Episode 26: ‘Stop Learning. Start Doing’  

How much of what you learn do you actually use?  

That is the question Bryan Cassady has built a career around. Not the softer version – did people enjoy the course, did they rate it highly, did they leave feeling motivated – but the harder one. Did anything change? And can you prove it? 

Bryan is an entrepreneur, professor, executive coach and keynote speaker whose career includes building 11 companies across six countries, teaching at some of the world’s leading business schools, and writing two books on innovation. He has also, in the course of building his own training 

programmes and considering the impact they have on participants, looked at 192 AI courses on the market and found that only two of them mention results. Not satisfaction. Not engagement. Results. Which helped to influence him to make sure his own method is built on a simple principle: the learning is not the point. The doing is. 

Bryan describes a way to focus on making ‘doing’ the point by a method which focuses on learning in ten-minute slots, followed immediately by ten minutes of application. No gap or reflection period, no waiting until conditions are right. The moment you try something is the moment it becomes yours. Before one of his AI programmes, 25% of participants score in the top 20% for AI sophistication. After it, 96% do. 

He has taught MBA programmes that ran to 36 hours of contact time. He now delivers the same material in 100 minutes. The days of the PowerPoint dump – the passive, length-equals-rigour model of corporate learning – are, he argues, simply over. 

But this conversation is not only about efficiency. Bryan also talks about what happens when people learn together in real time: the connection that builds, the accountability that comes from showing up, the moment a presentation in the final session of a public speaking course moved him to tears. Three months on, the participants are still in touch, sharing photos from stages they have since stood on. 

That is not a training outcome. That is what learning that actually works looks like.