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In the reality stakes, I recognize that people aren’t likely to throw their whole approach out. Instead, they make the small changes with big impact. Then, of course, they should use success to leverage the opportunity to do more. You can bring in a full evaluation of everything you do by the latest fad, but those tend to be expensive and out of date by the time they’re done.  Wherever you are, there’s room for improvement. How do you get there? By understanding how we think, work, and learn.

So, one of the things I’ve done, repeatedly across clients, is look at what they’re doing (including outputs and process). I have tended to do this in a lightweight approach, because I know most folks are sensitive to costs, and want to get the biggest bang for the buck. I’ve done so for content, for design practices, for market opportunities, and more.

To do so means I go through materials, whether products, processes, or plans, to understand the experience and look for ways to improve it. Then, we prioritize those potential opportunities. I then bring my independent observations together for a discussion on what’s useful and necessary. Of course, we always find things that don’t meet those criteria. My concluding reports typically state the goals, the current context, the applicable principles, and recommendations. I’m also happy to work with folks to see how it works out and what tweaks may be of use. Which isn’t every engagement, but it’s not infrequent.

One of the robust outcomes, for what it’s worth, is that folks get insights they (and I) didn’t expect! That may be because I’ve been an interdisciplinary mongrel, with interests in many things, or possibly because the cognitive foundations provide a basis to address most anything. Regardless, I’ve found opportunities to improve in pretty much all situations. These are at every level from how to implement a field to collect information to an assessment of the viability of a go-to-market strategy.

In short, looking at things from the perspective of how our brains work provides insights into ways in which we’ve violated that alignment. Further, it’s a reliable phenomena that pretty much everything we do has opportunities to improve. Sure, not all such moves will be worth the effort, or may conflict with what folks have learned to live with. Still, there’s a pretty-much guaranteed to be valuable changes that can be made. At least, that’s been my experience, and my clients.

What I’m really doing is a cognitive/learning audit. Basically, it’s about going through the cognitive processing cycle repeatedly through an experience. That experience can be the learner’s, the designer’s, purchaser’s, or more. Usually, all of the above! However, what you want to do is to minimize the barriers, and maximize the value. What’re the users goals, what’s  perceived, what’s considered, what’s processed, and what happens next.

There are benefits to having been actively investigating our minds for a number of decades now. I know the principles, I know how to apply them, and I also work in the real world. Also, perhaps against my own self-interest, I look to find ways to do it as easily and inexpensively as possible. I know organizations have limitations. Still, pretty much everyone benefits when you look for small changes with big impact. How about you?

We frequently hear that ‘perfection is the enemy of the good’. And that may well be true. However, I want to suggest that there’s another enemy that plagues us as learning experience designers. We may be trying to do good, but there are barriers. These are worthy of explicit discussion.

You also hear about the holy trinity of engineering: cheap, fast, or good; pick two. We have real world pressures that want us to do things efficiently. For instance, we have lots of claims that generative AI will allow us to generate more learning faster. Thus, we can do more with less. Which isn’t a bad thing…if what we produce is good enough. If we’re doing good, I’ll suggest, then we can worry about fast and cheap. But doing bad faster and cheaper isn’t a good thing! Which brings us to the second issue.

What is our definition of ‘good’? It appears that, too often, good is if people ‘like’ it. Which isn’t a bad thing, it’s even the first level in the Kirkpatrick-Katzell model: asking what people think of the experience. One small problem: the correlation between what people think of an experience, and it’s actual impact, is .09 (Salas, et al, 2012). That’s zero with a rounding error! What it means is that people’s evaluation of what they think of it, and the actual impact, isn’t correlated at all. It could be highly rated and not be effective, or highly rated and be effective. Etc. At core, you can’t tell by the rating.

What should be ‘good’? The general intent of a learning intervention (or any intervention, really) is to have an impact! If we’re providing learning, it should yield a new ability to ‘do’. There are a multitude of problems here. For one, we don’t evaluate performance, so how would we know if our intervention is having an impact? Have learners acquired new abilities that are persisting in the workplace and leading to the necessary organizational change? Who knows? For another, folks don’t have realistic expectations about what it takes to have an impact. We’ve devolved to a state where if we build it, it must be good. Which isn’t a sound basis for determining outcomes.

There is, of course, a perfectly good reason to evaluate people’s affective experience of the learning. If we’re designing experiences, having it be ‘hard fun’ means we’ve optimized the engagement. This is fine, but only after, we’ve established efficacy. If we’re not having a learning impact in terms of new abilities to perform, what people think about it isn’t of use.

Look, I’d prefer us to be in the situation where perfection to be the enemy of the good! That’d mean we’re actually doing good. Yet, in our industry, too often we don’t have any idea whether we are or not. We’re not measuring ‘good’, so we’re not designing for it. If we measured impact first, then experience, we could get overly focused on perfection. That’d be a good problem to have, I reckon. Right now, however, we’re only focused on fast and cheap. We won’t get ‘good’ until we insist upon it from and for ourselves. So, let’s shall we?