Todd Henderson, Director of Practice Improvement, BA

Talk Description
Most of us assume more human involvement in learning is better. A human voice. A live trainer. A community. Todd Henderson spent the past year testing that assumption … and kept getting answers he didn't expect.

He tried distilling live training recordings into short, polished on-demand content, then asked people to weigh in. He joined a 90-minute live session he found nearly unbearable, then discovered it was among the highest-rated content in his onboarding program. Along the way, he's also been facilitating a video series where the most interesting question turned out to be who the real beneficiary is. Finally, he’s cultivating a community of practice with minimal technology – just people talking. Taken together, these efforts span a surprising range: from purely synthetic content to purely human interaction, with a lot of complicated middle ground in between.

Each experiment nudged the same question: when does the human actually make a difference? And a few of them landed as a reminder that UX practitioners figured out a long time ago: you are not the user. Our intuitions about what learners value are worth testing.

Speaker Bio
Todd Henderson is a principal at BA, where he serves as Director of Practice Improvement. After two decades designing healthcare environments, Todd shifted his focus to the operational backbone of practice—leading initiatives in knowledge management, onboarding, quality assurance, and firmwide change management. He rebuilt the firm’s corporate university and led the revamp of its intranet to support better learning and collaboration. A longtime process nerd, Todd applies systems thinking with lean and agile methods to untangle complex problems and drive lasting change.