Dave’s Whiteboard

Wendy Wickham, In the Middle of the Curve, has derailed my morning with her current dilemma.  In her post, “Teaching People to Fish,” she talks about her challenge: people within and outside her department wanting to “convert their 100+ slide, information-heavy PowerPoints into 100+ slide, information-heavy Captivate projects.”

So they can put the on the LMS.  So people can learn.

(When I say I got derailed, I mean I found Wendy’s dilemma so compelling that I pushed other stuff aside.  She didn’t throw the switch and isn’t responsible, except insofar as her problem resonated with me.)

She asks for thoughts from her readers.  Mine ricochet all over the place (maybe I need to edit?), so I’m scribbling here on my own whiteboard rather than cluttering up her comments.  No particular order, and no particular value to any of my thoughts:

Wendy says that “having hundreds of dull click-to-death tutorials sullying my LMS makes me more than a little crazy.”  Sadly, this is Gresham’s Law, applied to training: bad courseware drives out good.  Sooner or later, though, you’re not in control of the LMS.  It’s natural to take pride and feel ownership — my password in an early system I managed was “tsar.”  My hunch is that someone can tell you to put the stuff in, though, so accept what you can’t change and work on what you can.

Among the things she thinks need to happen:

• Making the subject-matter experts more independent, which probably includes…
• Teaching them how to use Captivate, as well as…
• Developing a support system beyond ‘call the help desk” or “here’s my card.”

Wendy has no illusions that she can move people from drown-them-with-detail to “fully-realized game with important decisions” instantaneously (or, if you ask me, this year).

What do I think would help?  Wouldn’t it be great if the subject-matter experts came to accept a few concepts like:

1. Talking isn’t training; listening isn’t learning.
2. The key question isn’t “what should they know?” but “what should they do?”
3. Give meaning before details.
4. “Bear with me” means “I’m talking too much.”

I see several ways to approach this.  For subject-matter experts who are genuinely interested in having people learn, a copy of Bob Mager’s What Every Manager Should Know about Training is worth at least two weeks of workshops from ASTD or ISPI.  Mager smuggled performance improvement into your consciousness in his trademarked readable style.  If you can’t read its 139 pages inside of three hours, your lips are moving.

In one-on-one settings, you might try asking the expert (regarding a deluge of 100 PowerPoint slides): “Is this how you learn?”  (The follow-up questions are, “Is this really how you learn?” and “Tell me what you’ve learned this way.”)

Still, that’s theory.  What about the practice?  The ideal to me is to demonstrate the sense and the effectiveness of a different approach.

I’m leery of the curse of recursion, so in a course on Captivate, my sample topic would not be “how to use Captivate.”  (See how confusing that gets?  I mean, in my how-to-use Captivate course, the examples would not be from a make-believe course in how to use Captivate.)  Whatever my topic — one technical enough for an expert to admit it was technical — I’d combine the near-transfer details of using Captivate with the far-transfer challenge of instructional design.

In fact, that may be a fruitful path.  The late Ron Zemke of Training magazine wrote a series of articles he called “bluffer’s guides.” While he pretended that what he wrote was not nearly enough about the topic (producing training videos, managing computer-based instruction), his real purpose was to communicate useful principles by example.

So, some things I might try in The Bluffer’s Guide to Effective Training:

• Offload excess detail and nice-to-know material.  I’d include hyperlinks under titles like “for more about Product X” or “Examples of Process Y.”
• Explain when to use job aids, and give examples of them.  The idea here is that you store the skill or knowledge in the job aid; the training gives practice in applying the job aid.  Less time to develop, faster results, less cognitive load.  (Works great, less filling.)
• Articulate and apply rules for effective presentations.  This one based on John Medina’s Brain Rules is on the lengthy side (132 slides) but not exactly death by PowerPoint.

Depending on the experts, you might even whip up a guide to help them clarify the outcomes they want their training to have.  An online guide, with decision support taking the form of options that someone clicks to explore alternatives or see examples.

Earlier this year, I had to make a presentation on a relatively dry topic.  I challenged myself to make extensive use of visuals, and to minimize the textual information.  Creating it probably took me three times longer than a more traditional presentation would have (I’m an analytical, text-ophilic guy.)

That’s another point to convey to the experts: working in a new way (whether you’re trying to master Captivate, or creating your first web menus using CSS) is tough. As Bill Deterline said, things take longer than they do.  The question as always is, what’s the outcome?

(If you’ve got other ideas, I’m sure Wendy will welcome them.)

Photo of a whale shark (among many other seagoing experts) at the Churaumi Aquarium by Dolmang / SJ Yang.

You don’t hear much about privatizing Social Security lately.  This morning’s Washington Post notes that retirement savings for Americans have lost $2 trillion in the past 15 months (roughly a 20% decline).

Yes, it’s likely the market will stagger back eventually, but if you’re looking at the desire or the need to live on your investments within the next 10 years, the route has just gotten a lot steeper.  More so, since the AARP reports that 20% of baby boomers stopped making any contribution to their retirement plans in the past year.

They needed the money.

A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF) says that the proportion of workers age 55 and older will grow by nearly 47% by 2016 (five times the rate for the work force as a whole).  In fact, by 2016 this group will make up 22.7% of the work force (versus 16.8% in 2006 and 11.9% in 1996).

The same report predicts that by 2016, nearly 30% of all people aged 65-74 will still be working, and 10.5% of those 75 and older.

I see a lot of opportunity and a lot of challenge in this (and not just because of my own age bracket).  On the one hand:

• More people can work productively thanks to organizations thinking beyond the 8:30 - 5:30, here’s you cubicle model.
• Technology shortens distance, reduces (some) drudgery, and provides a scaffold from which a seasoned person can more effectively wield his experience and harness his personalized networks.
• Many people  in the baby-boomer cohort don’t see their life past 65 as one of puttering, early-bird dinners, and naps.  They’re energized by being involved.

More unsettling, though: many people now 55 or older have long careers in endangered sectors like manufacturing, with work experience that may be hard to transfer elsewhere.  Given our pastiche of a health care system in the U.S., many feel unable to switch jobs, let alone industries, for fear of losing insurance coverage.

Even those in white-collar work are often basic users of technology: they send email, they go to web sites, they transact business online. But the further past your 50th birthday you are (not you, reading this — you’re an exception), the less likely you are to use RSS, let alone participate in career-related virtual networks.

Finally, although we’d like to ignore it, many of us will not have the physical ability to work past age 70.

Eight years from now, not everyone’s going to be self-employed.  Not everyone’s going to be a consultant.  Not everyone will be as original an entrepreneur as the person in North Carolina who erected the sign in the photo.

From here for the next ten years, and maybe longer, the percentage of the workforce over age 60 will be larger than at any time in our history — and will increase each year.

As for the post-boomers: at the end of that time period, you’ll be 10 years closer to 60 yourselves.

Janet Clarey asked recently how you measure effectiveness when moving from a content-presentation to a distributed-learning model.  There’s a lot going on there, both in her post and in the extended comments.

Janet believes that learning is embedded in social experience (true, though some of them are pretty indirect — I can and do learn from, for example, Head First HMTL, for which the main social component is that two other people wrote this book).  Thus, she says, social media are the better choice for supporting the learner.  “The role then for the [instructional designer] is to provide access to immersive environments…powered by the tools that foster social experience.”

The crux, though, is how to evaluate effectiveness.  And that has me going off on my own tangent, because the next project coming up for me will involve (as Janet says) a more-or-less bean-counting workplace.

Because, you know, unless you work for yourself, pretty much every place counts beans.  Joe Harless spoke once about adding value for the client.  “Value in terms of what?” Training Magazine asked.  “Value in terms of money,” said Joe.  “Otherwise, you’re babysitting, or doing psychotherapy.”

The lure of traditional assessments — and far too recently I saw multiple-choice questions for judging the ability of paralegals to interpret case law — is that they’re easy to understand and to track.  Hell’s bells, that’s the main reason for the success of learning management systems: they administer.

As you get into more and more complex behavior, it’s harder to define what’s effective, harder to retain the attention of stakeholders (as in, upper management), harder to avoid everyone’s favorite nit to pick:  “paralysis by analysis.”

I worked on a series of cold-call roleplays for people selling electronic data interchange services.  EDI is a big deal in the corporate world (e.g., Target requires all its suppliers to accept purchase orders and to send invoices electronically — no more fax, no more phone).  The salespeople has a wide erange of skills they needed to apply: getting past the gatekeeper, determining whether the “client” has (or was aware of) any problems, doing “client triage” to avoid nonproductive sales.  You couldn’t grade this kind of thing.

I worked with the group’s management to come up with scales and checklists.  Ad hoc?  You bet — but informed ad hoc.  As a developer, I someimes have an irresistible urge to help my clients more than they want help.  In a performance system, though, it’s the people who make up the system who matter, not the outsider like me.

If Leo, the cold-caller manager, chose to spend all his time in exaggerated roleplay (wildly hostile customer, preternaturally bored customer), the best I could do ask whether many prospects responded to cold calls in this way.  In other words, did he have evidence that these were high-value reactions to encounter and respond to?  Or was he just messing with his staff’s head?

Whatever the “new learning” is, it involves the same neurons we developed over a far longer period of time than the use of phrases like “web 2.0.”  And in organizations that have to earn their way, someone’s gong to look for evidence of effectiveness. If you can’t work with your partners/colleagues/clients to find that evidence, sooner or later, they’ll find someone who will.

For all involved, then, even if we use iMacs, it’s good to keep in mind the advice of the noted theorist James Thurber:  “It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”

Photo of navy beans by Eva the Weaver / Eva Ekeblad.
Coffee bean photo by robertstown2001 / Ken.
Jelly bean photo by Caro’s Lines / Caroline.
Being-counter photo by gullevek / Clemens Schwaighofer.

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.

A likely project has moved from off the stove onto the back burner, though not yet at a steady simmer.  It’s related to the National Flood Insurance Program, established 40 years ago “to protect communities from potential flood damage through floodplain management, and to provide people with flood insurance.”

At NFIP’s site, FloodSmart.gov, I found a little widget intended to help people grasp the potential cost of every small floods.  (You can click the image below to try it yourself.)

I tried eight or nine amounts of flooding, from 2 inches to 18.  It’s a pretty good effort, though some of the images are unclear — is the object used for 9 - 13 inches a bookshelf?  An entertainment center?

Still, far better than a spreadsheet or line graph or a dozen bullet-points about costs of flooding.