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A practitioner series from Learning Rewired Lab

Kip’s Lab Notes

For the moments when you know the request is not the whole problem.

Short, practical expressions of Learning Rewired Intelligence for the requests, stakeholder conversations, and design decisions that make you stop and wonder what to do next.

One situation you recognize. One better way to respond. Five minutes or less.

Practical guidance for diagnosing learning requests, navigating stakeholder conversations, and making stronger learning-design decisions.

One practical note every other week. Unsubscribe anytime.

Kip, the Learning Rewired Lab diagnostic researcher character
Kip reads the request before anyone builds the course.

What arrives in each note

Practice the moves that make difficult conversations easier.

Every note follows one structure, so the thinking transfers. You learn the sequence, not just the example — and you can run it on the request sitting in your inbox right now.

  1. The request

    A recognizable stakeholder or workplace-learning request, quoted the way it actually arrives — solution already attached.

  2. Kip’s observation

    The assumptions and missing context hiding inside the request — what has been decided before anyone looked at the performance problem.

  3. Try this

    Questions, language, or an action you can use in the next conversation. Written to be said out loud, not summarized in a deck.

  4. Watch for this

    A common diagnostic or design mistake — the one that quietly turns a good investigation back into a course request.

  5. Take it with you

    A prompt, script, checklist, or investigation starter you can paste into your own notes and reuse on the next request.

A complete sample note

Read one before you subscribe.

Sample Lab Note · Resilience training

The request

“Our managers need resilience training.”

Kip’s observation

Three decisions have already been made inside that sentence: that the problem sits in the managers, that the gap is a skill gap, and that training is the response. None of them have been checked.

Requests like this usually arrive after something visible happened — a hard engagement survey, a wave of resignations, a leader who is tired of hearing that their team is stretched. The request is the summary of a feeling, not the result of an investigation.

And resilience is often the most convenient explanation available, because it is the only one that does not require changing anything about the work.

Conditions worth looking at first

  • Headcount, workload, or scope changes in the last two quarters
  • Managers carrying individual-contributor targets alongside a team
  • Decisions that keep reversing, so effort is repeatedly discarded
  • Escalation paths that route every exception back to one person
  • Time-off patterns: unused, interrupted, or quietly discouraged

Try this — three questions before you accept training

  1. “What did you see that made resilience the word we landed on?” — this moves the conversation from the label back to the observation behind it.

  2. “Which managers are managing this well right now, and what is different about their situation?” — if some are coping, the variable may not be the skill.

  3. “If we ran this session and nothing else changed, what would you expect to be different in ninety days?” — this surfaces the real success measure, and often the real cause.

Watch for this

Asking these questions and then building the workshop anyway. If the answers point at workload, role clarity, or decision churn, a training solution will absorb the blame when nothing improves — and the next request will arrive with even less room to investigate.

Take it with you — a stakeholder response

“I can build that. Before I do, give me a week with three managers and the last two quarters of workload data. If it’s a skill gap, the session will be sharper for it. If it’s something structural, we’ll both want to know before we spend the budget.”

Working a request that needs more than a week? Learning Rewired Intelligence takes the same investigation further — evidence, assumptions, alternative explanations, and a decision you can defend.

Why this is different

Something you can actually use in the next conversation.

Most L&D writing tells you what the field should do. A Lab Note gives you something to say on Tuesday, in a room where someone has already decided what they want built.

  • Slow down solution-first requests — without becoming the person who blocks everything.
  • Diagnose before designing — separate what you were told from what you have observed.
  • Ask better stakeholder questions — language you can use verbatim, and reuse.
  • Translate evidence into decisions — research that survives contact with a budget conversation.
  • Build professional judgment — the part of the job that compounds.

Selected notes

The archive lives here.

Notes arrive by email first. Selected ones are published here afterwards, each at its own permanent address, so you can send a colleague the one note instead of the whole series.

Sample entry Date to be published

When the request is already a solution

Situation: “We need a course on the new policy.”

How to find the performance problem underneath a request that arrives pre-scoped, and what to ask before the deadline is set.

Coming soon

Sample entry Date to be published Video

The stakeholder who wants it by Friday

Situation: A deadline set before the problem was named.

Language for buying investigation time without sounding like you are refusing the work.

Coming soon

Sample entry Date to be published

“Completion is low” is not a finding

Situation: A dashboard used as a diagnosis.

Turning a metric into a question, and a question into evidence you can bring to the next review.

Coming soon

Where a note ends, Intelligence begins

Use a Lab Note when you need a better next move. Use Intelligence when the problem needs a deeper investigation.

Learning Rewired Intelligence supports the complete process — examining a performance problem, sorting evidence from assumption, testing alternative explanations, and arriving at a learning-design decision you can defend in the room.

Kip’s Lab Notes

Get Kip’s next Lab Note

One real L&D situation. One practical response. Five minutes or less — written for instructional designers, learning strategists, and the people who keep receiving training requests that arrive as solutions.

Practical guidance for diagnosing learning requests, navigating stakeholder conversations, and making stronger learning-design decisions.

One practical note every other week. Unsubscribe anytime.

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