06. The Number Said 278

I am someone who reads rooms for a living.

Not in a mystical way. In the way that anyone who has spent enough time presenting to people learns to do. You watch the face of the person in the third row who crossed their arms twenty minutes ago. You notice when someone stops taking notes. You feel the energy shift in a way you cannot always name but you know, and you adjust. You slow down, you find a different entry point, you make eye contact with the person who looks lost and you bring them back in.

It is not a technique. It is just paying attention. And it is probably the thing I am most naturally good at in a room.

The Old Mutual session had 278 people in it at its peak. I know this because a number told me so.

That is all I had. A number. No faces, no arms crossed, no energy to read. Just myself reflected back at me on a screen and a figure in the corner that went up and down while I talked.

I want to be precise about how the session actually ran because I think the details matter.

I was not standing in front of a quiet audience waiting for me to finish. It was a proper session. I shared a cheat sheet during the presentation itself and gave everyone time to screenshot it so they would leave with something in their hands, not just something in their heads. I built an assessment so they could test what had actually landed versus what had washed over them. The questions came at the end, through a moderator, and I answered what came through.

And then it was over.

The organising team appeared on screen. The IT guys and my contact at the organisation. The people I could finally see. They said they had followed along. That they had learned something new. I believed them.

What I could not shake was the 278 I never got to see. And the fact that this session is going to sit on their FAIS platform, which means close to a thousand people will eventually watch it outside of the live session. A thousand people I will also never see. A thousand people I cannot follow up with, cannot check in on, cannot ask what happened when they tried the thing I suggested on a Tuesday three weeks later.

That is the part that bothers me. And I have been trying to understand why it bothers me so much.

Last year I spent two weeks with my son’s school teacher.

She had told me she was not good at Excel or Canva or anything in that category. Not in a self-deprecating way. Just matter of factly. This is not a thing I can do. So we worked together. I gave her tasks to do at home. She did them with what she described as joy, which surprised her about herself. At some point she went further than I had asked and started colouring her columns and rows the way she wanted them, just because she could, just because she had discovered she was someone who could do that kind of thing now.

A few months later her school asked her to design a newsletter. She made it the best newsletter the school had ever produced. They put her in charge of the project. Other staff members were directed to come to her to learn.

She told me. I got to hear the end of the story. I got to know that it took.

That is what I mean when I say adoption matters to me.

I am interested in the moment someone realises they are no longer afraid of the thing they were afraid of. That is what I was trying to create with 278 people I could not see.

The frustration is not really about the webinar format. Virtual sessions are a fact of life and I will do many more of them.

The frustration is structural. It is about the gap that exists in how organisations think about learning and adoption. You bring someone in, you run a session, you collect the feedback form, you file the number. 278 attended. Objective met. And then everyone goes back to their desks and the real question, which is what actually changed, goes unasked because there is no process for asking it and no budget allocated for finding out.

But I keep thinking about my son’s teacher. About how the newsletter only happened because we did not stop at the training. Because I checked. Because she had somewhere to bring her small victories and her questions and the moment she figured out how to colour a row in a colour that pleased her.

I had a conversation recently with someone who is trying to use AI to help his care workers move through thirty one clients in a day without the paperwork eating everything. He had found a platform he was excited about. When I asked about the data infrastructure he said he thought it was secure. I told him we needed to be sure rather than think, especially given the vulnerability of the people his organisation serves.

He said he hadn’t met anyone in this space who asked questions like that.

I wasn’t asking a technical question. I was asking the question that comes after the tool. The question about what it actually means to responsibly introduce something new into a system that involves real people with real stakes.

That is the only question I am ever really asking. In a room with 278 or in a conversation with one person. What happens after this? Who is responsible for making sure it takes? What does the newsletter look like, six months from now?

But I keep asking anyway.