Dave’s Whiteboard

Last year on the Whiteboard, I mentioned the Six Boxes^TM model for performance management. Six Boxes now has a blog, and principal Carl Binder’s Beware of MSU is well worth reading.

MSU in this case is not Michigan State — Binder was talking to customer service reps about the problems that arise when people lack knowledge or can’t find what they need.

In reply, one rep said, “Oh, you’re talking about going to MSU.” As in, Makin’ Stuff Up.

Mnemonics can help people organize and retain information. While I hardly ever do biological classification, “King Philip, come out, for God’s sake” certainly retrieves kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species from my longterm memory. Binder is in favor of tools to help people master constructs or basic facts.

But you don’t want to go to MSU, he says, if that means you try and fit a model onto the world without starting by looking at what’s in the world. In other words,

…We need to resist the tendency to create clever frameworks, concepts, and categories a priori (before we observe), but instead really look at behavior and its outputs, catalog them, see how they actually cluster together, and describe them accordingly. This is often sloppier and more difficult than armchair concept creation because the actual work outputs and behavior might not be immediately obvious, and one might have to observe and interview repeatedly, dig more deeply, and gather more information to determine what is actually the case.

You see the aftereffects often. How many people in the training/development world talk about “form, storm, norm, perform” as if they’re an add-on to Newton’s laws, as opposed to a rhyming version of a simple model? Will Thalheimer valiantly tackled another example that just won’t stay dead (that nonsense about how you remember only 10% of what you read but 80% of what you do).

As Joe Harless said (and Binder quotes), an ounce of analysis is worth a pound of objectives.

Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence looks at new research related to transfer – which is pretty much the entire reason for organizational training and learning.

In Building Expertise, Ruth Colvin Clark described near-transfer tasks as ones that “must be performed consistently each time they are done and by each worker who does them.”  I’ve worked with thousands of tasks like this — hotel or transportation reservation systems, tracking software for drug trials, procedures for evaluating health claims.  They may be enormous, like a financial system to support the work of tellers and officers at a bank branch, but individual elements are straightforward, like the steps for opening a certificate of deposit.  You don’t want a lot of innovation there.

Far-transfer tasks, Clark says, “require the worker to use extensive judgment… there are no set steps for all cases.”  She offers sales an an example — the successful salesperson treats each sales opportunity as a new event.  (When you go to a car dealership and the guy starts with a canned approach, you’re seeing someone using near transfer in a far-transfer setting.)

Sometimes judgments like Chatham’s seem obvious — well, of course training can improve your ability to perform.  I do think, however, that far more people claim to belong to the Church of Evidence-Based Practice than ever show up at services.

He cites a study dealing with tasks that activate a particular part of the brain (the left inferior frontal gyrus).  In theory, the left IFG helps “bias” activity when associations aren’t clear.

For example, you may need more of such “biasing” when trying to come up with a verb that’s related to “giraffe” than one that’s related to “lion” (lion has some obvious associates [roar! eat! hunt!] and is therefore less likely to require any help from [the left] IFG). This is an example of a verb generation task; like many other similar tasks, it engages the left IFG.

So, can training related to a specific kind of task improve performance in other areas, which is what far transfer is really about?   The study in question (PDF), by Persson and Reuter-Lorenz, deals with “interference resolution.”  How can the brain cope when a previously-learned task interferes with performance on a similar task?

From the study:

Eight days of training on high-interference versions of three different working memory tasks increased the efficiency with which proactive interference was resolved… participants training with noninterference versions of the tasks did not exhibit this effect….

An improved ability to resolve interference was also transferred to different working memory, semantic memory, and episodic memory tasks, a demonstration of far-transfer effects from process-specific training.

The researchers suggest that transfer may occur only when the same brain regions are activated in both the training and transfer tasks — which seems to argue that, however you do your training, the trainign tasks must demand the same kinds of brain activity as the desired performance.

No big secret here: if you want people to handle customer complaints or improve work flow or advise high school students, then the training requires increasing approximations of realistic situations.  The design element involves identifying high-value or high-importance cases — even though the universe of cases is vast — so as to strengthen a person’s ability to transfer what he’s learned to a new situation.

Complexity photo by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE.

Yesterday, I worked with a group of people at a nonprofit; the goal was to help them manage the content on the organization’s web site — a new task for most, a new interface for all of them.  Certain, um, distinctive characteristics of their system reminded me (again) of how often “training” serves as the Clearasil on the zits of some software application.

All of these folks are busy at work, and until now none of that busy-ness has meant wrestling with the finer points of Drupal.  They’re not much into multitasking, a topic Jane Hart touched on recently.  She points out that today’s new learners are multi-taskers, and links to a Learning Circuits article by Tom Brigham, How to Train Multitaskers.

I’m looking forward to Jane’s promised piece on the needs of those new learners.  I thought Tom’s ideas made sense, though none of them is unique to “e-Learning 2.0″ (possibly since distractions and competition for attention existed long before even Whatever 1.0).  And at their cores, each of Tom’s suggestions is aimed at having people choose not to multitask for a while.

I’m skeptical about multitasking.  Sure, I’ve seen people listening to music, skimming their BlackBerry, hopping onto a call, updating mankind via Twitter, all while drinking coffee and, I suppose, mashing up the new strategic plan for presentation via YouTube.

But there’s a big difference between doing several things and getting several things done.  Our brains aren’t really good at doing two things at once if they both involve focused attention. John Medina describes the process in chapter four of Brain Rules:

• Shift alert: when your brain detects a signal to shift attention (you decide to start the report, you hear the phone, you see a email arrive), blood rushes to the anterior prefrontal cortex.  “Brace yourself, brain!”
• Rule activation: the brain seeks to locate the neurons required for the new task –  those involved in writing, or in phone conversation, or in reading emails).  Having found them, the brain then gets them started (hence, activation).
• Disengagement: as you work on your report (task A), your brain picks up a signal from outside the task realm (e.g., the chime of an arriving email).  The executive function of the brain must disengage at least partially from task A.  You may still be physically holding the pen or touching the keyboard, but your brain has paused.
• Rule activation for task B: At a cost of a few tenths of a second, once again the brain locates and then activates a set of neurons appropriate to the new task.

That’s for every switch that requires attention. (Thank heavens for the autonomous nervous sytem.)

Clearly, some people do this better than others — younger people more so than older ones (in general); people working on familiar tasks rather than novel ones.  But any superior performance is likely to to greater working memory that’s capable of shuttling faster to handle new inputs one at a time.

I think this has implications for work literacy — a recognition that at least some of the time, trying to do things at once, or as they arrive, is counterproductive.  I absolutely believe that the individual is in charge of his own learning.  As with the individual’s own health, though, people don’t always make the best choices — something Rob Wilkins also muses about in Lots to Learn from the Past.

MultitaskMobile photo by Or Hiltch. It’s his car.
On the top of the dash: yogurt drink, hairbrush, electric shaver, Polo cologne, two bananas (in case of a guest?).
Lower down: CD playing, cell phone at the ready.

In comments to my post about seelou training, my friend Ann Yakimovicz talks about resistance she has toward “totally self-directed learning.”

It theoretically would be nice for each employee to choose his/her own learning path, but this adds to their self-service load. They have to have good online search skills to navigate the LMS, then evaluate the choices they find without manager guidance. As a result of HR outsourcing, managers are too busy filling out the latest quarterly goals report in the performance management system or filling out their own hiring or termination documents to hold conversations with their employees.

Ann sees more and more people relying on heyjoe training:

“Hey, Joe — do you know how to extract data and automatically create a graph in Excel?”

Sometimes, heyjoe training is just fine— though maybe it’s really heyjoe support.  You’ve got an immediate need; you look for an immediate solution.  When it works, great, but the drawbacks are equally obvious:

• What happens when Joe (or all the available Joes) don’t have the answer?
• What happens when you can’t frame your question well?
• What happens when Joe (a coworker, a contact, someone in HR or training) starts turning into a discount version of customer support — or of a security blanket?

I actually think it’s vital for people in the workplace to actively manage their own job-related learning.  But I don’t think that lets the organization off the hook.

The drawbacks I list (along with others you can think of) are systemic ones.  As an individual, your on-the-job learning is a personal concern.  The organization needs to concern itself not only with your learning but with everyone’s.  That means a systematic and systemic approach toward problems (or opportunities) for improving performance.

Seelou training and heyjoe support will tend over time to petrify and mythologize past practice.  The antidote is an effective way* to request, receive, provide, and give feedback on both training and performance support.

Coworker “support” photo by K W Reinsch.

Harold Jarche, who knows what he’s talking about, wrote the other day about keeping learning and performance in balance.  In passing, he linked to an insightful post by Jay Cross, “Whatever happened to performance support?” Like Jay, I remember Gloria Gery’s influential book on electronic performance support systems (EPSS).

In a way, they are another example of the almost inevitable bandwagon effect that new technology seems to take in the world of training.  Make no mistake; Gloria was trying to shake up the world of corporate training departments, scheduled courses — the whole panoply of schoolhouse-like behavior that characterized “learning” in the typical large organization at the time.

Jay points out  that tools like wikis, Google, shared bookmarks, and so on are the new EPSS.  We thought at one time we’d all be carrying around little gizmos like the crew on the Enterprise (and some people are, right down to the communicator and no doubt the phaser).

What happens when there’s too much top-down thinking?  What happens when you try to cover every eventuality?  What happens when you violate that Ted Williams principle (”If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.”)?

Something like this:

That’s an actual sign from an actual elevator.  (Click the photo to see the text in excruciating clarity.  I’ve also copied it into this post, after the continuation break.)   Over 300 words, 50 of them coming before “what to do.”

I can hear E. B. White weeping, while Joe Harless cackles at “instructions” that are much more of a job than an aid.

Malfunctioning sign photo by Matt Grommes.

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