Three Big Mistakes I Made

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.