Technology is supposed to support our goals, and, when well-written, it does.  So for instance, when I write, I use particular features to make my writing process better aligned with my thinking.  I’m working on a book (as you’ve seen hints of and some resultant interim thoughts), and I’m finding that now that it’s time to deliver, I’ve got a conflict.  Let me explain.

My writing is not just a process of sitting down and having the prose flow.  At some point it is, but even with my first book that had gestated for years, I had a structure.  Subsequent exercises in screed generation have really relied on my creating an overarching structure, that lets me tell a story that incorporates the things I need to cover.   And I use outlines as my structuring tool.

Even this isn’t linear: structure and then write.  As I write, I have ideas that I will either put later in the structure, or go back and add into the prose.  One of the things that regularly happens is that, as I write, I find things flowing in a different way than I originally expected, and I rearrange the outline to achieve a structure that captures the new flow.

To do this, I use the outline feature hugely. I don’t just restructure, but move chunks to different places using these capabilities.  While I have not been a fan of Microsoft in general, I learned Word to write my PhD thesis, and have used it consistently ever since.  For instance, while I love Keynote, I haven’t been able to adopt Pages because it hasn’t had industrial-strength outlining.  This also means I inherently use styles.  I like styles. A lot.  For instance, it makes me crazy when people format by hand on something that might need to be reformatted.

The reason I mention this is because I’m now faced with an externally-induced dilemma. Having a deadline, and finally having crafted my prose, I now look at their submission requirements.  And they’re antiquated.  Here’s the requirement from my publisher:

Our production process requires minimal file formatting; do not use formatting such as fields and links, styles, page headers or footers, boxed text, and so on.

No auto-indexing, no auto-table of contents, nothing. And yes, I faced this before, but it’s still hugely frustrating.  The dilemma I’m in: I’ve  had to use styes to write a well-structured book.  Now I’m faced with the onerous task of removing all the file formatting created by the outline styles that I needed to use to give my best effort.  And I have to do it by hand, as there’s no way to systematically go through and manually format all the headings.

This is nuts!   I mean, it is almost 2014, and they still need me to use hand-formatting.  Um, people, this is why we have technology: to support us in working smarter, not to go to a last-century (or worse) manual process.  These instructions are essentially unchanged since 2005, when I wrote my first tome! (Ok, they no longer require a floppy disk version, and I talked them out of the 3 paper copies. Ahem.) I managed to create camera-ready material for my thesis (with library restrictions where they’ll take out the ruler to make sure the measurements meet the criteria) in Word back in 1989; I bet I could create camera-ready page-proofs to meet their requirements today.  As you can infer, I’m frustrated (and dreading the chore).   The irony of using last century production processes to tout moving L&D into the 21st Century is not lost on me.

Please, if your processes are still like this, let’s have a conversation. I will be having a fight with my publisher (which I will lose; they can’t change that fast), but I hope you can do better.

It’s clear that our brains aren’t the logical problem-solvers we’d like to be.  The evidence on our different thinking systems makes clear that we use intuition when we can, and hard thinking when we must. Except that we use intuition even when we shouldn’t, and hard thinking is very susceptible to problems.  Yet we need to have reliably good outcomes to solving problems or accomplishing tasks.  What can we do?

The answer, of course, is to use technology to fill in the gaps, when we can.  We can automate it if we totally understand it, but the best solution is to let technology (and design) do what it can, and let our brains fill in what we do best.  So, when there’s a problem or task that needs to be accomplished, and it requires some decision making, we should be doing several things.

To start, we should be looking at the scope of possible situations, and determine what’s required.  We should then figure out what information can be in the world (whether a resource or in other’s heads), and what has to be in the performer’s repertoire.  We want to design a solution system, not just a course.

Recognize that getting things into human heads reliably is problematic at best.   It takes considerable work to develop that expert intuition: considerable practice at least.  So the preference should be to design either a really good support system that helps in characterization of the problem, and a dialog that helps determine what of the possible solutions matches up with the situation.

It can just be information in the world, such as a job aid or checklist, or an interactive decision support tool. Or, it could be a social network of resources such as tools and videos created by others that’s usefully searchable and the ability to ask questions of the community and get responses.  It’s likely a probabilistic decision here: what is the likelihood that the network has the answer, versus what’s the possibility that we can design support that will cover the range of problems to be faced?

The point is that support design is a necessary and very viable component of performance solutions, and one that isn’t being used enough.  I’m looking forward to the upcoming eLearning Guild’s Performance Support Symposium in Boston as a way to learn more, and hope to see you there!