Dave's Whiteboard

Last week, I found myself in a couple of discussions about the difference between training and learning.  I only took one philosophy course in college, and later on I hollowed out the textbook to hide a gag gift, so it’s clear I’m not that contemplative on this issue.

To oversimplify, many people in more traditional training jobs felt strongly that there is such a thing as “training” and that it has the potential for great value.  Other people, by and large on the you-manage-your-own-learning side, seemed to place little value on structured training as such.

Although I doubt most participants intended it, you could interpret the divergent views as “this is important work I’m doing that helps people become more productive” versus “get out of your rut.”

Maybe not a rut, but at least a well-worn path.  I’ve spent a lot of time in that corporate-training path: 7 years at Amtrak, 18 at GE, and much of my consultant career since.  Usually I’m far from the executive suite, so I have some sympathy for challenges that first-line and middle managers face together with their work groups.

Which is why, over and over, I recommend Robert F. Mager‘s What Every Manager Should Know about Training.  Not just to clients (though I’ve even sent the book as a gift when I thought it would be well received) but to the corporate trainers supporting them.

It’s not a scholarly book, nor a thick one; you could probably read the 140 pages in two hours. But in that space, Bob Mager works hard to get managers out of the training-as-dosage mythology.

• Rule 1: Training is appropriate only when two conditions are present:
  • There is something people don’t know how to do, and
  • They need to be able to do it.
• Rule 2: If they already know how, more training won’t help.
• Rule 3: Skill alone is not enough to guarantee performance.
• Rule 4: You can’t store training.
  • Use it or lose it.
• Rule 5: Trainers can guarantee skill, but they can’t guarantee on-the-job performance.
• Rule 6: Only managers, not trainers, can be held accountable for on-the-job performance.

Mager: “If training is only a means to an end, what is the end toward which it strives?  It’s performance.”  Someone familiar with concepts like ISPI’s human performance technology model (links to a PDF document) recognizes exactly what Mager’s doing: smuggling performance improvement into the organization.  He’s just hidden it in a plain brown wrapper that’s labeled TRAINING.

He was clever in choosing the title, because I’d argue the majority of people who supervise or manage in organizations use “training,” at least in casual conversation, to mean a whole complex of things related to getting people to produce valuable results on the job.  Instead of trying to convert them to performance-improvement or informal-learning jargon, Mager starts where these managers are likely to start.  Then he builds on their likely experience in other dimensions of work to help them see how training (as a structured approach toward helping people acquite skills they don’t have) is one part of overall performance.

In the chapter, Where the Magic Goes In, Mager addresses another concern managers have:

Instead of asking, “How long will it take to develop my course?” you might consider asking:

What can you do for me with the lead time I’ve got?…

For example, if [the training department has] only two days for training development, the most useful thing they can do is to verify whether training is a valid solution, and to verify which solutions will have the greatest impact on the problem.

If the trainers have time to do one more thing, a task analysis would be the most useful action.  These analyses can be turned into checklists in a matter of minutes, and the checklists can be given immediately to the instructors…and to the trainees, to show…what competent performers can do….

If there is time to do one more thing, trainers can derive the objectives of the instruction and then draft skill checks by which instructional success can be measured…

…Which, by the way, isn’t a bad way to think about any sort of guidance you’d like to provide other people.

I saw this comment on Twitter:

@urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie.

I couldn’t resist retweeting…nor adding my own comment:

@dave_ferguson: RT @urbie: Flashback.. taking a text-based CBT. Owie. // Me: yeah, like going to college at the ATM screen.

This led to a side conversation with Simon Bostock about the (mostly) bad old days.  I’ve written thousands of lines of text-based CBT: long ago, I was in charge of computer-based training for Amtrak’s reservation system, and I consulted with Marriott when they launched MARSHA, their hotel system.

It’s hard to convey the impact of the all-text, monochrome oppression of dumb terminals, back in the early 1980s.  Amtrak’s ARROW system couldn’t (or wouldn’t) display lowercase letters, so the entire screen (25 rows, 80 columns) would be in uppercase.

(My ATM remark reveals the bias own experience; actually, I haven’t seen an all-text, graphics-free ATM in quite some time.  But a mainframe screen is falling into the same category as a dial telephone or a ditto machine.)

Back then, CBT could be downright horrible. So is a good deal of contemporary digital learning; it’s just horrible in newer, flashier, noisier ways.

I recalled, during my conversation with Simon, that at the time I’d taken great pride in the training we created at Amtrak.  The reason for the pride?  We made good use of the tool.  It was what we had to work with, and a better tool  for the situation than any other realistic option.

Every technology has its advantages and its drawbacks.  If you work in a group setting, let alone an organizational one, sometimes you choose to live with the givens.  So, at Amtrak: we had over 2,000 people in over 125 locations who needed to learn to use a new reservation system, different from the one about half of them had seen before.  And we wanted the training to work for new employees–say, 400 or 500 per year–so we didn’t want to keep saying “in the old system…”

So what did we do?  This kind of thing:

• Started with a goal in mind. Specifically, we wanted to teach people how to make reservations and issue tickets using the new system.  Folderol about what kind of mainframe we had or what company made the previous system was, well, folderol.
• Strenuously avoided on-screen lectures. We worked hard to avoid over-explaining.  A frequent pattern: simple example, you-do-it problem, clear feedback for varied answers, then extension to more cases.
• “Individualized” by chunking. Most people would learn on the job, so we build courses to take less than 20 minutes.  Clear topics (“how to report train time”) made it easy for someone to decide whether to take a given course.
• Built a practice system. Probably the single most useful thing we did was to create (in collaboration with the Train Operations department) a set of “training trains.”  Any user of the Amtrak system could use a special ID to work with these in any way he wanted–make reservations, change reservations, even issue tickets (nonvalid ones–they wouldn’t print).  This allowed people to apply the general procedures from the formal CBT to the kinds of problems they encountered on the job.

Note that the training trains were not part of the CBT.  One person on my team worked with Train Ops and essentially cloned actual trains.  You had to use the training-train ID to get to them, and with that ID, you couldn’t work with actual reservations.  So it provided robust practice (you were using all the capabilities of the system) while protecting you from serious consequences for mistakes (you couldn’t cancel someone’s actual trip).

Our success was a result of combining the new tool with the best of what we knew about learning in the workplace.  All of this reminded me, as Charles Aznavour does in a different setting, that at times in the past, people weren’t wrong.

Public domain image of a dumb-terminal screen by SamuraiClinton, from WikiMedia Commons.

ASTD’s T&D for January includes E-Learning: What’s Old is New Again, by Allison Rossett and James Marshall.  They wondered what e-learning looks like in the real world and surveyed nearly a thousand practitioners.

In her book on training needs analysis, Rossett talks about actuals and optimals–finding out how things really are, and determining what they could be.  She and Marshall take a similar approach here.  They summarize responses about how things are, e-learning-wise.  And they speculate about how things could be.

I think the article’s worth reading in full, especially for people who don’t work in corporate or organizational settings (two-thirds of the respondents do).  I agree that for many people, the workplace is changing, as is the definition of work.  At the same time, most of my own clients have been and are large organizations with multiple locations, often with a significant effort to provide structured learning (a term I prefer to “formal”).

I was especially struck (not to say “depressed”) by the last response in the first of several charts in the article:

Our structured training uses realistic situations, encourages choice, supports learning from that choice — less than “some of the time?”

Sadly, I think that’s accurate, and a true indictment for the organizations in which this happens.  Formal training departments may be complicit, but so too are organizational leaders.  Often, in the aeries just below C-level executives, there’s a touching faith in magic beans–nice, clear solutions to nagging problems that don’t look like they’re the organization’s real business.

My driver’s ed instructor told my class:

You never have the right of way.
You can only yield the right of way.

Recalling this precept got me thinking about driver education / driver training, and that got me thinking about how people have very different readings for “training,” “education,” and “learning.”

Learning to drive is a good example of a complex skill (the kind van Merrienboër and Kirschner grappled with in Ten Steps to Complex Learning).  We tend to think we know what the outcome of the education or training will be: a good driver.

But what’s that?

On the formal side, it’s really about passing requirements.  If you’re an adult who moves to Maryland, for instance,  you have to:

• Pass a vision test
• Have had an out-of-state license within the past year (no suspensions)

And if your out-of-state license expired a year ago, you have to take “the knowledge and skills tests,” which I take to mean a road test and what was once known as a written test.

I’ve been driving for more than 40 years and have had licenses in four states, but I don’t recall taking more than one road test.  Not that I’m eager to do so, but you do get the impression that if you pass it once, still drive, and haven’t lost your license, you’re doing okay.

Some of what vM&K would call constituent skills for driving are recurrent ones–how to start the car, how to stop, how to steer, how to recognize signals and respond to them.  But there are many non-recurrent skills (things we do differently in each situation).  The other day I was exiting a strip-mall parking lot, wanting to turn right onto the highway.  An oncoming car on that highway had its right turn signal on.

Did that mean he’d be turning into the lot I was exiting?  How could I tell?  How could I help a novice driver figure that out?

My old instructor’s advice about right of way was a kind schema or mental model, like the two-second rule–one way to help new learners acquire cognitive strategies.

In writing about this, I’m seeing more clearly that there’s also an overlap of stakeholders: the general public (represented by the state) wants the roads to be safe; new drivers want to be able to drive; parents want their children to drive safely.

They might not even agree on the outcome.  Is it “status as skilled driver” or simply “holder of a driver’s license?” Is “skilled” the same as “safe?”

(I can answer that one: no.  Just take a drive through heavy traffic with someone who prides himself on what a skillful driver he is.)

Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Adminstration publishes a skills log and practice guide “to help the new drives gain valuable experience in operating a motor vehicle in a variety of conditions and highway environments.”  Maryland now requires 60 hours of supervised driving prior to taking the tests, with 10 of those hours at night.  The parent, guardian, or mentor of the new driver must sign a statement attesting to this, in addition to the 6 hours of behind-the-wheel instruction in the mandatory driver education course.

I like the guide (other than the mid-60s bureaucratic tone of the writing).  A “planning guide” (on the right; click for a larger version) summarizes skills; individual sections amplify them with descriptions, examples, and checklists.

Because of the state’s interest in having competent drivers, it makes sense for the state to have created this.  Is 60 hours the right amount?  Are these skills the right skills?  Will parents or guardians follow the guide, or simply certify that they had?

I can’t say–and, frankly, neither can you.  This is a complex skill; there’s no one right answer.  I think you can make a case that most of the skills in the guide are basic ones for a competent driver.  At the same time, no test is going to guarantee that a new driver, or even an experienced one, will never have an accident.  (I’d settle at times for “will not talk on the phone while driving.”)

I’m not a fan of “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  The basic idea works; sometimes good enough is just right.  So why the skepticism?  Like that tiresome definition of insanity (which some people repeat as if casting a spell), the perfect/good nostrum can substitute sloganeering for thought.

Sometimes the humdrum and the mediocre are the enemy of the good.

Which leads somehow to two seemingly unrelated conversations: my wife asking if you can save an Excel chart as a JPG, and a colleague and I exchanging tweets about tutorials and about “fun” in training.  “Seemingly” because the connection between the two is: accomplishment.

Excel chart as JIT graphic

My wife’s request had a clear focus: one of her coworkers, with basic Excel skills, wanted to use a chart as an image on a web page.  So I read into that “don’t get too complicated.”  I fiddled around with menus and right-clicks, but didn’t see anything obvious.

Googling “save excel chart as JPG” got lots of hits.  I learned there’s File / Save as Web Page.  That saves your spreadsheet as whatever.xls.  It also creates a folder, whatever_files, in which you’ll find the chart as image001.gif.  No, not a JPG, but good enough for the outcome.

“Fun” — the tutorial

In the Middle Ages, when I first learned PowerPoint, Microsoft had a clever tutorial–Christopher Columbus’s pitch for funding.  Whatever  umbrage you or Ed Tufte might take with PPT, I recall the tutorial clearly showing how to achieve certain effects: bullets, images, titles, and so forth. So I stuck with the tutorial, and quickly learned how to do things I wanted to do.

Which to me is a lot more important than “fun” stuck onto training like a clown nose onto a marble bust.

Or, say, an Indian war bonnet stuck onto the head of “the greatest man ever to come out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont” (as Clarence Darrow said of Calvin Coolidge).

There’s nothing (in theory) wrong with  clown noses, but context does matter.

More on “fun” in another post.  Let’s stick with what makes a good tutorial.

CTQ: a point of view

In Six Sigma parlance, critical-to-quality elements (CTQs) are things important to a process so you can produce what’s important to the customer.  If you want high customer satisfaction with your service contract, a one CTQ might be “scheduling that suits the customer.”  Meaning your time window should not be the size of a barn door.

One CTQ that I see for a tutorial is: can people get stuff done quickly?  Or is the tutorial so full of overview and first-of-all and before-you-begin that it feels like one of those half-day mandatory snoozefests for the corporate initiative fo the month?

My wife’s coworker already had some context: she knew Excel basics, and she knew about JPGs.  All that was necessary for her to do what she wanted boiled down to:

• Here’s how to turn an Excel chart into a GIF.
• Here’s how to find the GIF.
• You can use a GIF like you’d use a JPG.

When I first encountered PowerPoint, I didn’t have that context.  I hadn’t used presentation software before.  A rich tutorial made sense, and the design of the tutorial kept newcomer me engaged…

Until I hit the point where I felt I knew enough.  Then, I dropped out: I stopped the tutorial and got on with what I wanted to do: build a presentation.

Yes, this goes against a prescriptionist streak that you find in many trainers and instructional designers (including me).  We’re dying to tell you more, to share our hard-won–or at least much-valued–experience.  We mean well, but we can get a bit… smothery.

It’s important for both the designer and the learner to say, “That’s okay.”  I think drop-out-to-do may well be a key characteristic of successful demos or tutorials.  They show that someone feels she’s learned enough to try things on her own.

And trying things on your own is strength training for your neurons.  When things go well, it’s endorphin time.  When they don’t, you’ll put up with a certain amount of frustration and expend a certain amount of effort if you can still accomplish something that matters.

Thus the argument for well-built tutorials (or other detailed support): a reliable resource.  Unlike the typical software “knowledge base” that’s much more base than knowledge.

Photo of Calvin Coolidge from Wikimedia Commons.