So-Young Kang, Founder & CEO at Gnowbe has the ability to assess any situation quickly and determine a path forward. She is always focused and convicted to move her team forward in a way that aligns to the company’s mission and vision. She loves developing people and helping them improve by seeing the best in people even when they may not even see it themselves. One can say she is tough at times, caring at others but has the company’s and employees’ best interests at heart. Even when times are tough, she believes in investing in the team to overcome hurdles together.
Gnowbe was born out of a desire to scale the human experience. So-Young’s first company Awaken Group is a multidisciplinary transformation design firm that provides consulting, coaching, capability building and design services. They were trying to find ways to increase the impact of their work. “It’s challenging to scale and replicate the human experience, so content is not optimized and scalable in effective ways. The person ends up repeating themselves over and over again and hopes that the messages are clearly delivered, understood and most importantly, applied,” explains the pioneering leader. “But we know that is challenging to do even in person. I could not find a tech solution that could solve this problem so the team innovated and created Gnowbeto replicate and scale the human experience Redefining using tech.” Today, with a pandemic affecting mankind, the pain points are even more evident with the need to replicate face-to-face experiences – training, communications, events, coaching, meetings – and do them effectively. Gnowbe solves that challenge!
So-Young is very passionate about mentoring the next generation. She founded the Young Professionals’ Group, a non-profit organization, with the mission to help young people achieve their professional dreams through scholarship and mentorship. Similarly, she along with her team are empowering—One leader at a time—taking a very human approach to helping clients solve their biggest challenges. Gnowbe is also a thought leader by pioneering not just the world’s first mobile-first microlearning library but also empowers other leaders and trainers on how to develop the skills, mindsets and knowledge to be relevant for the future of digital learning through its Mobile Instructional Design Accreditation program.
The product itself is designed to change mindsets and behaviors at scale through daily bite-sized content using behavior nudges, gamification principles and the science of adult learning, which can result in transformative shifts. The clients use Gnowbe to shift mindsets and develop skills like sales skills through applied learning in Gnowbewhich gives them the data and insights to coach and give feedback to employees to improve skills on-the-job.
Digitizing Human Experience
Most e-learning platforms are designed to transfer knowledge via videos with some assessment of retention through quizzes. This design is focused on ‘knowing’ things. Gnowbe is designed to shift this to ‘learn-by-doing’ via a digital format by giving participants actions to apply on-the-job or in real life situations to practice and apply the knowledge taught. The simple principles used to curate and learn are Know-Think-ApplyShare. These principles are based on andragogical principles which is how adults learn. Andragogy is an approach to adult learning that recognizes adults are self-directed, internally motivated and problem-solving focused.
Gnowbe’s patent-pending mobile authoring empowers anyone to create their own content anytime, anywhere. This enables participants to ‘learn-by-teaching’ others which is the ultimate in effectiveness and sustainable impact.Gnowbe’s mobile-first, micro-learning platform allows anyone to author and access ready-made content anytime, anywhere via mobile, tablet or web. Gnowbe is designed based on the latest research and science on how adults learn: not by passive listening but through application and reflection. Gnowbe leverages social learning and gamification to encourage active engagement and inspire action. It is designed for the modern individual who needs relevant, new content when they want it, when they need it – right in their pockets. Gnowbe is a solution created at the right time and place as the world is awakened to the need for rapid, easy-to-use, and effective digital content solutions.
Towards the Future
The company’s product roadmap will continue to focus on making it super easy to gnowbefy content to enable more agile organizations to address one of the biggest bottlenecks in tech adoption – content creation. “We will also continue to build out GnowbeLearn, the world’s first and currently largest library of ready-made content designed for mobile-first social gamified learning,” says So-Young. “And finally, we will continue to equip and empower others as a thought leader for the future of digital learning through amplifying our Mobile Instructional Design Accreditation program which is setting the global standards for how to design powerful experiences on mobile devices.”
Gnowbe’s vision is to humanize our socially distanced, digital world. They believe that technology can be used to amplify the human experience. Gnowbe was designed to grow knowledge into being and address the biggest challenges facing every organization today. Gnowbe is redefining how one engages with digital content. That’s disruptive innovation!