Will at Work Learning

Present Like Steve Jobs? Yes, BUT...

Here's a nice presentation about what makes Steve Jobs a great presenter.

Check it out, then read my comment below:

Here's my comment on this:

Okay, Steve Jobs is great at giving a product-sales presentation. No doubt about that. But let's not generalize this too far. In my field, the learning-and-performance field, many of the recommendations made here are spot on (for example, keep slides simple and relatively undecorated), BUT some are not relevant (for example, "and one more thing") and some important things are not mentioned (for example, provide people with practice opportunities, etc.).

Jobs also has a big advantage that most of the rest of us don't have. He's a celebrity. For some reason, deep in human evolution, this gives him our loving attention.

Presentation characteristics depend on the audience, purpose, etc. If you acted like Steve Jobs at a scientific convention, you would not be trusted. If you acted like Steve Jobs in training people, you would not create long-term remembering of key learning points.

Again, I'm not criticizing Job's presentation skills. He's perfect for his audience and purpose. I've even used him as an example for some of my training-and-development clients. It's just that we have to be a little discerning in deciding what we can use of Jobs' repertoire for our particular purposes.

Recycling Your Computer?

If you're about to dump your old computer, consider recycling it.

Here's the link.

Remember, there are a lot of nasty materials in our computers.

Can we utilize the "Elevation" Emotion in Learning?

Read this intriguing article in Slate.

It talks about how some people can elicit an emotional response in others that enables optimism and moral inspiration.

Quoted from the article:

University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration."

I don't think most training situations would benefit from such elevation, but some might. There's little likelihood that someone learning how to use a spreadsheet could be elevated, for example.

On the other hand, I can see particular opportunities for socially-responsible organizations or initiatives, especially those that are led by elevation-enabling leaders. Perhaps some soft-skill training may benefit, for example, where a management-training facilitator tells stories of others' efforts to help develop the people they work with.

There can be downsides to elevation as well, not least of which is that those who don't feel the elevation think that those who do feel it are either ridiculous or brainwashed. And, elevation by itself doesn't generate changes in behavior.

Haidt's research shows that elevation is good at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at motivating real action.

Still, I think it's worth thinking about how to connect with our learners at a deeper level. It doesn't have to be super-deep, just a little bit deeper may help.

Let's remember that we as learning professionals have a responsibility not just to inform, prepare, and provide practice. We can also increase the likelihood that our learners will actually utilize what we teach by enabling their "motivation to apply" what they've learned. Sure, we can utilize our learners' management to promote application, but we can play a role in enabling the learners to want to apply what they've learned. Elevation may be another tool we can use in our work.

Changing Our Learning-Design Mindsets

I started Work-Learning Research 10 years ago in August. Since that time, I've been translating learning research into practical recommendations for learning professionals. Unfortunately, it's not easy. It takes a major change initiative in most instructional-development shops. It takes time. It takes leadership. It often takes a helping hand. Why? Because we have to completely change our mindsets. For example, I've recently been using a model I'm calling Situation-Based Learning Design. It is research-based but because it is translated and crafted into a conceptually useful framework, my clients and audiences have found it eye-opening. More importantly, they have been able to see its applicability. BUT, even though the ideas in the model are easy, it is extremely difficult to move a whole work team to the new method. It takes time, perseverance, and guidance. We all fall back on our topic-based learning-design mental models. To develop new mental models aligned with the research is a worthwhile slog, but it is a slog nonetheless.

Recently I've been designing workshops around the Situation-Based Learning Design notion. My clients see me present the concept at a conference and want a workshop in their own company. Nothing I have done in my ten years as President of Work-Learning Research has been so satisfying. I've learned a few things over the years, correcting mistakes in my delivery. SMILE. One reason that the Situation-Based Learning Design is having such an impact now is that it's a simple research-based model that immediately makes sense to people. The other reason for impact is that we're able to build workshops that enable people to begin changing the way they do learning design. Finally, more and more learning professionals understand that for training (even their own training) to be effective, it has to be designed more like a change initiative than a course. 

A Better Learning to Performance Model and Job Aid

For almost a decade I've been building a model of how learning works to prompt performance. Each iteration gets better (in my unbiased opinion). Here's the latest one--this one has the advantage of pointing out the responsibilities learning professionals have AND the responsibilities that learners' managers and the workplace have in creating on-the-job results.

You can use this model for two purposes:

1. As a visual metaphor for how learning works to drive on-the-job performance and results.
2. As a job aid to assign responsibilities and tasks.

This graphic draws on many sources, many I'm probably unaware of. It draws from the wisdom of authors such as Wick, Pollock, Jefferson, and Flanagan of Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning fame, and Tim Mooney and Rob Brinkerhoff from the new book Courageous Training (which is great by the way, I'll review it within the next month).

It also draws from countless researchers on learning, memory, instruction, and cognition who have helped me understand learning at a deep level, enabling me to add to models that don't fully include wisdom on how learning and cognition really work to drive remembering.

Also, I'd like to thank my many clients who have enabled me a great real-world workshop in which to think deeply about how learning works in a practical reality. I'd particularly like to thank my friends at Walgreens, and especially Anne Laures who commented on an earlier version of this model.

Download Learning-Performance_Diagram_v2.pdf.

As always, this is a work in progress, so let me know what you like and what I might be missing. Note, of course, that human learning and performance is too complicated to include every factor of relevance. My goal is to create a model simple enough to be easily understood and precise enough to be useful and provide practical learning-to-performance improvement.

Oh, if you have to give it a name, you might call it the Learning-to-Performance Landscape Model, but I'll probably come up with a better name.

What Work-Learning Audit Reveals

I recently completed one of the most comprehensive work-learning audits I've ever been asked to do for a major U. S. retailer. The goal of the audit was to find out how their learning programs AND work-learning environment were supporting the stores in being successful. The audit involved (1) structured and unstructured interviewing with all levels of the organization, especially with store personnel, (2) focus groups held across the country with specific groups of store personnel (e.g., clerk, store managers, assistant managers, etc.), (3) task force meetings with senior line managers and representatives throughout the company, (4) learning audits of e-learning courses, (5) learning audits of a mission-critical classroom course, (6) review of company artifacts (CEO messages, publications, databases, intranet, etc.), (7) interviews with learning-and-performance professionals, (8) discussions of business strategy, (9) discussions regarding corporate information and data-gathering capabilities, (10) job shadowing, (11) store observations, etc.

Who/What Do Workers Learn From?

One of the most intriguing results came out of a relatively simple exercise I did with focus-group participants. The following is a rough approximation of those results.

What I did was ask focus-group participants who they learned from. I would hold up a large 6 x 8 index card with a position label on it, for example, "District Manager," "Clerks," or "Corporate." The group would shout out where they thought that card should go on a large diagram I had created on the wall. I would place it on the wall in a particular category based on the verbal responses and then we would negotiate as a group to determine it's final positioning. So for example, participants could say that they learned the following amounts from that person/position, and we often compromised using in-between placement:

• Learned Most
• Learned a Lot
• Learned Some
• Learned a Little
• Learned Least
• Had Little/No Contact with

See the diagram below for a rough example. This one is actually a composite based on several focus groups and more than one position. It gives a fair representation for how frontline retail clerks responded. Note that the orange boxes represent fellow employees, while the blue boxes represent other groups of people or things that they learned from.

There are several key insights from these results:

• People learn the most from those who they work closely with.
• People learn the most from their experience doing the job.
• People learn the most from their self-initiated efforts at learning.
• The more contact, the more learning (for the most part), however there are benefits from learning from experts (e.g., store managers, head clerks), though the worker has to have at least some signicant contact with them to create this benefit. You'll notice that district staff have only a little impact and regional and corporate staff have none.
• E-learning is seen as somewhat facilitative but not a place where workers learn the most. This result may be organization specific as different e-learning designs and implementations might easily move this result higher or lower.

Frontline clerks didn't get much from company magazines and the like, but managers (not represented in the results above) did find value in these. Store managers also reported that networking with other store managers was on of the "Learn Most" entries for them. For this company, this network was even more important than learning from their district managers (their direct bosses). This makes sense because their network is more accessible throughout the heat of the daily grind.

These results were eye-opening for my client, and they are still wrangling with the implications. For example, district managers and district training staff seemed to produce very little learning benefits. So, should their roles for learning be de-emphasized or re-emphasized?

These types of result have to be understood in the larger data-gathering effort of course. Analyzed alone, they suffer from the problem of de-contextualized self-report data. Combined with multiple other data sources, they paint a really robust picture of an organization's learning environment.

Informal Learning, Social Networks, etc.

Vendors are out and about in our field now selling the benefits of complicated and expensive analysis tools for looking at how people learn through so-called informal on-the-job mechanisms. The example above shows that if you don't have the big bucks, there are simpler ways to get good data as well. 

Elliott Masie's LMS Wish List

Elliott Masie came up with a great and very insightful wish list for LMS's. Click here to access it. He even added a few suggestions in the past few days, probably based on feedback from his loyal audience.

I really like the richness that Elliott's suggestions might create for a typical LMS. Most LMS implementations are just a list of course offerings.

On the other hand, I worry about overly complicating options for users. Most workers just don't have extra time to waste. Maybe the suggestion to let users rate the courses comes into play here.

I also worry about user-generated content. It can be great, could be better than what the training folks can create, could engender more engagement, could be bottom line more effective. But we should all recognize that it is a double-edge sword. User generated content could be incorrect, could be a huge waste of time, could cause the organization to leave itself vulnerable to legal liability.

Doesn't Fix the Biggest Problem with the LMS Mentality

The biggest problem with LMS's can't be fixed with Elliott's suggestions. The biggest problem is that the whole LMS face sends a powerful hidden message that "learning" is about taking courses or accessing other learning events. This "Learning Means Sitting" LMS mentality infiltrates whole organizations.

I've seen this recently with one of my clients, a huge retailer, where their LMS has encouraged store managers and other store leaders to focus learning time on taking courses, in lieu of coaching, learning from each other, trying things out and getting feedback, encouraging store employees to take responsibility for particular areas, etc. It's not that they completely ignore these other learning opportunities; it's that the LMS focuses everyones' time and attention on courses, creating a lot of wasted effort.

To get the most from an LMS, you ought to throw away your LMS and start over. People can learn something—develop competencies/skills—from courses or from other means. A competency-management system that offers multiple means to develop oneself is ideal, where courses/events are just one option. I still haven't seen a commercial system that does this though...Most are course first designs.

Maybe I'm too over-the-top recommending that we get rid of all LMS's. I make the statement to highlight the humongous problems that the LMS mentality is causing.

Evidence-Based Learning

The concept of evidence-based practice is bubbling up all over. I started Work-Learning Research in 1998 to bridge the gap between research and practice. Ruth Clark has been talking about evidence-based recommendations for years. The medical profession has transformed itself to focus on evidence-based medicine. The No-Child-Left-Behind initiative was based on the concept of evidence-based education. Though No Child Left Behind has been poorly implemented, the core concept is sound. Kevin Kruse, CEO of the custom e-learning company Axiom Health, has trademarked the term, "Evidence-Based Training." Management gurus, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton have recently written a best selling book (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management). ISPI (the International Society for Performance Improvement) has been promoting evidence-based practices in their CPT certification program since the 1990's.

Evidence-Based Practice is on an upward trajectory, but what does it mean for those of us in the learning-and-performance field? I'm not going to go into depth now, but I want to highlight a few critical points.

1. Evidence-Based Learning (EBL) DOES NOT simply mean that we follow research-based prescriptions.
2. Evidence-Based Learning (EBL) requires us also to measure our own performance. In other words, we ought to be routinely gathering good EVIDENCE about how well our learning interventions are working. Only by having feedback loops can we learn from our performance.
3. Evidence-Based Learning (EBL) requires us also to build continuous cycles of improvement into our practices. After gathering and analyzing the evidence, we need to act on it. Then we need to evaluate and analyze and act again.

I spend an inordinate amount of time every year culling practical learning wisdom from the world's preeminent refereed journals on learning, memory, and instruction. It appears that I am one of the most passionate advocates for learning research living today. Yet still, I believe that following research-based recommendations can provide us with less than half, probably less than one-third, of the power of a full practice of evidence-based learning.

In fact, I've come to believe that, as a field, we have only reached a small measure of our potential because we don't utilize evidence-based practices. We don't have adequate feedback loops. We act too often on superstition, on the ideas inherent in commercial messaging, and on our learner's lowest-common denominator comfort zones.

The bottom line recommendation is this: Only with true evidence-based practices, not warmed over attempts to follow a few research-based prescriptions, can you build a maximally effective learning program.

Sorry I can't provide more specifics in this short blog format. If you want to know more, feel free to get in touch with me.

The Magic Question for Learning and Instructional Design

The most important question that instructional designers can ask is:

“What do learners need to be able to do, and in what situations do they need to do those things?”

While we might discount such a simple question as insignificant, the question brilliantly forces us to focus on our ultimate goals and helps us to align our learning interventions with the human learning system.

Too many of us design with a focus on topics, content, knowledge. This tendency pushes us, almost unconsciously, to create learning that is too boring, filled with too much information, and bereft of practice in realistic situations.

The Magic Question requires us to be relevant. For workplace learning, it focuses our thinking toward learners' future job situations. For education learning, it focuses our thinking toward real-world relevance of our academic topics.

The Magic Question in Practice

In practice, the Magic Question forces us to begin our instructional-design efforts by not only creating a list of instructional objectives, but also by creating a list of performance situations. For example, if we're creating leadership training, we not only need to compile objectives like, "For most decisions, it can be helpful to bring your direct reports into decision-making, so as to increase the likelihood that they will bring energy and passion in implementing decisions." We also need to compile a list of situations were this objective is relevant, for example in weekly staff meetings, project meetings, in one-on-one face-to-face conversations, in phone conversations, etc. Also, for general decision making, but not in situations where time is urgent, where safety is an issue, where legal ramifications are evident, etc.

By framing our instructional-design projects in this way, we get to think about our learning designs in ways that are much more action-oriented, relevant, and practical. The framing makes it more likely that we will align our learning and performance contexts, making it more likely that our learners, in their future situations, will spontaneously remember what we've taught them. The framing makes it more likely that we will focus on practice instead of overloading our learners with information. The framing also makes it more likely that we will utilize relevant scenarios that more fully engage our learners. Finally, using the Magic Question forces our SME's (subject-matter experts) to reformulate their expertise into potent practical packages of relevant material. It's not always easy to bend SME's to this discipline, but after the pain, they'll thank you profusely as together you push their content to a much higher level.

Obviously, there is more to be said about how the Magic Question can be integrated into learning-design efforts. On the other hand, as my clients have reported, the Magic Question has within it a simple power to (1) change the way we think about instructional design, and (2) transform the learning interventions we build.

Training and Carbon Offsets

The Carbon Offset idea works like this. We all pollute, but when we do so we can help limit the damaging effects by either (1) offsetting our damage by doing good in other ways (for example if we have to drive a large car we can replace all our light bulbs with energy-saving flourescents), or (2) we can donate money to projects that help support renewable energy, energy efficiency, and reforestation. For example, check out the not-for-profit organizations CarbonFund.org and The Clean Air Conservancy.

Here's some ideas for those of us in the training and development field:

1. Encourage the use of e-learning, which limits the carbon footprint of travel. And, make sure you build e-learning that is effective and engaging, so more folks will want to use e-learning.
2. When calculating the "cost" of training, calculate carbon footprint costs as well. See for example, The Carbon Fund's calculators or The Clean Air Conservancy's calculators. Make these costs evident.
3. Encourage your company to buy carbon offsets when utilizing training. It's not just a good thing to do, but it may help your company attract business and recruit highly-educated employees.
4. In your e-learning courses, provide an option for learners to calculate how many tons of carbon dioxide they would have utilized had they had to travel from their location to headquarters.

What other ideas can you think of?