Episode 25: How AI Can Help You Stretch Out of Your Comfort Zone

Everyone has a comfort zone. But what this comfort zone looks like is unique to you. So how can you push out of that comfort zone to do more, accomplish more, and grow in ways you’ve always wanted (but may have never thought possible)? Ron Zamir and Jessie Wirkus share their ideas in this thought-provoking, meaningful discussion for learning leaders. Listen in on the conversation to think deeper about what it means to identify your personal comfort zone—and stakeholders’ comfort zones—to streamline the design process, enhance the learning experience, heighten engagement, and revolutionize learning in new, success-driven ways.

Top Takeaways

• Curiosity is essential for understanding and innovating within comfort zones.
• Identifying comfort zones helps in determining the right innovations to pursue.
• Incremental innovation can be as impactful as big changes.
• AI can streamline the design process and enhance creativity.
• Effective learning experiences often require stepping outside traditional methods.
• Client engagement is crucial for successful learning design.
• Using data from learners can inform better design decisions.
• Innovation is about daring to do things differently, not just improving existing methods.
• Reflective activities can be enhanced through AI tools.
• Personal interests can lead to unique insights in learning design.

Ron Zamir

Welcome to our podcast. I’m excited to be joined today by Jessie Wirkus. So, welcome Jessie. I’ve worked with Jessie for many, many years. I don’t often get to spend time just chatting with people I admire, so it is a great opportunity.

Jessie, why don’t you start us off? Talk a bit about yourself, what brought you into our world, and we’ll take it from there. You can introduce yourself, whatever would be comfortable.

Jessie Wirkus

Sounds great. Thank you for having me. It’s exciting to be here. I’m a Director of Strategic Solutions here at AllenComm. And I started, which feels, you know, a long ways off, in an English PhD program. I was hoping to be a professor.

Even before that, childhood me wanted to be a Supreme Court justice, but just like very silly. I think it was like the robes. But then I was like, okay, I’ll go to law school. I’m going to be like a scholar of constitutional law. I always really liked digging deep into questions. I had a lot of curiosity. And then my interest changed over time.

So I ended up in English and literature, spent about 10 years in academia, doing a lot of teaching, a lot of teaching writing, a lot of teaching literature, a lot of, you know, how do you make an argument? How do you research? How do you convince people of different things?

And then towards the end of that time as I was finishing up my PhD, I finally processed the fact that I didn’t want to be in academia. It was the pace of work, the opportunities to collaborate in the ways that you could, and couldn’t, in certain ways wasn’t a great fit for me.

And so I took one of the three lines, which has always been… I’ve always loved teaching, learning, knowing how people learn, really maximizing on that. And I kind of segued into instructional design, building off the teaching part of my career.

So I was very happy to come to AllenComm, and I’ve learned a lot here. That’s how I got here.

Ron Zamir

Yeah, we sometimes faux pas the criticality of just knowing our language well, and knowing how people think, and how that underlies teaching, and learning, and training. We use so many of these words at the end, but I do like to hope that any of us involved in L&D at some point see us as being teachers. It’s great to hear that.

Your journey here has been even now pretty long here at AllenComm. And I think for our listeners and viewers, some will see this on video, some will listen to it, I hope to get to some really, really good insights on how people enter that innovation process.

For those that know AllenComm, we’re brought into the fold usually when companies are looking to innovate, to scale, to do better measurement of their learning activities. Maybe you can start sharing some best practices.

What does it mean to come into a client, their comfort zone, how they want to stretch? And then we’ll get into some examples that may interest our viewers.

Jessie Wirkus

Yeah, I think one best practice I have is to be really curious. To innovate, you’ve got to understand where you are to start. And so that may seem kind of elementary, but first, like defining what is the comfort zone, and figuring out why it’s comfortable, and where the resistance is to moving outside of it. I find that’s really essential to identify the kind of innovations that will push your goals.

I mean, that’s the other thing, you know, like what’s even motivating you to try something different? What’s important enough that’s getting you to consider shaking something up? And when you know those things, both the carrot and maybe the stick, the things that you’re a little bit afraid of, that’s when you can start to see your room to move.

And one thing that I think is a strength, you know, it’s something I know about myself is it can be a strength and a weakness, but I want everything I design to be really useful, realistic. If you’re innovating, the program that’s going to get you results is the program that works. Right.

And so, that I think is really essential too, is like figuring out where are the right places to push? Where are the right places to maybe stay where you are or what trade-offs can you make so that you do land somewhere that is going to be successful?

One thing that really impresses me with my clients too is it’s always really cool when people can take a big swing and make a big step forward, a big change in how they’re doing things. But I’ve learned a lot from my clients too, who are very, very smart about incremental innovation, right?

Ron Zamir

Yeah. We don’t bend you around the word pragmatism enough with innovation. I think some people think they conflict. One of the challenges I believe anybody has in a reactive organization like L&D is that you have to pick your battles. But more than that, you have to want to go to battle. And I think that is where we see these amazing change agents in these large companies where they pick a battle they think they need to fight, but how to fight it is something that vendors like AllenComm and others help them.

How do you suss out boundaries to comfort?

Jessie Wirkus

I always like to look at different sources of data, whatever the client has. I want to talk to them, you know, what’s your vision, what excites you, what would success look like here? What are you hearing from your stakeholders, right? Are they resistant? On board? What does success look like to them?

I love getting learner data, right? And I think that can be really powerful, even just the qualitative, like, I like learning from my peers or whatever it is, understanding what it is that they like and find valuable out of learning can be really helpful.

Because then if you can title like, well, historically, you’ve gotten on this way, what if I can give you that in a new way? You find that common ground, or that comfortable thing about it, or the thing they find valuable that you can tie to.

I also like I think sometimes we under look at people like facilitators, the people who are doing the work every day and see it happening. I’m often shocked at how little they get to come into the design process or give feedback. And I think that’s a real miss.

Anyway, I want to just hear, I want to get as many angles on the context as I can from kind of your learner to your stakeholder and everything in between. I think that gives you a lot of texture and nuance to really understand what’s creating and driving that comfort and the motivation to get outside of it.

Ron Zamir

Yeah, and I think when we look at some of the projects we’ve done that have won the most awards that tend to stand out, these are projects where the client could answer the question. Sometimes it’s about, you know, so where is your comfort zone? What are your learners used to now? What was easiest to do within your governance or within your structure? Where does your learning technology support or not support your ambitions? Just putting a framework around it sometimes helps.

But again, that’s only the baseline, right? This is a session about innovation. So the real question is, okay, once you’ve defined that comfort zone, now how do you stretch? And how far can you stretch? What are some of the signals you get when you’re working with a client that, well, maybe I’m trying to stretch them too far, or maybe they’re still too comfortable with my ideas?

And some examples if you want, you can use them, but even just guidelines for our viewers and listeners.

Jessie Wirkus

This may sound obvious, I think a certain… I know I may be playing it too safe or that there are opportunities to push it a little bit more if you’re not seeing any genuine excitement. If it’s just kind of like, yep, okay, yeah, what we expected, little feedback, yeah.

Ron Zamir

That would work, yeah, some kind of those laconic statements.

Jessie Wirkus

And so what I’m… that’s often an, okay, great. Next time I come to you, I’m coming with you, to add you with something a little extra, right? Like, okay, we’ve got this foundation, let’s build on it. Let’s iterate. Let’s think about some ways we can get excited about this.

I think sometimes when it’s going a little bit too far, I don’t know, I get a lot of like, “That’s not going to land with this population.” And that’s always an interesting one to me. It’s a great opportunity to ask why. It’s a great opportunity to say, well, here’s a situation where it did land well with us.

And that’s one thing that I think our clients appreciate about working with us is that we see a lot of different environments. We work with a lot of different learning leaders, and they want to hear about that. And that’s always a really cool opening to the innovation conversation and helping people want to move people out of their comfort zone, like, uh, tap into their competitive strengths.

If you have like a holdout on a team or something, have some people who are more excited than others, bring in those stories of what other companies or organizations are doing and the impact they’re having. Yeah, it’s scary. You’re putting a lot on the line sometimes to innovate in small or big ways, and helping spread the news, and the success stories, and best practices like we’re talking about here, I think can be really motivating and open doors too.

Ron Zamir

I think we often see a continuum of… we used to talk about how interactive, more interactive, less interactive. I think as we look at, and we’re going to talk about AI later in this podcast, it’s passivity versus activity. How are we using our design elements, our technology elements, to push the learner, the audience of this intervention, to be more active?

Maybe you could talk a bit about… I know that it’s always fascinated me when I got deep into our designs that we push a lot of type of pre-assessments or diagnostics that for some would seem as intrusive. It takes them out of their comfort zone, oh I don’t know this, or I really know this. And then the idea of how they can collaborate with each other versus cohort-based training.

Let’s get to some examples. We’re not going to mention clients because we respect our clients’ privacy, but we’ve seen a lot of great movement of clients getting out of their comfort zone to ask learners to engage, right? And we can bring some examples, if it’s some things that become viral or some things that become more gamified, what can you share around those continuums of engagement and passivity versus activity?

Jessie Wirkus

One of my favorite examples of a client really innovating and pushing their client culture lately, recently, has been in leadership development where the comfort zone was workshops. You know, we get together in person, we collaborate on a business challenge, and that’s awesome. Right? Like I would love to go to an experience like that. People love doing it, but you can hit all those problems at scale.

And so one thing that they wanted to do, and this is one of those places where they were very cognizant of like, our leaders like to talk to learn from other leaders. And that’s great. That networking is invaluable. We believe in it as like a leadership development organization. But they really took seriously, how can we scale that, that interpersonal working together, learning from one another.

I also really admired that they did this in steps. They started with new leaders, right? So we have new leaders, we know we need to like get them kind of leading in the way we do at this organization. So it’s like that. It’s an important leadership development area that gets a lot of attention. Let’s start with them. Let’s move to a more cohort. So we have them into a session for a couple of days. Let’s extend that, have some cohorts, bigger cohorts. And we’ll have some virtual sessions where we get together.

But one of their big innovations was introducing like using… they used Webex, but like we’re going to use Webex chat and upskill our facilitators to become cohort experience facilitators and like keep this chat going. And get people to talk day to day, not just when they’re in a session, and create a community. That was one of their big goals to like, okay, they like to network, let’s network, right? And create long lasting, longer term conversations.

And they had enough success with this that then one of the next steps was to invest, add to their technology stack, like a platform that supported that in a more holistic way. But I really admired that it wasn’t just like, “Well, if we don’t have this amazing pro platform, we can’t do that. We need the tech.” I love using the technology people have in new ways to produce programs.

So that’s one experience that’s inspired me, and one that I get to take to other clients too, and say like, well, we can get asynchronous social happening. Let’s get a little scrappy.

Ron Zamir

Yeah, and I think what you’re describing is a great example of disrupting the formality of a learning process and really working hard. It’s never easy to encourage that in between. We talk a lot about that. A lot of the comfort zone that our clients have is pretty much over training, right? They formalize a process. You’re onboarded. This is your compliance regime. This is what you have to do.

And they try to disrupt it with coaching and mentors, but really, as you said, those things don’t scale and they have to be very picky. And then a lot of their audience misses out on those peer interactions. So definitely re-looking at how technology has enabled us now to scale one-to-one connection or one-to-few connections, like in a cohort, is very positive.

I know that a lot of times when you meet with a client, they’re looking for something that they can’t really define. The extreme would be, “I’ll know when I see it.” What are some approaches that have helped you get a client to better articulate what they’re looking for so they can get to that stretch that they so desire?

Jessie Wirkus

I know we may talk AI specifically later, but I will say AI has been invaluable in being able to kind of put up some quick iterative examples of different approaches. And that’s amazing, right? Because if it is, I don’t know until I see it. Well, it’s a lot easier than it has been in the past to show you things. And things that are created for you, not just examples of other work or trying to talk around something. I think that’s been a bit of a game changer for me.

I also, yeah, helping figure out what they’re looking for… I mean, I like to go to similar experiences. Say you’re a consumer, right? What’s a great customer experience? Or say you’re, you know, making a change, like someone’s asking you to do something different, what motivates you to make that change?

How do you actually… sometimes thinking through an experience and why it was impactful, or effective in a kind of parallel tracking your life, I think can really unlock some of the core emotional and psychological things that you want to have happen that are really at the core of what you want to do. But then you have a lot of options about how to actually make that happen in learning.

Ron Zamir

Yeah, you kind of crystallize it down to the assets, emotions, motivations, feelings that encompass change, and then you could design to those desires. Let’s talk about AI a bit. It’s no secret here at AllenComm, we’ve heavily implemented AI in our design process.

Where does AI give you that velocity to innovation that we talk about a lot?

Jessie Wirkus

Oh, well, I think in a couple of ways. I was thinking through this one, all the ways that you expect about like the way that AI can help you get to first drafts, take away the first page, free you up to do the most exciting innovative thinking maybe that is not to be dismissed. And that’s been a game changer for me.

I think AI as different tools, as a thought partner that helps me come up with ideas that I have kind of come up with before or that’s a lot better. I remember trying out AI in some of the first early days, when I was trying things out and being like, yeah, okay, we could do that. Like it feeling very kind of normal L&D, yep, yep, we got it.

But there are ways now that I’ve worked with it more, maybe it’s me getting better at prompts, I don’t know, that could be part of it too. But yeah, sometimes I get surprised where I’m like, that is a great idea. So I think that being able to level up how I work with it, where I work with it. We use it a lot more now for wire framing things too, not just text, but generating starter interfaces and experiences and getting visuals on that.

I love that then I get to be like a client, and I get a look at it and be like, no, that’s not what I’m for, right? But it doesn’t take so much of my brain energy to get to that first output. So anyway, I think those are maybe the main two things that come to mind.

Ron Zamir

Yeah, I think what you’re describing is something we’ve known a long time, but maybe we’re waiting for the right technology, which is the idea that prototyping, multiple prototyping of ideas, concepts, visuals, journeys, give you that choice to say, well, I like this in this example, and I like that in that example. It was always time consuming. And what’s time consuming for us is expensive for our clients, right?

So, very few clients went through that iterative multi-choice prototype process. Now with these AI tools, if it’s tools for video simulations, tools for audio, tools for animation, tools for outlining and even building dialogues, right? We’re enabling ourselves together with our clients to do a lot more. I don’t want to call it brainstorming because I think it’s more like prototyping.

Jessie Wirkus

One thing that I haven’t, maybe this is where you’re going, but one thing I should speak to too is AI in the learning experience is an exciting way to innovate, and that we’re getting more and more into. And yeah, that’s, that’s exciting. That is legitimately exciting to be working in those spaces. It’s also exciting to see where it doesn’t work, where it’s like, yeah, here’s the limit.

Like speaking of comfort zones and innovation, like understanding too, okay, we’re using a chat bot as a coach. Like where does that work really well, and what are the circumstances, and how can we engineer that to work really well? Also where are the gaps in that or where it might fall short now but maybe it’ll get better or it will get better?

How does that help me then think about a whole like, wrap around blended experience, and where to scale using AI, and where to really still emphasize that human touch and opportunity to talk to other humans?

Ron Zamir

It gives me food for thought because I really do believe that there’s two aspects of the AI question for L&D, and this can take on a whole half an hour of a podcast. The one question is how do I use these tools to enhance my ability, even without a vendor, my own ability as a practicing L&D professional to better my output? To stretch, to do things that before I didn’t either do because they took too long?

Think of innovation just about effort. A lot of times innovation is stifled because of effort. Effort could be budget, effort could be time, effort could be complexity. So for example, one of the things that I think is invigorating for our clients is AI is giving them less dependence on SMEs. They’re able to use AI tools to accelerate the content generation process. It’s faster, but it’s less dependent, right?

If I look at the impact of coming to a client with examples that are heavily rooted in the public information around their subject matter, if it’s, you know, empathy training, if it’s call center best practices, if it’s safety, it doesn’t really matter. All these topics are accessible with AI models, even before you touch a client’s proprietary information.

And being able to set up the conversation at a further path down the road enables us to do more. And so there is a promise of AI not to replace us, but to invigorate us to do more and to innovate more. And that’s something that we need to hold. This may be one of the golden eggs, whatever the fairy tale you want to use.

But the other side, which I think you were speaking to, and let’s talk about that a minute, is now that we have all these tools, can we be more daring in our learning design? Can we be more ambitious in our learning experience? Let’s talk a bit about some of the opportunities you see there.

Jessie Wirkus

Yeah. The thing that always excites me about AI application in learning has to do with getting to the… one way to describe it is to get to those higher level order things, and like… a Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs, right? Create, evaluate, synthesize.

As a writing instructor, I was always so… you know, things will look like they’re going great in class. People are writing, answering your questions, it’s been great. They write a paper, and then that’s when you really start to see what’s actually moving in, what’s moving from like, yeah, I understand the concept, I can actually do it.

I think that’s something that’s often really frustrating about designing something like eLearning is that it often stays at this level of like, I can identify the thing that looks good, but can I actually do it? That can be a big leap. And so anything that’s like, okay, record yourself and do the thing, say the thing, get some feedback through an AI analyzing… that’s a huge leap forward, because that’s how we finally do scale things more effectively like coaching, and mentoring, and that kind of one-on-one practice.

I mean, the thing that burned me out in teaching writing was just how incredibly effortful it was to evaluate a piece of writing, figure out what’s going on with it, giving good feedback in a way that’s going to leave room for growth for the individual and for them to figure out some problems, but then be really clear about what’s working and what’s not.

I think sometimes we know that takes time, but I think sometimes we just like forget how much effort that takes. But how that’s also the thing that’s impactful is to get kind of individualized, real feedback in your work and what you’re doing.

Ron Zamir

It’s exciting. But the cautionary tale I give is it is easy to look at AI as a crutch, right? It’s replacing things I don’t like to do, because that is the promise of agentic AI. Things that are tedious in manufacturing, tedious in document reviews, tedious in reviewing MRI scans, the things that are more tedious, we build systems that can do it better than us. Not just as good, but better than us.

While we sometimes forget that these technologies, these mechanisms can help us invigorate or do more things we know to be successful, but we never had the time, the effort, or the budget to do them, like reflective activities.

We talk about AI, you talked about AI as an assessment tool to give feedback. I get excited when I think, you know, using an AI-aided engine, we can help learners reflect on understanding the ramifications of what they do, how it’s important to themselves, how it’s important to the company, fine tune their responses. We’re seeing a lot of our clients use AI for call center training, for leadership training.

So I think innovation, to stay to our topic, this is not a podcast about AI, it’s really to look for where this technology can now let you do things you couldn’t do before, right? As opposed to doing what you’re doing better, okay? To me, it’s not the same. So, you know, challenge yourself to be adaptive. Challenge yourself to say, “I don’t just need to know the score of how this person understands and grade them better on the skill.”

We’ve always wanted to do that, you know, in a path. We can do that better for sure. But what can I teach them now that I could never teach them before? Self-awareness, critical thinking. These are things that I know excite you, Jessie, and the team you work with, but they definitely excite me as kind of the old dog in the store, on the street.

I started my career in design using these special sheets of paper where I write learning objectives on the left and then lesson activities on the right. Paper and pencil. For a dyslexic like me, that was a definitely a challenge.

Jessie Wirkus

Like, critical thinking, of course, you’re right, I do like that. But yeah, those things, the real true skills never go out of style. And I love the opportunities we have, too, sometimes to bring… with AI, it’s not like get feedback, maybe it’s like have it generate an output and then you evaluate it. Let you be the judge, and evaluate that way, and apply the skill, and think critically in that way.

I think that’s a great point. Like, what really is the best way to use that? Sometimes it’s not the first thing you think of, or yeah, don’t let it just be the thing that you don’t want to do. I think it’s a great point.

Ron Zamir

Exactly. And go through the process. Innovation is, in my read, innovation is not just doing what you do better. In fact, I would say that’s not innovation, that’s improvement, right? Yeah, innovation is daring to do things that you didn’t want to do before. And if it’s AI, or technology, or a partner, or just even a process of going about thinking, if they help you stretch yourself to do things that you wouldn’t do before, then maybe you’re in that innovative zone versus that comfort zone.

Well, let’s get to our last question. And that’s really, again, about you. We started this whole session about you, so we’re going to end with a question about you. So knowing what you know today through your journey, through a PhD in English, and a performance consultant at AllenComm, now even learning strategy… What would you tell yourself when you started this journey, either at AllenComm or in general in training and teaching?

Jessie Wirkus

Many things. I would tell myself to follow my interests. I think I’ve spent a lot of time worrying too much about what’s the right thing to be interested in, and researching, and looking too much to others. And this to me feels very connected to innovation on this kind of… This was definitely part of my scholarly work that I was like, well, I want to be talking about the things other people are talking about so that they’ll take me seriously.

I think where I really had more to offer, or would have had even more to offer, is in really kind of exploring the things that were unique and interesting. And anyway, I think that’s what I would tell myself to do. And I think it still applies today, you know, just because someone else isn’t thinking about it, doesn’t mean there’s not promise there.

Ron Zamir

Look for the paths less trodden. Or an analogy I like to use, sometimes you find insight between the raindrops, not in the drops themselves. Okay, I’ll leave everybody with that five-cent philosophy note, and we will thank Jessie for joining us.

We hope to see you at our next podcast. Thank you, everybody.

Jessie Wirkus

Thanks for having me.