Cover Story

Cover story
Breakfast in Tescos on Sunday. My elder daughter asks 'what's your favourite colour?' 'Black' I reply. 'That's not a colour, it's a tone.' she says matter-of-factly. 'I disagree, black refers to the absorption of visible wavelengths of light so really black is no colour. Anyway, your point is a technical one - in practice if you walked into a shop and the assistant said 'are you looking for any particular colour' and you said 'black' I don't think they would say 'I'm sorry m'aam, black is not a colour' or 'actually black is a tone'. She munches a hash brown 'I still think black is a tone'. 'What's a tone, daddy?' asks my youngest. 'It's like a colour' I say.

It sometimes strikes me as amusing how far the day-to-day can drift from sense - and the extent to which we take for granted the sensibility of the day-to-day. I spend my day doing silly, non-sensical things; you spend your day doing silly, non-sensical things. Sometimes we just keep quiet, other times we build up a whole world of justification. An example: instructional design, or even experience design. This is something I have spent many years concerning myself with, to the extent that respectable institutions occasionally ask me to speak on the topic, despite the fact that by and large it is has little value and arises largely from historical accident. If you work in audio or vision let me ask you: do you have experience designers for your programmes? Should we all have small teams of people called 'experience architects' who reconstruct our output on the basis of what is known about human cognition. No. Why not? Historical accident.

I suppose the argument is crudely that for the purposes of entertainment you can do whatever the heck you like on the screen or airwaves so long as it entertains, whilst in the area of learning there is science to be applied. Instructional designers do your thing. Back in the 90's some research I carried out suggested that this was basically hogwash: people take what they want from content and instructional design is at best mostly harmless. I guess that in reality online learning design is quite a lot like programme-making in other areas: there are some basic rules that are pretty much common sense and then the rest is down to hard work, experience and creative flair. The experience designers that bring so much to our programmes do so because, first and foremost, they are good programme makers - not because of any specialist area of knowledge. Equally, I would trust a good programme maker to make better instructional content than many of the instructional designers that I have known in the past. At the core of the problem lies the traditional role of the teacher, someone who was once in charge of the classroom and who now commands via proxy - wielding the arcane art of instructional design.
And so I sometimes feel a bit of a charlatan: helping to perpetuate a field of study that I know full well to be little more than a cover story. A lot like marketing, really.

Probably the most useful thing I read recently I found in a book called 'Made to stick' by Chip and Dan Heath. Drawing on a military analogy they note that the army has more or less given up the detailed planning approach, having finally realised that 'No plan survives contact with the enemy.' Which, it seems, is very much the case in the BBC: you make plans, nothing goes to plan. Instead, they substitute the notion of 'Commander's Intent': a crisp plain statement setting out the desired goal. The key idea is that teams of competent people working together will figure out how to achieve a goal, taking into account the prevailing circumstances, and that this is a far better approach than doggedly trying to execute and revise a project plan. At the risk of spoiling the book, the answer to the question 'what sticks?' are messages that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories (SUCCESs). I can't tell if it's a book for programme-makers, marketeers or instructional designers.