like we're kind of deviating from that. Let's come back to that that story.”

Kevin Fyock 
Yeah. So you're hinting at sort of, you know, I started off before saying, you know, modern learning development, but you're hinting at sort of how you are doing things differently. So so maybe give us the voiceover, like what are you doing most differently than maybe traditional L and D players?

Jason Lavender 
Yeah. So I'd say two things. One, the kind of term that we used early days was a lot of L and D teams were creating content. Hannah, who leads our learning team, had this expression where she said, “The future of learning is actually curating content.” And so rather than have an in-house team spend months kind of coming up with a new training, we're actually reaching out into the world of experts and saying, you've done this, can you come into this organization and teach employees?

So kind of content curation versus content creation is one. The second piece that we've been leaning into more and more, which is hard to not talk about AI, especially at HR Transform, but outside of the live learning, we have what we call AI simulations or AI role plays. And part of the learning experience is you can learn how to give feedback as a manager. And a lot of times people are like, I got it. I can I can do it.

But until you actually role play that and get the words out of your mouth and have a challenging conversation, it's it's really hard to actually kind of flex that muscle. And so we've been trying to kind of compete from both a live learning and an AI simulation perspective.

Kevin Fyock 
Well you're spot on, Jason, that we had to talk about AI. Actually, you know, within within the benefits ecosystem, the two topics that come up all the time are AI and and GLP-1s. I suspect we probably aren't going to talk about GLP-1s today. But we'll see.

Jason Lavender 
We'll just stick with AI.

Kevin Fyock
So let's let's pull on the thread again connecting your work with the world that I live in and the world you used to live in, right? So I think when you and I were starting in our career, you know, wellness was largely around things like step challenges, right, and finding ways, and you're smiling because it was very like physical focused and obviously expanded to, I think, to the benefit of the employee, things like financial wellness, emotional wellness, and so on and so forth. And again, it's been fantastic to see that. What we don't necessarily spend that much time talking about, Jason, is the impact that managers have on employee well-being. And I see this in my own role with the teams that I lead.

Can you talk about, you know, what you see with manager impact and its importance on employee wellbeing?

Jason Lavender 
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think the evolution of well-being in terms of that conversation, I think is really important. There's kind of that stat or that anecdote that you always hear in terms of people don't leave the company, they leave their manager. And I think that's only becoming more and more true. The two things I would say is number one, a lot of managers are basically high performing ICs that get promoted and they're like, congratulations, now you manage six people. 

Kevin Fyock
That's right. 

Jason Lavender
And those managers have kind of picked up different things from their managers, but they haven't learned the fundamentals and the basics. And so a lot of the things that we see with our clients is just a ton of struggling new managers. Resulting in then burnout not only on themselves because they're having a hard time managing people, but the people they're managing start to leave. So that's one. 

The second thing, connecting kind of wellness managers and the AI conversation. We used to see the expression we now use is called social recession. And the meaning behind that is we used to see a lot of employees go to their managers and say, like, “Kevin, can you proofread this real quick before I send it out?” And now people are just going to AI to proofread. And so we're missing some of those small human moments, which is also leading to some of that burnout. So not only are we trying to help develop managers to kind of be better managers, but we're also trying to build social kind of connection points in the day-to-day work.

Kevin Fyock 
Yeah, I mean I love that thread, Jason, because to your point, you're connected to a manager and there's a lot of research. We've done at Aon a lot of research on this too, right? So when you feel connected to your manager and by extension of your own well-being, when you want to show up work and you want to bring your best self. And so I think what you're pushing on, it makes a lot of sense. 

Let's touch on the AI piece a little bit more. So you offer, as you said before we sat down, AI training to workforces across a lot of companies, right? So what patterns are you seeing? Do you think employees are actually embracing artificial intelligence? And maybe to balance that, where are you seeing resistance?

Jason Lavender 
It's interesting, a lot of the conversations we have is about employees resisting AI. I actually think it's more of a confidence issue than a resistance or fear. And so a lot of the training we do is literally just helping people get familiar with the tools and give them that confidence. And some of the tools kind of unintentionally did this to themselves. So we we we've heard Claude, or Claude Code quite a bit, and that reaction from a lot of non developers is like, “Oh. I'm not a coder, I can't touch claude code.”

And then we'll do a training where people start building different things with Cloud and they're like, I I can do this. And so a big part of the training is not only kind of learning and the development side, but a big part is just confidence and almost inspiration from a creativity perspective.

Kevin Fyock 
I saw you holding back not saying vibe coding, so well done.

Jason Lavender 
Vibe coding, vibe marketing. All classes on the platforms.

Kevin Fyock 
Sorry I interrupted. Keep going.

Jason Lavender 
No, I think the the other the other kind of thread that I would pull on on the AI training is, and it's probably not surprising, but in the early days of some of our AI training, we talked about ethics of AI, how LLMs worked. Now people are actually building their own custom GPT to be their own consultant for them or building their own, you know, no code app. And when you leave a 60 or 90 minute session with a tangible product, I think that's the, those are the learnings that start to kind of evolve and the word of mouth in the organization starts to grow.
And even if it's non-work related, like we had somebody last week build a board game recommendation engine, totally for fun, but now those dots start to connect and they can say, wait, we could actually build another recommendation engine that is relevant to our industry.

Kevin Fyock 
What I love about what you're all doing is, you know, and and maybe to embarrass you for a second, you're leading, you as a leader, but your firm with such authenticity. Recognizing a sort of a gap in the marketplace and you know you talk about storytelling, you talk about how people learn, like I I I think this about how I learn and what I listen to, and storytelling is how I try to lead in a lot of my career, but also how I learn, right? So sitting and reading a textbook, I think has always been a struggle for me, but listening to someone who's connecting maybe one of my hobbies or one of my interests or a personal story, I take away something from every single one of those interactions.

Jason Lavender 
Yeah. I was having dinner last night with a chief people officer and she asked me, which I get asked all the time, she's like, What's your favorite Electives class? Yeah. And I, it sounds totally, you know, kind of cliche, but I'm like, every class is, you know, every instructor particularly is kind of my favorite instructor. 

Kevin Fyock
Yeah. 

Jason Lavender
But I was sharing one example where we have a poetry slam winner from from Mexico who teaches how to tell your story through poetry. And I laughed, I was like, never in a million years did I think that would A, be a class on the platform when we first started the company, and B that that would be one of my favorite classes. But he has such this unique way of everybody participates, everybody tells their story, and it's like water works by the end of the session. But you find this kind of creativity inside you that you just didn't know existed. And I've heard from learners afterwards that they're like, now I'm publishing my work, and you know, it's there's like an intellectual well-being that you know kind of sparks out of that.

Kevin Fyock 
I was talking to a colleague yesterday and and we were sharing, like, what podcast do you listen to? Of course, I said my favorite podcast is The Stretch.

Jason Lavender 
Mine, too.

Kevin Fyock
Good, good. But but I also am sort of drawn to storytelling. So like the Moth Podcast is one that I've loved for many, many years. I actually participated in one of their story slams and I I presented a story about my Beagle. But again, it it's it's funny that the way people learn through storytelling.

There's something to learn here about what you're doing and what you're scaling, but again, back to this idea of manager well-being, back to this idea of sort of the role we play in HR, I think all of us could serve to be better storytellers in what we do with our clients, with our colleagues, and people that work with us.

Jason Lavender 
Yeah. Yeah. It's so I mean the I think there's a famous quote like Storytellers Can Change the World or something like that and it's they're they're very influential.

Kevin Fyock 
Yeah. So Jason, maybe one last question for you. Well, two more questions, and I'll end the way that I do with with all of our guests. So, the role of HR teams is changing rapidly, and I think that's been the theme of so many conversations we've had here, but then also throughout the many seasons of The Stretch. How are you seeing learning and development departments shift in terms of headcount, but also the way that they're focusing?

Jason Lavender 
Yeah, since we started the company five years ago, the general theme of across all of our clients, no matter the original size of the company, the industry, is HR teams have been kind of downsizing and shrinking. And they're being asked to do more with less. On the L and D side in particular, I I'll go back to that kind of content creation versus curation. 

Kevin Fyock
Sure. 

Jason Lavender
Most of the clients we work with, the L and D teams now are focused on the things that are very specific to that company. So they'll do onboarding, they'll do the industry related training.

If we go back to when we met at H&B Basics, you're not going to outsource H&B Basics to Electives. But for everything else, whether that's manager skills, negotiations, AI training, that's where they're starting to outsource. And the two things that come to mind in that kind of spirit is number one, one of our clients early days was sharing a story about how her team was going to read a book on radical candor and then create training, practice it, and then deliver it. It was going to take about seven months to do that.

The author of that book is on our platform. And so we're like, why don't you just have the author come in and teach? And she was like, that's a better use of time. And so it's kind of shifting just the way they're spending their time and energy is one. 

The second, AI is changing so quickly. I took one of our own AI classes in January, and when I signed up for it, it was called What's New in ChatGPT 5.0. When I went into the session, the instructor had already changed the title page to say what's new in 5.2. And the instructor's just so passionate that she was like, just loving sharing what's new in 5.2. But it's really hard to have an internal team member keep track of every new model update and everything AI. And so if that L and D person is kind of that strategist and the quarterback to say, we know we need to find somebody who is that expert, let's go find them. They're still even more effective in in that sense. But they don't have to kind of do that research and keep up on on their own and flip that into new training content.

Kevin Fyock 
Very cool. Okay, Jason, last question. And I asked this of all of our guests, and it's our crystal ball question. Okay. And it's usually focused on where do you see sort of your industry vertical in the next five to ten years, I think, at the risk of asking you to almost repeat what you've done in your business, because in many ways you're trying to live and breathe differently every five years, because you've created something that I think is quite different in the marketplace, but for your business, maybe for your industry across learning and development, like what did the next five, ten years look like?

Jason Lavender 
Yeah, so I think there's there's kind of two paths and that we hear in the market, and I'll share the path I'll share kind of one path we hear and the path that we're gonna try to head down. So we're hearing, going back to AI, how AI is gonna impact L and D. And I'll just share an example. I received an email from a another company in the L and D space a few weeks ago, and they said, now using AI, we can create a million training videos in a week. And I looked at that and I was like, that sounds terrible.

Yeah, like I don't want a million videos, I don't want to watch any of those videos, and like what a hard user experience to try to navigate that. So, I do think one path is AI is going to create more content. I would argue I don't think we need more content. We actually need more connection and more human engagement and time to actually apply it. My co-founder has this great expression where he'll refer to Electives as kind of the island of human connection. And so over the next five years, we're just going to lean more and more into human connection.

Both from a live instructor to employee perspective, but we want to facilitate employees being in breakout rooms and talking about your beagle and not just work. And so we're gonna lean even more into the kind of art of human connection over the next five years.

Kevin Fyock 
I, no better way to end the podcast right on human connection. I love that we're here in person. You know, many of the episodes of The Stretch we do virtually, so it's good to be reconnected, Jason. This was a lot of fun.

Jason Lavender
Yeah, this was awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

Kevin Fyock
Of course. And to our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in. Again, this is The Stretch. In this season, we're doing things a little differently. We'll continue to bring you fresh perspectives, real conversations, and on the ground insights from leaders who are actively redefining what better looks like. Thanks very much for tuning in and we'll talk to you soon.