For years I measured a good session by how much I crammed into it. Steps, screenshots, settings, the lot. If someone walked out with a longer to-do list than they arrived with, I’d done my job. I don’t see it that way anymore.
The shift happened quietly. I started noticing that the sessions people remembered weren’t the ones where I taught the most. They were the ones where something clicked and a person suddenly wanted to work differently. The instruction was almost beside the point. What stuck was the wanting.
Knowing how isn’t the same as wanting to
You can show someone exactly how to do a thing and watch them never do it. We’ve all run that webinar. The hands-on steps are perfect, the recording goes up, and three weeks later nothing has changed in their business. The knowledge landed. The desire never did.
I see this constantly with Microsoft 365 Copilot. I can demonstrate how to summarise a long thread in Outlook, how to pull the action items out of a Teams meeting, how to draft a first version of a proposal in Word. People nod. They get it. But the ones who actually change are the ones who leave thinking, “I never want to scroll through forty unread emails by hand again.” That sentence isn’t instruction. It’s appetite. And appetite is what does the work after the session ends.
The job is to make the better way feel obvious
So now, when I’m putting together a workshop or a video or even a short email to a client, I’m not really asking what I should teach. I’m asking what I want them to start wanting once it’s over.
That changes how I build the thing. Instead of opening with a feature, I open with a moment they recognise — the Friday afternoon spent rebuilding a status report they’ve already written four times this month. Then I show Copilot pulling that report together from the documents already sitting in their SharePoint, in about a minute. I’m not listing what it can do. I’m letting them feel the gap between how they work now and how they could. Close that gap in front of someone and they don’t need convincing. They’ve already decided.
The same logic runs through everything I put out. A YouTube clip, a Loop page I share with a patron group, a single line in a newsletter — they all work better when they leave a person slightly dissatisfied with their current way of doing things, in the best possible sense.
What I’m watching now
The tooling has never been easier to demonstrate. Copilot will happily show off. The harder, more interesting question is whether the content around it makes anyone actually want a different working life.
That’s the part I keep returning to. Teaching the steps is the easy half. Teaching someone to want the outcome — that’s where the real change starts, and it’s the bit I’m still learning to do better.
CIAOPS 