I teach adults for a living. I build the products that teach them when I’m not in the room.
I spent most of my career at Crucial Learning, the company behind Crucial Conversations, teaching leaders at Google, NASA, and American Express. Since 2023 I’ve been Head of Product at Lone Rock Leadership, a leadership development firm. Teaching thousands of leaders a year shows you one uncomfortable pattern, and this page is built around it.
Watch what happens to a class
A leader walks out of class able to do things she couldn’t do that morning.
- Friday, 4 p.m.the language for the hard conversation
- Saturdaythe framework for the next decision
- Sundaythe plan for the follow-through
- Monday, 9 a.m.the confidence from live practice
By Monday, most of it has faded.
Not because the class was bad. Because nothing was designed to hold it. Everything I build starts at this moment.
Students practicing with a chatbot that had no guardrails looked better during practice, then did worse on the proctored exam. The randomized study LearnVector cites on its homepage · Bastani et al.
Learners practicing with a live instructor look great in the room, then lose it when the room goes away. Every classroom I’ve taught since 2011
Same failure mode.
The skill holds while the scaffold is there. It fades when the tool, the room, or the trainer disappears. I’ve spent my career designing against that curve from the classroom side. The rest of this page is the record.
The room is the lab.
My week starts on stage. Live classes, virtual cohorts, executive sessions, keynotes. Teaching at that volume is a privilege. It’s also where every question I care about comes from.
“Clearly outlining / collaborating on expected deliverables and timeline / measurement during 1:1s”
One week after class, we ask learners where they’ve used the skills. This is one of 880 written answers, collected in the measurement system you’ll meet in the evidence section.
Live classes & virtual cohorts
Multi-week leadership programs for enterprise teams, taught live.
Executive sessions
Closed-door skill work with senior leadership teams.
Keynotes & webinars
Audiences of 1,000 or more, on stage and on camera.
Train the trainer
I teach the people who teach, and certify the facilitators who deliver our courses.
Google·Facebook·NASA·American Express·Gap·Applied Materials
LinkedIn·Costco·Steelcase·Sutter Health·ezCater·Kumon·CommonSpirit Health
years in adult behavior change, in the room and in the data
people a year taught on stage and on camera
trainers certified to deliver our courses since 2011
organizations whose learners I’ve surveyed and measured
That volume is where my questions come from. What follows is what I built to answer them.
Teach. Notice. Read. Build. Measure.
I run my work as one loop. Plenty of people do one or two of these stages well. The work compounds when you hold all five at once.
- 01
Teach at volume
Thousands of people a year, in rooms and on camera. Every session is a live look at what lands and what doesn’t.
- 02
Notice what doesn’t stick
The gap between what people can do in the room and what they still do on Monday. That gap is the whole problem.
- 03
Read the literature
The transfer-of-training research, from Baldwin and Ford’s foundational 1988 review forward, condensed into design rules I can build against.
- 04
Build the system
Courses, assessments, a production standard with hard gates, checks that can each block a release, and the agentic pipeline that produces all of it.
- 05
Measure whether behavior changed
Two waves of learner surveys, one in week one and one at course end, graded against my own transfer criteria.
Each pass through the loop leaves an artifact behind. The six below are the ones I’d want you to check.
Built to be checked.
Since October 2023 I’ve been Head of Product at Lone Rock Leadership, mostly as a team of one. These six artifacts came out of that seat. The software runs, the citations resolve, the data grades itself: every claim here is numbered, named, and checkable.
The Core Four are the four leadership skills our courses teach, and this is the instrument that measures them. Each item names an observable behavior and measures the leader twice, once for personal proficiency and once for organizational need, then scores the gap between the two. That gap is the point: it tells a leader where to start, from data instead of a hunch. Designed and built solo, from psychometrics through production. Next.js · Supabase · Vercel
Does training change behavior back on the job? The research on that question, Baldwin and Ford through the 2025 literature, distilled into one measurement rule: do not collapse the evidence chain. A learner liking a course, using a skill once, and still using it a year later are different claims that need different proof, so the review defines seven levels of it, from planned use to business result. Includes an honest audit of Lead In 30, our flagship course, against the research. It governs everything we design. Primary sources · APA 7
1,081 learners across two survey waves, week one and course end. 68% reported using the skills in their real role within the first week, and 880 wrote down exactly where. All of it graded against the seven-level criteria from the review above. Typeform · Tally · Supabase · analysis in pandas
A 100-point rubric with five hard gates: source fidelity, learning transfer, learner psychology, voice, and medium fit. Ten style guides, one per format, from slide decks to facilitator guides. Quality stops depending on any one person, including me. The standard every artifact passes before it ships
One course per Core Four skill: Lead In 30 · Decide In 30 · Power In 30 · Adapt In 30. For each, slides, workbooks, video scripts, facilitator guides and playbooks, and the full LMS build. Every piece clears the production standard above before it ships. LearnUpon LMS · Articulate Rise · Reach 360
The AI systems that produce the work above. A content pipeline with five specialized writing modes that keeps its own structured memory between runs. A video stack operated by agents (Runway, Remotion, FFmpeg). Harvey, an AI assistant I built to handle client context, scheduling, and CRM. And the four courses restructured so agents can query the content directly. This page came out of the same pipeline. Claude (agents, skills, MCP) · Codex · Cursor
The surveys prove learners used the skills. They do not prove the skills stuck. That is application evidence, not efficacy evidence, and holding my own data to that line is exactly why you can trust the 68%.
Here is the wall I keep hitting: a vendor’s access to learners ends when the engagement ends, so the question that matters most, whether the skills are still in use months later, stays out of reach no matter how good the instruments are. A first-party platform is where the loop finally closes. That is the job I’m applying for.
Open the artifacts.
The ledger above makes the claims. These are the artifacts themselves: filmed teaching, shipped decks, and the guides participants hold. Everything opens in place.
On camera
Short teaching videos made for leaders, plus course media from the four Lone Rock programs. The room and the product, as shipped.
Slide craft
Two of the four course decks, slide by slide. Hundreds of these ship in every course, and each one clears the production standard first.
In print
The pieces participants and certified facilitators actually hold. Written, designed, and produced end to end.
Two companies, one arc.
Lone Rock Leadership
Head of Product · Oct 2023 – Present
Leadership development firm serving LinkedIn, Costco, Steelcase, Sutter Health, and 25+ other organizations.
The whole product function, end to end
I build the curriculum, the assessments, the measurement, and the agentic systems that produce them. I also designed the post-training reinforcement we run for clients, built on spacing, retrieval practice, and implementation intentions, including a multi-week roadmap deployed for LinkedIn’s leaders. I direct contractors and vendors, and I certify the facilitators who deliver our courses.
Crucial Learning
2011 – 2024 · 14 years
The company behind Crucial Conversations. Formerly VitalSmarts. The dates overlap on purpose: I stayed on the Senior Faculty through 2024 while building Lone Rock’s product function.
Senior Faculty
Lead facilitator for the company’s highest-priority customers: Google, Facebook, NASA, American Express, Gap, and Applied Materials. And the trainer of the trainers. I taught the rest of the Faculty to deliver to brand standard.
Manager, Customer Success
Led a team of 4 managing a pool of 9,000+ Certified Trainers; built trainer- and customer-enablement content; curated REACH, the annual customer conference of 400+ customers.
Master Trainer, Development & Delivery
Internal content creator alongside the authors, Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, and Al Switzler, on Crucial Conversations, Crucial Influence, Change Anything, and Power of Habit. In 2014, I was the first on the team to take the courses virtual.
The instrument I most want to run is the one a vendor’s seat has never allowed: the survey wave that measures what’s still there after 90 days.
I’ve measured planned use and week-one application at scale. Whether the skills survive months later, what the research calls maintenance, needs something a vendor never owns and LearnVector will: the learner relationship, end to end. I’d like to help you build it.
hello@davidnelson.io