ISPI SoCal
ISPI SoCal Presents: GEMS RoundTable
From Designing Courses to Designing Work
Join us to discuss this month's article:
Facilitated by: Rob Pusch
The RoundTable is an exciting approach that stimulates incredible conversation and insight around the topics and trends impacting our discipline.
We read aloud the RoundTable Guidelines and this session's article for about 15 minutes. Then for the next 45 minutes, we offer everyone in attendance equal time to share their thoughts and experiences on or around the topic. Come explore with us!
NOTE! Please download and print the article, or view in browser, for your use during the session (link above).
To facilitate and/or propose an article for a future RoundTable, contact Laura Braeunig laura@nationalitc.com
Follow us on Linked In: Southern CA Chapter of ISPI
#PerformanceImprovement #L&DandInstructionalDesign #GEMSRoundTable
The GEMS RoundTable format was provided by Sue Gabriele, President and Owner, Gabriele Educational Materials and Systems. Website: www.gemslearning.net Email: sgabriele@gemslearning.net
ISPI SoCal Presents: First Tuesday Webinars
SNAP for PI Pushback:
Maintaining Clarity During Challenging Performance Projects
Lisa Chandler
Performance improvement practitioners regularly operate in environments where the path forward is not always clear or supported. A request for training replaces a deeper performance need, well-supported recommendations are set aside due to constraints, or competing priorities shift the direction of a project.
Session Description
In these moments, the challenge is not just diagnosing the system, but maintaining your own clarity and effectiveness within it.
This session introduces SNAP as a practical discipline for navigating these situations. SNAP provides a structured way to interrupt reactive thinking, focus on what remains within your influence, adapt to real-world constraints, and continue making progress even when conditions are less than ideal.
Participants will explore common moments that trigger reactivity in performance work, walk through the SNAP approach, and identify how to apply it immediately to stay grounded, focused, and effective during their next challenging project.
About the Speaker
Lisa Chandler is a Board Certified Coach and performance improvement practitioner with over 15 years of experience working in complex, high-stakes environments. She specializes in helping leaders and teams move from reactive patterns to deliberate, strategic action, particularly in organizations with competing priorities, multiple stakeholders, and constant pressure.
As the founder of Beyond the Trees, Lisa integrates cognitive-behavioral principles, emotional intelligence, and performance improvement practices to help individuals and teams maintain effectiveness in the middle of complexity. Her work focuses on practical, repeatable approaches that strengthen decision-making, collaboration, and execution when it matters most.
Lisa has led large-scale initiatives and leadership development efforts across government, healthcare, financial services, higher education, and non-profit sectors. She is known for translating complex concepts into actionable tools that drive measurable progress in real-world environments.
#PerformanceImprovement #L&DandInstructionalDesign #ISPISoCal
Derailers, Detours, and Dead Ends: Avoiding Pitfalls in PI Projects
with Lisa Toenniges, CPT and Dawn Snyder, PhD, CPT, Prosci CCMP
Join Innovative Learning Group CEO Lisa Toenniges and Dawn Snyder, founder of Dawn Snyder Associates, as they share practical strategies for avoiding common pitfalls in performance improvement projects. Drawing on 80 years of combined experience working with global organizations, they’ll highlight where projects often derail — and how to prevent or fix them.
This interactive session invites you to share challenges, brainstorm solutions, and contribute to a crowd-sourced job aid. Together, you’ll explore five common derailers, discuss inclusive and agile practices, and surface solutions that reflect today’s complex organizational realities.
Whether you’re new to the field or an experienced professional, you’ll leave with actionable insights grounded in real-world practice.
About the Speakers
Lisa Toenniges, CPT
Lisa Toenniges, CPT, is the owner and chief executive officer of Innovative Learning Group, a company she founded in March 2004. A dynamic and respected leader, Lisa has nearly 40 years of experience in the performance improvement industry and has consulted with many Fortune 1000 companies about their learning and performance strategies and solutions.
ILG was born out of Lisa’s passion for building a business, providing for her employees, and doing what is right for clients. Her entrepreneurial spirit, positive outlook, and hands-on leadership style have been the drivers behind ILG’s profitable annual compound growth.
Lisa's dedication to the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) spans more than three decades at both the chapter and international levels. In recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field, she was honored with the Distinguished Service Award in 2018. Throughout her career, Lisa has held several key leadership positions on ISPI’s board of directors, including treasurer, president-elect, president, and past president. She is also a Certified Performance Technologist.
Lisa has a master’s degree in instructional technology from Wayne State University and a bachelor’s degree in music education from Michigan State University.
Dawn Snyder, PhD, CPT, Prosci CCMP
Dawn M. Snyder is the founder of Dawn Snyder Associates, a learning and performance firm that offers consulting on learning strategies, curriculum design, performance assessment, and evaluation. Dawn has a proven history of delivering practical, innovative solutions to organizations who want to take performance to the next level. She helps these organizations achieve results by combining modern, evidence-based practices from various fields, including learning, performance improvement, and change management. She is the go-to consultant for initiatives that impact global learning, performance, and talent development.
Dawn is passionate about supporting emerging talent and has worked in universities and corporations to build curricula and teach in programs that credential high-performing individuals. She teaches graduate-level classes in performance improvement, change management, evaluation, organizational learning, knowledge management, leadership, and project and relationship management.
Dawn has been actively involved in ISPI for her entire career, serving in leadership roles at the local and international level. She currently serves as ISPI Faculty for our Principles and Practices workshop. Dawn is a Certified Performance Technologist and has mentored others to achieve this credential.
Dawn has an M.S. and a Ph.D. in instructional systems from Indiana University, and a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from Butler University.
Why AI Adoption Stalls, According to Industry Data
Facilitated by: Vanya Boardman
ISPI SoCal Presents: AI@Work Seminar 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM PST
From Intelligence to Execution
Rachel Walter
AI has rapidly improved how organizations generate knowledge yet performance isn’t keeping pace in most cases. In this session, we explore what has changed in AI over the past year and why the real gap is no longer access to intelligence, but consistent execution. Drawing on emerging patterns across organizations, this talk introduces a performance-focused approach to AI enablement. Together, we will move beyond tools and into capability, decision-making, and measurable outcomes.
Rachel Walter is the Chief Innovation Officer at ansrsource, where she helps organizations rethink how they learn, grow, and adapt, especially in a world where AI is changing the game every single day. She works with leaders across industries to turn big challenges into smart, strategic solutions, using learning as a tool to drive business results.
With an MBA in data analytics and certifications in organizational learning and talent development, Rachel brings a mix of data skills and creative thinking to everything she does. She's all about making things work in the real working world.
Known for her down-to-earth style and no-fluff approach, Rachel loves helping people at all levels embrace change, experiment with new tools (like AI), and build skills that matter to them and the organizations they work with. She’s passionate about learner-first design, measuring what matters, and making sure innovative ideas lead to actionable results.
Accessibility
Live captions available. All registrants will receive the session recording and resources.
Performance Thinking® Logic: Performance Improvement for the Rest of Us
Dr. Carl Binder
Human Performance Improvement is often communicated through complex models and technical jargon that can make it harder to engage executive and management stakeholders and those who report to them. While practitioners strive to partner with their clients, overly technical language and models can create the impression that consultants "parachute in, work their magic, and leave behind the solution" – hardly a recipe for lasting impact or return on investment. We need precision and clarity, but without the jargon.
Over more than five decades of consulting with organizations of every size across many industries and non-corporate organizations, Carl and his collaborators found that simplicity and plain English accelerate understanding, collaboration, and sustainment. Beginning with user-tested relabeling of Thomas F. Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model to eliminate category errors for clients, which one client renamed the Six Boxes® Model in 1991, they continued refining the language and logic used to describe human performance and the factors that influence it.
By the early 2000s, this work had evolved into two simple models – the Performance Chain and the Six Boxes® Model – that laid a strong foundation for consulting and teaching. As clients repeatedly said that this approach was "teaching us a different way to think about performance," Carl renamed his consulting firm The Performance Thinking Network and the methodology itself, Performance Thinking® Logic.
This session provides an overview of Performance Thinking® models and logic, illustrates the wide range of applications they support, and previews the practical, plain-English book that Carl is preparing to publish under the same title as this presentation.
Dr. Carl Binder is CEO of The Performance Thinking Network, and President of The Fluency Project, Inc., a nonprofit organization devoted to disseminating information about behavioral fluency research and application. He studied behavior science at Harvard with B.F. Skinner in the 1970s, and has taught and applied that science ever since, in education, sales and customer service enablement, leadership and management development, and organizational performance improvement. His four consulting firms, each with specific areas of application, have been laboratories for discovery and innovation. He currently teaches clients to apply the simple, plain English, accomplishment-based Performance Thinking® approach in projects, and to develop leaders and managers. Carl is a recipient of ISPI’s Thomas Gilbert and Lifetime Member awards. Find his LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/drcarlbinder, and learn more about his work at his company’s YouTube channel www.PerformanceThinking.tv and at www.Fluency.org . Contact him at carlbinder@performancethinking.com
Increase Learning by 7x! … And Accelerate Design with First Principles AI Tools!
with Dr. Timothy Stafford and Dr. Max Cropper
Merrill's First Principles of Instruction help achieve world-class instruction.
How effective are Merrill's First Principles? Ted Frick has provided evidence that First Principles provide 7x learning.
In addition, First Principles AI Tools make it possible to accelerate the course design process by up to 40%.
In this session, we will demonstrate and give participants access to the free First Principles AI Evaluation Tool.
Dr. Timothy Stafford is a futurist, instructional designer, and thought leader specializing in online learning, instructional design, and AI ethics. He currently serves as Director of Graduate Online Academic Affairs and Program Director for the MS in Instructional Design & Technology at St. Thomas University. As the creator of the First Principles AI Course Lab, he integrates AI-driven tools to guide instructional designers in building engaging, outcome-driven courses.
Dr. Max H. Cropper, CEO of 5-Star Performance Solutions, is an award-winning instructional design consultant. He has taught many workshops and presentations on Merrill's First Principles. He has studied, researched, implemented, and taught best practice instructional design, evaluation, performance improvement, and leadership for more than 40 years. Some clients include the EPA, the US Department of Defense, Morgan Stanley, and the US Department of Transportation.Accessibility
AI for Learning Evaluation: What's Working, What's Risky
Will Thalheimer, Ph.D.
68% of L&D professionals say their teams can't do the learning evaluation they want to do. Only 19% rate their learner surveys as providing "very good" data. Our evaluation practices have a problem — and now AI is entering the picture. The GROWLE 2026 research finds 45% of organizations are already using AI for evaluation, but a real worry has emerged: are we adopting AI before our underlying practices are mature enough to use it well? Could AI make our evaluation problems worse rather than better?
Will Thalheimer, PhD, MBA, Consultant, Speaker, Researcher at Work-Learning Research. Will is a world-renowned thought leader focused on research-based practices for learning, work performance, presentations, and evaluation—and an advocate for learning professionals. Through Work-Learning Research (WorkLearning.com), Will empowers organizations to build maximally effective learning-and-performance solutions and strategies. Will wrote the award-winning book Performance-Focused Learner Surveys (second edition) and The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning & Work: Empowering Learning for a Competitive Advantage. Will created LTEM, the Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model, and conducts popular workshops like the LTEM Boot Camp. He co-created The Learning Development Accelerator and the eLearning Manifesto.
