I was interviewed
recently about the work we've been doing at BP and at the end the
researcher asked what question I'd like to ask of other organizations. I
said 'what mistakes have you made?'. It occurred to me that I should probably share a few of mine:
1) Building a course
when I should have built a resource: around 20 years ago I was working for a
global telecoms company who sell the kinds of phones that you have on your
desk, if you still have one (either a desk or a desk phone). They were
massively functional and blindingly complex to use. So we were tasked with
building e-learning for customers wanting to get value from their phone systems
(Basically we were patching poor UX).
In response, we built
something that would look futuristic even by today's standards: a
simulation of the phone in which artificial characters would call you and ask
you to perform a range of tasks which gradually increased in complexity. The
characters had an element of AI, their expressions and tone changed in response
to their degree of satisfaction, the storyline was branching and randomized -
the whole experience built into a complex gamified environment.
I was an idiot. The
point when someone learns how to set up a conference call is the point where
they are on the phone to someone important who says 'can you add Bob to this
call?' - and at that point they do not need a 40 minute gamified simulation.
They need a one-page guide beside the phone that says 'press these buttons to
set up a conference call'. We built a course. We should have built a resource.
2) Expecting people to
share: around 8 years ago some of us built a video sharing & blogging
platform called 'MOO' for the BBC which inspired some other platforms you may
have heard of and was based on 'visionary thinking' - namely that in the new,
non-hierarchical world we could create a Creative Commons which allowed talent
and capability to reveal itself wherever it existed in the organisation. People
would share their ideas, their talents and we would bypass the tired
hierarchies and democratize creative contribution.
Mostly the people who
posted were members of the team who built the platform. We hadn't really
understood that contribution is a by-product of consumption. That people will
come to a site to take, not to share - that a small percentage might share if
something which involves them personally is going on there. This mistake helped
me to understand the vital role played by audience analysis and content generation strategy.
3) Taking learning
theory at face value: as a young psychology lecturer I used to teach learning
theory. I was so excited to have the opportunity to apply it in practice - to
make a difference. Except it didn't. And for years I didn't notice because
we're not in the habit of putting our work to the test in the learning
industry.
The sheer hubris of
building courses based on 'Learning Styles' and 'Modes of Representation' and
'Scaffolding' made me want to prove - conclusively - that ours were superior
courses. So we tested recall for learners in 5 different conditions, ranging
from formats derived from learning theory to plain text. It made no difference. In
fact the participants in the plain text condition fared slightly better.
Imagine that: learning that all that stuff you're building today could be
replaced with a text document.
I learned that
learning is not driven by what you do with the content, but by what is in
learner's heads: that people who want to learn can do so from pretty much any
format (we should have learned this from Google, really). That instructional
design is almost entirely ineffectual.
Today, a lot of what
we build really is text documents: stuff like 'Top 10 mistakes to avoid in your
new role', 'Five things you really should do in your first month', 'Tips for
success'. Turns out, if you know what people want to learn, simple formats work
best.
I hear a lot of guff
about mistakes and learning, and how it's important to fail fast etc, etc. The
problem is we're failing all the time - only we don't notice it. We live in a
massively sub-optimal world, we just don't realize that we do. I worry not that I might fail, but that I might fail to notice.
Nooooooooooo Massimo!!!!
ReplyDeleteYes. How could I forget those hours spent in a dingy, windowless room in Rome, doing the Italian translations, Monkee ;o)
DeleteIn those days testing could last 2 years and not 2 weeks.
DeleteGreat post, Nick. An excellent reflective stimulus! In the same spirit...
ReplyDeleteI learned many years ago how much peer review matters. When teaching 13-year-olds French in another lifetime, I quickly found out they had no interest in whether what they said was correct or properly pronounced until I asked their peers to rate them. Only then did it matter that they got it right. It was in their self-interest, they cared what their peers thought, and rather less what the teacher thought or said.
Later on I learned that you can't assume people will post content onto a message board just because you make it available to enable them to share their learning experiences. What if in posting something they 'expose their ignorance'? Their peers might think less of them, their self-esteem could be affected and the risk of damaging their reputation would far outweigh any benefit from sharing a point of view or sharing the learning task. I learned there has to be a better reason to contribute, one that is stronger than the barriers they perceive and benefits others more than any perceived negative personal outcomes.
Thank you Joan. You highlight very nicely the way in which personal concerns - not didactic ones - are often better predictors of outcomes. For me progress has come largely as a consequence of developing a systematic method for analysing and addressing these concerns.
DeleteHi Nick,
ReplyDeleteLove your point that "people who want to learn can do so from pretty much any format". One of the things I say in my workshops is that we don't really have a content problem. But what we do have is a problem of motivation.
We need to think less about instructional design, and more about marketing. After all we're in the same business - that of changing behaviours.
Yes. My view is that there are pretty much two contexts which we encounter: when people want to learn (so our job is to provide good resources), and when we want them to learn (when we need to provide experiences such as simulation, situation, storytelling). Often the problems seem to stem from not spotting which situation we are in.
DeleteGood point Mark, still I learned on recent convo that many L&D people are hostile to learning Marketing (same for coding). There is a barrier here that learners are crossing with ease so learners eventually maybe more aware than the instructor.
DeleteThe only difference between ID and marketing is the origin of the intent. For marketing it's clearly from seller side, for learning it's left to the learner. If you want to change behavior without or against people motivation you are doing marketing. Many orgs use marketing without selling (government, charity, free services (FB, Google)) so selling is no more distinctive of marketing.
If we accept my suggestion (and I accept that maybe you don't) that there are only two kinds of things we do: we create experiences and we support/guide performance then it is not clear if either of these is akin to marketing. This might help explain why Apple spent relatively little on marketing - the result of applying design-thinking to a product is that the product markets itself. Equally the usage of our solutions is so high not (primarily) because we have marketed them, but because they are genuinely useful. One might almost say that marketing is indicative of poor product design. It has certainly been our experience that a good solution can suffer fro lack of awareness, but I am not sure this is quite the same as marketing.
DeleteBrilliant Resonates for me
ReplyDeleteHi Nick, what's the best way to reach you?Thanks
ReplyDelete