For a few months, I’ve been head-down in my new job (I’m a curriculum developer with the BC Pension Corporation). Much of it involves helping our staff adapt to changes in the tools they work with or in the processes that those tools work on, in order to serve our members–the people covered by various public-sector pension plans here in British Columbia.

There’s a significant procedural component to that. Pension plans in general are governed by all kinds of rules — vesting requirements, contribution tracking, tax issues — and can have so many options that they’d daunt Benoit Mandelbrot. That’s one reason that a few weeks ago I noted this post by Misty Harding at the eLearning Brothers site.

One trigger for her post on handling boring content was boring content:

I realized that I didn’t need to spend any more time wrestling with that yawn-worthy content, and neither did the learner. I achieved this through (brace yourself Instructional Design World), not focusing on the content.

Much of what she then offers will strike many people as common sense, but those people are probably turning out pretty good stuff. This is a quick summary; read her full post for helpful details.

• Give them something to do that isn’t at its core touring the boring content.
• Violate expectations: approach the learning challenge (as opposed to “the content”) in an unexpected way.
• Let them take on a role so they need to solve a problem.

Part of what Misty Harding is addressing, I think, is the gap between procedural knowledge and tacit knowledge. In any organization serving individual customers, be it BC Pensions or Zappos, you’ll find reams of procedures. Invariably these deal with routine processes — or at least processes that can be routine-ized, because at some level the steps and the decisions are predictable and the range of outcomes is fairly small.

What’s far more challenging is combining these procedures effectively–a point that Harold Jarche makes in this diagram:

If like me you’re trying to help people who have to deal with things on the “routine work” end of the diagram so they can deliver things of higher value, then whatever training and support you produce benefits from being set in a realistic context.

It also benefits from avoiding stuff that doesn’t relate to that delivery. (I recall an EEO compliance officer who insisted that people needed to know the dates of EEO-related legislation–in a course on helping an employee to pursue a discrimination complaint.)

“Realistic” also does not mean the typical software Field Trip:

This is the Last Name field. Enter the last name here.
This is the First Name field. Enter the first name here.
This is the Street Address field. What do you enter here?

(ad blooming infinitum)

The training course I’m working on at the moment deals mainly with changes to our procedures caused by legislation going into effect next month. It’s not earth-shaking; it’s not going to reset paradigms for everyone who works at the corporation. Even so, our design relies heavily on teaching the rules and principles by having participants work through a series of problems.

Even the initial look at procedures for choosing the beneficiary for a pension will involve opening the online procedures (just like you do in the target jobs) and working a sample nomination form (our term) through the initiation, evaluation, and entry stages.

What about things that are new or significantly changed?  Well, take one new on-screen button. It enables a feature that didn’t exist in the previous version, because the underlying capability didn’t exist. No matter what the label is on such a button, without context people are likely to misinterpret it.

Rather than introduce it as part of a field trip (“here are 27 changes you’ll see on 9 different screens”), we’ll deal with it in the third practice exercise, which will be the first time clicking that button would make sense.

What’s all this got to do with tacit knowledge? In part I think tacit skills emerge as you combine procedural skills (and interpersonal skills) in job-related contexts. You’ve got to build them up, and working with realistic problems–including relating them to your experience, speculating about variations, and exchanging ideas with experienced people–is one way to help foster that construction of knowledge.

Public domain button image by decosigner.