Dave's Whiteboard

About a year and a half ago, I decided to try losing weight by following the Weight Watchers program that my wife had enrolled in. After a few months, I began to view weight management as a kind of performance improvement project (see this post and this one).

(Here on my Whiteboard, I focus mainly on topics like workplace learning and performance improvement, areas I’ve worked in for decades.  No one in his right mind would pay me for advice on cardiovascular health, weight-change dynamics, or the physiology of nutrition and exercise.  I’m extrapolating from my experience to make a point about accomplishments at work, not telling people they should eat less or exercise more.)

I’m no longer such big deal

Although I didn’t say so at the time, my ultimate goal was to lose 60 pounds, 50 of them in the first year. Some 20 months after I started, I’ve lost 43. 

You could say “that’s great!”  Or you could argue I’ve fallen short of my goal.  I’ve felt especially frustrated by months-long stretches where I didn’t seem to lose any weight at all.  This in spite of what I think of as the bank-account approach to weight: there are 3,500 calories in a pound, so reducing your daily intake by 500 calories should have you losing a pound a week, give or take.

The New York Times recently ran Why Even Resolute Dieters often Fail, in which Jane E. Brody reported on a study by Dr. Kevin D. Hall and his associates. The study, which appeared in the August 27 issue of The Lancet, makes a number of striking points.  (By the way, that link to The Lancet leads to a summary of the study.  For the complete study, use the free registration option at the bottom of the summary.)

Among those points:

• That 3,500-calorie model leads to “drastically overestimated expectations for weight loss.” Overestimated, as in predicting “about 100% greater weight loss” than the model that Hall and his colleagues set forth.
• Weight loss requires much more time than many people expect (and more time than many diet-plan promotions imply). 

Although my 60-pound goal is reasonable for me, Hall’s study suggests I’ll see only ”half of the [desired] weight change being achieved in about 1 year, and 95%…in about 3 years.”

I’ve read Brody’s article several times, and gone over the Hall study in detail; they helped me understand my own situation.  More to the point here, they offer me an opportunity to compare weight management with improving performance at work.

Training is like dieting: not a bad way to start

When I say “training,” I’m usually thinking of a deliberate effort to close an existing, important gap between current skills and those required for a newcomer to achieve acceptable results in the workplace.  I’ve worked on lots of projects where such training made sense for people like reservation agents, field salespeople, and health-claims adjustors. 

What I think these projects have in common is that it was possible to help people gain new skills so they could produe acceptable performance in a relatively short time.  They aren’t going to be master performers right away, but they’ll be good enough for now.  And they’ll be more likely to improve in the future, because they’ll no longer be complete novices.

What such workers tend to have in common is that they have lots in common: they do similar work,  they have similar job-relevant experience, they have similar skills, and they lack similar skills.  Often they’re in a few physical locations (like, say, central offices or reservation centers), or the organization can assemble them for training (classrooms, workshops) or assemble training for them (online learning).

As for the skills they need to acquire, those are predominantly procedural: how to check availability, how to manage customer accounts, how to conduct intake interviews.

How is this like dieting?  If you’re overweight (e.g., have a BMI over 25) or obese (over 30) and you’d rather not be, there are lots of approaches you can take at the outset.  Noting your caloric intake and decreasing it, so that you’re not taking in as many as you expend, is one approach that may be good enough for starters.  If you don’t have other serious health issues, and if a principal cause of your current weight is a caloric imbalance, then a deliberate reduction in overall calories–a diet–will likely produce results.

Don’t just take my word for it.  “All reduced energy diets have a smiliar effect on body-fat loss in the short run,” Hall’s study says.  “The assumption that a ‘calorie is a calorie’ is a reasonable first estimation…over short-time periods.”

Even in that short term, you have choices that are more effective and choices that are less so.   For example, the real-world Mayo Clinic Diet (as opposed to the “miraculous,” grapefruit-laden one) for example, will likely produce better results than the kind of “diet” that has you eating nothing but rutabaga and rockfish. 

To me, that’s analagous to the difference between “any training is better than no training” and training based on task analysis, needs analysis, and effective ways to help people learn.

From apprentice to journeyman (Deterline was right)

Thus far it seems that Brody, Hall, and I are in agreement, which is pretty classy company for me.  It doesn’t seem to matter much how you start on weight management.  Many different paths will produce results that are good enough in the short term. 

In the workplace, though, short-term thinking rarely pays off long term.  Likewise with job-related skill: good enough for a novice, after a while, isn’t good enough.  If you think of the newcomer to a job as an apprentice, you want him or her to eventually move to the journeyman level: more skilled, able to deal with a wider range of problems, and competent in skills that are not simply procedural.

That’s not easy.  As Bill Deterline once observed, “Things take longer than they do.”  Part of the path from apprentice to journeyman is learning to recognize and deal with complexity.  In the weight-management world, here’s some of the complexity revealed by Hall’s study:

• When an overweight person begins consuming fewer calories than he expends, he loses weight–but the rate of loss slows as the ratio of fat to lean in his body changes.  (Weight loss is not linear; steady progress is unlikely.)
• The same increase in caloric intake will result in more weight gain for an overweight person than for someone not overweight–and for the overweight person, more of the gain will be body fat.  (You risk regaining, and you’ll regain quickly.)

Here’s how Hall’s study suggests you think about goals for weight loss:

We propose an approximate rule of thumb for an average overweight adult: every change of energy intake of 100 kJ per day will lead to an eventual bodyweight chage of about 1 kg (equivalently, 10 kcal per day per pound of weight change) with half of the weight change being achieved in about 1 year and 95% of the weight change in about 3 years.

How does that rule applies to my original goal?  Let’s assume I was consuming just enough calories to maintain my starting weight.  Yeah, let’s assume that.  To lose 60 pounds would mean:

• Reducing my intake by 600 calories a day (a kilocalorie is the scientific term for what dieters call a calorie), thus…
• Losing 30 of those pounds in the first year, and in theory…
• Losing 58 pounds–by the end of the third year.

From Hall’s viewpoint, I’m on track–I’m more than halfway to my goal, and I’ve managed to maintain that loss.  In a sense, I’m no longer a weight-management apprentice.  

What happens after a good start

I said that training is like dieting.  But I’ve implied (and I’m now stating outright) that most of the time neither one is sufficient for long-term results.  “Diet” in the traditional sense is a short-term planned restriction on caloric intake in order to produce weight loss.  “Training” in the traditional organizational sense tends to be a group-focused, short-term effort to provide people with mainly procedural skills that they currently lack, in order to produce acceptable results on the job.

Just in case it’s unclear, I keep harping on “acceptable results” because if training doesn’t relate to on-the-job accomplishment, I don’t quite get why the organization bothers.  I keep harping on a lack of skill because if people already have the skill needed but the organization is “training” them anyway, mostly what people learn is that the organization isn’t all that bright.

The Brody article and the Hall study reinforce what I think of as a movement from losing weight to maintaining health.  On the job front, it’s like the difference between a hotel employee’s using the hotel reservation system correctly and that same person successfully resolving a customer service problem.

Even entry-level positions involve some judgment, some decision-making, some degree of tacit knowledge.  You can’t train for these things specifically; you need to develop models, offer examples, offer opportunities to practice and reflect.

Thus Hall’s 3-year timeframe is one tool that an individual can use to set his or her own expectations regarding the rate of weight loss and the likelihood of plateaus, along with similar research-based principles like these:

• We can’t estimate a person’s “initial energy requirements” (daily caloric need) without an uncertainty of 5% or even greater.  (Your reduced-calorie target is only an estimate.)
• People are often inaccurate in describing or recording their food intake, either before or during a weight-loss program.  (Your munchage may vary.)

As Brody points out in her New York Times article:

Studies of the more than 5,000 participatns in the National Weight Control Registry have shows that those who lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off for many years relied primarily on two tactics: continuing physical activity and regular checks on body weight.

How about that?  Behavioral change, the specifics of which vary, the results of which are higher levels of caloric consumption.  And a monitoring system to track data and assist in further analysis. 

(I weigh myself at the same time every day that I’m home, and have done so for 20 months.  Not only does the momentum of the practice itself carry me along, but I have a good sense for what the typical variation is.  Of course, if I’ve gained weight, that’s just a fluctuation, but if I’ve lost weight, that’s progress.  You go with the evaluation system that makes the most sense.)

I do think there’s a role for formal organizational learning (in my mind, a much better term than “training”)–though it’s a narrow role, in the same way that diet-as-restriction has a narrow role in managing overall health.  Both may in certain circumstances be good enough to start with, but both are likely to fall short over time.

In other words, I believe that letting new hires figure out the inventory-management system for themselves is probably a suboptimal approach.  You’re deluding yourself, though, if you think you can procedurize your way to workplace mastery .  If you’re trying to increase your organization’s effectiveness, you have to do better than telling people to eat more grapefruit.

CC-licensed images:
Balance-beam scale by wader.
Car-hire image by Send Chocolate (Tina Cruz).
Nighttime road by Axel Schwenke.

(I haven’t figured out how to embed images in a Google Plus post so they show up where I want, rather than as a gang of photos at the bottom.  I also haven’t posted here in a while, so I thought I’d ignore the figuring and sneak in some posting.)

Here’s an easy way to save items from your Google Plus stream to Evernote.

Step 1: Get your Evernote email address (the one Evernote assigned to you when you signed up.)

Sign onto Evernote.
Click Settings.
At the bottom of the Settings page, you’ll see Emailing to Evernote.
That’s where you’re find your Evernote email address.

Step 2: Create a new Google+ circle.  (I named mine “Evernote.”  You go wild like that, too.)

Step 3: Click “add a new person.” Enter your Evernote email address.

Enter your Evernote email address.

Step 4: Enter a name for this new “person.”

Enter a name for the Evernote email address

Step 5: You’ll see the new person in the new circle.  (You can add others, but I didn’t.)  Be sure to click “create circle.”

Create the new circle.

That’s it for setting up the circle.  Here’s how you use it:

When you find an item in your Google+ stream that you’d like to send to Evernote, click the Share button, then select your Evernote circle.  (I made Evernote the first in my list of circles, mostly so it’d show up first in the screen shot below.)

Sharing an item in your stream

Google+ reminds you that someone in that circle isn’t yet on Google+.  They mean “your Evernote email isn’t,”  which is true.  You can share the item with additional people or circles, but I’m trying to stay simple here, so I just click Share.

Confirmation (part one)

I don’t know if Google+ is being solicitous or just fretful, but when you do click Share, you’ll get a second reminder that someone you’re sharing with isn’t on Google+ and will have to settle for email.

Confirmation (part two), or, are you sure you're sure?

Within a minute of my having shared the item in Google+, Evernote had it in my default notebook.

How it looks in Evernote

The only quibble I have here: the item received by Evernote comes from me — I was sharing stuff in my stream with Evernote, right?  And so, if it’s an item that someone else posted (one that was in my stream, but not originally from me), there’s no indication in Evernote of who originally shared the item.

If I click that “view or comment” link in the Evernote note, I will see the item as it originally appeared in my stream — with, in this example, a link to Jane Bozarth, who originally shared the item.

Back to the source

I’m grateful to Beth Kanter, who’s shared a number of useful Google+ tips, and to Vikki Baptiste, whose comment on one of those tips led me to search for the details of how to do this.

Sometimes, it’s worth the whole week’s subscription to The New York Times just to get the Tuesday Science section.  (It’s certainly not worth it if you’re only going to count how often in a week the Times uses the word “famously”).

Science this week included Nicholas Wade’s article In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain, which centers on the work of Cornelia Bargmann.

I’m going to summarize the parts of the article that most intrigued me, in part because both the grunt work conducted on a 1-millimeter worm, and the complexity that work has revealed, are probably good to… well, have in mind when you read some breathless “finding about the brain” that means you should never use magenta as a font color.

(Click to see NYTimes diagram)

Bargmann has spent 24 years studying Caenorhabditis elegans.  Many neuroscientists do, in part because C. elegans has only 302 neurons.  (You, by way of contrast, have 100 billion or so.)  John G. White spent more than 10 years mapping the 8,000 connections between those neurons.

At that point, science had a neurological map for the worm, but didn’t know which connections made what happen.  It was like having the wiring diagram for an apartment building. As is, just the wires: not knowing what was connected to any outlet or socket.

Cell bodies of the ILR, VL, and 2-neurons (ILR is about 2 microns wide)

Bargmann eventually tried the equivalent of flipping circuit breakers to see which lights went out.  She knew that C. elegans “can taste waterborne chemicals and move toward those it finds attractive.”  So she started killing one neuron at a time with a laser. The idea was to try to figure out what the neuron did from what the worm stopped doing.

Eventually, she did find the neuron that controlled taste.  She also discovered that C. Elegans has a sense of smell, as well.  Like rats, these worms can tell what to eat and what to avoid by scent.  Bargmann learned that neurons, and not odor receptors, controlled the move-toward-good, move-from-bad behavior.

This is tough learning.  In addition to the 302 neurons and their 8,000 connections, there’s another system of “gap junctions” involving chemical connection between neurons.

And there are neuropeptides (250 different ones) that neurons release to affect other neurons.  Which means the pattern of neural connections changes on the fly.

Cell-body image of C. elegans neurons by Thomas Boulin for WormAtlas.

I know, I know, “learning events” is pretty vague.  But I wanted a crisper title than “an idiosyncratic list of face-to-face professional-development opportunities for people in the training / learning / performance improvement field.”

I don’t get to many in-person learning events.  This year I did go to the Innovations in eLearning Symposium (which was 40 miles from my house), and two years ago I made a presentation at a CSTD event in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The idea of presenting to your peers is a bracing stimulus, a strong incentive to reflect on what you do, what you’ve learned, and what you can share that’s useful to someone else.  Not that I always have to present, but I think sharing what you’ve learned with your colleagues is an opportunity you’d do well to embrace.

I find it hard to keep track of what’s happening where (and especially when) in terms of conferences and similar events that I might like to attend.  That’s why I’ve created a calendar of learning events.  It’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs that lists these things in chronological order.

Screen shot: events listed by start date (click to enlarge)

In addition to providing a link to the event’s site, the list includes  events that have already taken place; dates in the past appear in gray.  The idea is to retain them for a year.  I figure that will help me estimate when the event will take place next year, even if the organization’s plans aren’t yet available.

I did find a few similar lists, but none of them had a feature I really needed:  events sorted by the due date for proposals:

Screen shot: events by due date for submitting a proposal (click to enlarge)

I might ask myself why ISPI needs an eight-month lead time for proposals, but at least this way I know that’s their lead time.

I thought a list like this might be useful to others, which is why I’ve put it on Google Docs and why I’m sharing a bit.ly link ( http://bit.ly/k0YOvw ) instead of Google’s 136-character URL.

The document  actually has several  sheets that you can view (not including a couple of other sheets where I hide the machinery that makes the lists work):

• A welcome page with contents (links to the other sheets)
• The list of events sorted by start date
• The list of events sorted by due date for proposals
• The (unsorted) master list that the other lists work from

If other people find these lists useful, or if they suggest events to include, I’ll be delighted.  That’s part of the reason for the rambly “about this calendar” page: to say more than you’d want to read here about the kinds of event I think would fit and the kinds that wouldn’t.

Somewhere, yet another big organization is working on yet another big computer system.  Legions of stakeholders are fussing about what the system needs to have if they’re going to get their real work done.

Few of them, alas, are making the case for a robust, easy, and safe way to practice.  A shame, considering the universal desire to have people learn such systems.

Instead, people are mired in situations like a financial services project I worked on.  Its banking module, used by the people at a branch, enabled them to electronically open accounts for a customer, transfer funds, and handle loan applications.

But there was no way to practice those tasks.  If you wanted to get skilled at, say, processing an auto loan, you had to process an actual one–preferably for yourself, so you wouldn’t need someone else’s Social Security number.  You couldn’t complete the transaction.  Well, you could if you were actually getting a car loan.  Seemed like a mighty rigorous prerequisite.  And training people to do A, B, but not C — quick, hit cancel! — is disconcerting.

A practice system, like its first cousin, a test mode that truly works like the actual system, is a kind of performance-support forest that companies can’t see because all the stakeholders are focused on the system-spec trees.

When I managed online training for Amtrak’s reservation system, we inherited three imaginary trains that agents could access with a training ID. Granted, learners could reserve seats and sleeping compartments, but not much more.  And the practice provided was suboptimal.

Each imaginary train had a consist (a set of cars, with passenger accommodations), but there was no automatic cancellation of the fictional reservations.  In other words, the imaginary trains could sell out.

As for transferring skills, the trains didn’t follow any actual Amtrak route.  One went from London to Rome; Another, from London to Dublin–by way of Donegal.

More to the point, pretty much all you could do was reserve space.  You couldn’t calculate fares, in part because Amtrak didn’t have fares on the London-Donegal Express, but also because there was no connection between the imaginary trains and other parts of the system. Like fares.

During my time as head of online training , we decided to do better.  Leslie, who’d been a reservations agent, worked with John from the Train Operations group.  I’ll discuss specifics not because you need to know about Amtrak reservations, but to show the kinds of factors to consider when planning a sturdy practice system.

Realism: Leslie and John created training trains based on real ones: they cloned trains 3 and 4 (Chicago – Los Angeles) as 9003 and 9004 (no real-world trains had numbers in the 9000s).  Same cities, same accommodations, same schedule.

Coverage: They identified all the different types of Amtrak accommodations, then created training trains to include them all.  They took in geographic routes, so that while they didn’t duplicate the entire Amtrak system, they had trains in every part of the country.  This country.

Integration: the training trains got their city information, schedules, accommodations, and fares from the live system. When the fares changed on the real route, they changed on the training trains as well.  The training ID could access all the information-only parts of the system: fare quotes, current train status, and the like.

Resilience: you could make as many reservations as you liked, for whatever day you liked. At midnight, they’d all get purged, so as not to clog the system with imaginary trains filled with imaginary passengers.  And for entire new services, we could clone another real-world train and launch it in the training environment.

Security: we built in safeguards against error.  If you logged on with the training ID, you couldn’t reserve space or issue tickets on real-life trains.  Your real-system ID would not let you use or even display the training trains.  The burden of requiring  a training ID for practice was low, and the separate systems meant that even if you forgot which mode you were in, you couldn’t do anything harmful to a real reservation.

Continuing the security angle, you could make ticketing entries on the training trains.  That means you could pull up a training-train reservation and tell the system you were issuing tickets.  You couldn’t print the tickets, though, and the financial system ignored “sales” on the training trains.

What did Amtrak get out of this?

• Any Amtrak ticket clerk or reservation agent (more than 2,000 people at that time) could practice virtually any entry, or combination of entries, via the training trains.
• The new training trains, based on real-world routes, reinforced the layout of Amtrak’s route structure.  You could work with complex fares and experiment with complicated connections.  You could also build skill with accommodations or trains, like Metroliners, that you might not encounter often.
• As new features went into the live system, they were available immediately in the training system as well.

Safe practice in many live systems is harder than it should be.  Often “harder” means “not possible.”  Less-safe practice can mean goofy messages going to customers.  Phantom sales inflating revenue.  Accidental cancellations of live orders.  Triple demand for supplies.

No matter how firmly your company insists on formal training, your learners and the entire organization  can benefit from support provided on the job by a realistic, feature-rich way to practice skills.

CC-licensed images: a few stakes by TonZ;
log slices by the queen of subtle;
caber toss by notacrime / Gregor Dodson.
Detailed map of the London-Dublin Express is mine.