Experience Design: Dump the Content

When you last moved house, what were the topics?

And what were the challenges?

The first question doesn’t really make sense, but the second one does. In my last post I tried to explain how resources differ from ‘micro-learning’. In this post I would like to explain how ‘experience design’ differs from traditional programme design, having recently worked on a leadership programme where this distinction became really important. My view is that as an educator there are really only two kinds of thing that you can usefully do: you can build resources (to support performance), or you can design experiences (to encourage learning).

So what’s so different about experience design?

Conventional training is content-centric: you start with something like ‘learning objectives’, typically expressed in terms of what someone should know or understand, then use a variety of formats (such as classroom training or elearning) to try to get people to store that information. The dark art of translating content into learning material is called ‘instructional design’. Without going into detail, there are two problems with the approach: it’s largely ineffective at transferring information, and even where people can pass a test this rarely effects a change in behavior.

In experience design there are no topics. There are only challenges – since it is largely challenges which drive our learning. It is context-centric. In the case of leadership training for example, you do not start with the question ‘What do we want leaders to know?’ but instead ‘what do we want them to be able to do?’.

Once you know what you want someone to be able to do, how do you tackle the design? Not by gathering content. Imagine you want someone to be able to fly a plane: you break the overall ambition down into discrete challenges – take off & landing for example – and then you design a series of experiences which simulate these challenges.

In the case of leadership we might map out a number of challenges - for example handling conflict, performance conversations, creative thinking, decision-making – then build a series of experiences which simulate these situations, followed by feedback, reflection or practice.

The entire programme is experiential. There is not ‘content’ – there are no ‘topics’. I have found this very difficult to convey. People seem addicted to the idea that education should be about forcing people to remember stuff. (Although some of you will have noticed that we already do quite a bit of experience design covertly within programmes - such as role-play - and that this is the bit that tends to stick with delegates.)

Does it work? Intuitively it makes sense that the best way to train for something is to practice the same thing. In reality if you return to an environment where the new behaviour is extinguished, you can only achieve so much. But there is an increasing body of evidence regarding the ways that behaviour can be shaped (such as Charles Duhigg’s excellent ‘The Power of Habit') and it is certainly a far better approach than ‘content dumping’.

In summary, if you find yourself involved in a programme design and you are looking at a list of ‘content’ (or ‘topics’) then something has already gone badly wrong. Look for the challenges. As a rule of thumb: no challenge, no learning.