CELab - Ep 190 - The Secret to Speed Isn’t More Content: Mikaron Fortier on Customer Education Through an OD Lens

Customer education programs in fast-growing companies rarely stall because the content is bad or the tooling is wrong. They stall because the organization around them changes faster than any curriculum can keep up: reorgs, new products, a shifting ICP, a new leader every few quarters. In this episode, Dave puts that hypothesis to Mikaron Fortier, an organization development practitioner who earned her stripes training customers at a Seattle legal-tech startup that grew from 12 to 150 people, spent two decades as a learning consultant and instructional designer, and just completed her Master’s in Organization Development at Pepperdine. Her answer reframes the job: the secret to speed isn’t shipping more content, it’s managing how the team works.

Mikaron hands customer educators the OD toolkit our field rarely gets: complexity and chaos theory applied to a company that won’t hold still, the foundational team dynamics (how decisions get made, who owns what, how often people actually talk) that quietly decide whether a cross-functional program moves, and her new research on what people learn, and lose, when they work across company boundaries. You’ll hear why “knowledge leaks” happen every time a field expert returns from a customer engagement with no time to reflect, why trust has to come before anyone shares their IP, and why so much partnership work stays invisible to the organization that depends on it. If you lead Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the vocabulary for diagnosing what you’ve been feeling; if you’re in Enablement, L&D, Product, or Marketing, it’s the case for breaking down the silos where five teams quietly build the same thing.

Highlights from this episode:

• Slow down to speed up. Why the fastest education teams build in time to reflect instead of shipping more courses.
• Knowledge leaks. What your organization loses every time an expert comes back from the field and nobody asks what they learned.
• Tugging on the known unknown. How an outside facilitator surfaces the conversation a team never knew it needed to have.
• Room for both. Mikaron’s case for making space for emergence and co-creation with customers alongside the hard-coded curriculum.
• The OD reading list. Where to start: Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute, Meg Wheatley on leadership and complexity, and David Teece on dynamic capabilities.

Connect with Mikaron on LinkedIn to talk organization development, fractional OD work, or her research on how learning happens when companies collaborate.