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Work with purpose

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As another component of the Future of Work thinking I’ve been doing, one thing that strikes me is the question of what helps people  want to work, which I think pretty clearly will be important.  And I was reminded by my ITA colleague Jane Hart of the work of Dan Pink in his book Drive, where he isolates three components of what makes people engaged: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  And I think this is a good list.

The idea is fairly straightforward: people want work that actually does something important, they want to be free to pursue that work, and they want to be developed in their ability to accomplish that work.   What work is appropriate for different people is part of the task of deciding who to hire, and who to assign to what.

And while I think autonomy and mastery are part of the picture, for sure, I want to focus on making work  meaningful.  OK, freeing up people from micromanaging is going to be a necessity going forward, but that’s part of the necessary move to agile organizations, and while that’s challenging, it has to happen for organizations to survive. And supporting people by giving them assignments that stretch their abilities, and coaching them through it is absolutely important, but flows out of the 70:20:10 model. Jane, in her valuable book  Modern Workplace Learning, gives very specific  guidance  about managers developing individual potential as part of the larger picture.  But the area that strikes me as something I haven’t developed my thoughts  about before is finding ways to characterize work so that it connects to people.

I think work has to be meaningful (just as I argue learning has to be meaningful). Here I mean something specific, in that people see the connection between what they’re doing and the impact on the world.  And that’s not always done, and certainly not systematically or well.  And yet I think it’s a service to the employees and part of a thriving organization.  Heck, it probably even leads to better employee engagement ;).

Seriously, it first takes an organization that has a clear focus on what it’s doing. There’re the old stories about ice companies losing out when refrigerators came in, and I think that’s part of it: a very clear focus on what purpose they serve. And this is important to align an organization, and make the strategy easier to focus on.  A secondary desirable component, to me, is to understand what contribution the organization is making to the world. I think the ‘b corp‘ notion is a great one here. (I may be an idealist, but that’s the world I  want to live in. ;).

Then, there needs to be a clear alignment between what the employee is doing and the overall organizational goal. I think that if there’s a clear purpose for the work, you have a greater likelihood for employees to be engaged.  No one likes busywork, after all, but even some drudge work that’s part of a bigger picture can be shouldered. And it also means that rote work, work that can be automated,  should be automated, leaving people free to do the important work.   Very much like learning needs to see how the learning connects to their work and the bigger picture, so too should their work connect to the bigger picture, within and outside the org.

Not to say this is easy. It requires clear communication (queue the Coherent Org), and a clear vision, but these are steps organizations need to do.  The recognition that this alignment, coupled with a ‘safe’ culture (i.e. not the Miranda Organization), is the necessity for going beyond survival to ‘thrival’ I think is the catalyst for change in meaningful work. And that’s a good place to go.

#itashare

Starting a revolution?

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In thinking a bit about the Future of Work, one of the issues is where to start.  If we take the implications of the Coherent Organization to heart, we realize that the components include the work teams, the communities of practice (increasingly I think of it as a community of improvement), and the broader network.  But where to begin?

A couple of principles fall into place for me.  The first is the notion of  ‘trojan mice’, e.g. small steps rather than a epic change. That, coupled with the notion of scaling up from the small, leads me to believe that the best place to start is to start small. This follows on the advice about change in general  that changes should be strategic and leveraged.

So, a natural place to start small is the team itself.  The goal would be to draw upon a diverse team meeting a real need, but facilitating their tool use. I remember an engagement with a Scandinavian oil company that I was brought in on, where they started out establishing teams for new projects that crossed geographies (and, implicitly, cultures), scaffolded them using collaboration and communication tools, and then released them back to other projects. The goal was to skill up teams and have the team members become viral influences.

Another approach, as there are already likely communities in existence, would be to migrate and facilitate communities online. I recall that the Defense Acquisition University took this approach.  However, I might like to get some project teams going with tools and then migrate out to the communities, where those team members that had participated were familiar with the tools and could be drawn upon by the community.

In fact, after the initial team work, I might facilitate a team not only working together, but working out  loud back to their respective communities.  And while it makes practical sense to be sequential, at some point it might make sense to go parallel, and be having the working out loud from the teams being worked on at the same time as the community development. But for resource reasons, I might make it sequential.  Ultimately, you want to be facilitating the communities participating in  and outside  the organizations, and looking to other communities both inside and outside for inspiration.

The point is to be finding a small way to begin, and maybe take several tries until you work out how to do it well, then start scaling up and out.  You want to build need, awareness, and ability steadily.  It can effect a change in culture too, if the principles that make this work in teams and communities begins to be made aware as well.

And this is not independent of work on going to more performance consulting and performance support in the organization, but instead is a complement.  In previous exercises, different organizations have prioritized different elements, where you begin will be dependent on your context.

So, in the social space,  this is my instinct and experience, but welcome hearing alternate viewpoints.

#itashare

Working and learning out loud

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I’ve been thinking about some of the talk around the Future of Work, and in addition to the free flow of information I recently posted about  from the Coherent Organization, I think working out loud is another component.  Inspired by a post from my colleague ITA Harold Jarche,  this is how I see it, in actionable terms.  (And I expect this is also part of Jane Bozarth’s Show Your Work, but I’ve yet to get my mitts on a copy, mea culpa.)

The point is to make your work visible.  There’re two points: showing the actual goals, progress and status of your work, and showing the thinking that’s going on behind it.  And there are two dimensions: within the organization, and outside the organization.  Pragmatically, this yields some concrete and actionable elements.

First, there have to be mechanisms to share.  Ideally, you don’t have to work and then separately post it, but instead your tools automatically share.  This really means collaborative work tools, because you want people to be able to engage: at least commenting, and of course sometimes (maybe most of the time) you’ll be working in a team. Also tools that track contributions and changes.  And there may have to be permissions: so some people can edit, some can only comment, etc.

And I wouldn’t assume folks know what it means to ‘narrate your work‘ (aka learn out loud).  Here, I mean exposing the underlying elements.  This includes the context, assumptions, considerations, experiments, and reflections.  In User Interface Design, it was called Design Rationale, and it’s showing not only the current state, but how you got there.  Benefits include others’ experiences, not revising early decisions when new team members are added, and more.  The typical techniques of being explicit, modeling, evangelizing, promoting, etc, play a role here.

Then of course it has to be ‘safe’ to share, you can’t be working in a Miranda organization.  If your work will be held against  you in any way, you won’t want to share.  This means culture and policies and more. Basically, you need to be working in a Learning Organization, where the elements are aligned to facilitate optimal engagement.  This includes the practices about how to work out loud and learn out loud.

Another   issue is how far to share.  What can you share outside the organization?  Harold talks about the essential requirement of sharing outside the workplace, and that can be a big concern.  Obviously, proprietary work needs to be protected until it’s not business vulnerable. This means policies about what’s safe to share, and when.  Certainly, ‘sanitized’ work, where critical details are obscured but the thinking is shown should be supported in going out to communities of practice.  And the end result, when the business advantage isn’t threatened, could and should be shared through articles or webinars or conference presentations.

At the end, it’s a risk/reward tradeoff for any project at any time. What’s the benefit of getting feedback to improve versus what’s the downside of information getting out to competitors or exposing regulated data?  At any point, with any particular version of ‘anonymizing’, the balance may tip one way or another.   But the point is to be open to the benefit, and take advantage of it when and where you can.  Getting systematic at making it a regular part of any project is likely to be key.

It’s what I do here, and I encourage you to work out loud as much as you can.  So, any feedback so far?

#itashare

Conferencing reflections

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It turns out that I’ve been to a  lot of conferences this year (8, if my math is right) scattered through the year and around the globe. And over the past decade, I’ve hit a lot more.  And it’s given me some opportunities to contrast and compare some of the tradeoffs that can be made.  So I thought I’d share my thoughts with you.

Now, my perspective starts out a bit different. At these events, I’m speaker, so I see things from a different perspective.  However, I also try to go see sessions as an audience member as well, and I still see the same events.  So I am trying to write this from all perspectives: conference organizer, attendee, speaker, and vendor.  And let me be clear, I’m a learning technology strategist, and my passions are learning, technology, and how to use them together to make things better. So that colors my comments.

Here are the major elements and my thoughts on them:

Keynotes: I am tired of ‘inspirational’ keynotes. I really don’t need to hear some person who climbed a mountain or sailed a sea and their attempts to connect that to learning somehow. I’d rather hear about an issue that affects learning.  Topics about how we think, work, or learn are of interest. Let’s hear about the risks of technology, or some new ones or ways to use them.  Yes, I like compelling speakers, but please give me new thoughts, not random aspiration.

Speakers:  I think it’s unconscionable to have an unprepared speaker who can’t manage time.  It’s even worse on panels or shared sessions where one speaker runs over. It’s just not fair to the other speakers.  It’s also essential that the talk is not a sales pitch, but instead presents real value in ideas or experience. And they should be happy to chat afterward.  It boggles my little mind when someone gets up and clearly hasn’t practiced and checked their timing. It’s appears  I’m somewhat unusual, but I really don’t necessarily feel the critical need to spend most of the time conversing with others. I don’t mind, and even can recommend some interaction, but I want to hear something substantive as well.

Schedule: I like events that have a clear and comprehensible schedule. I want to know exactly what things are at the same time, so I can choose and then vote with my feet if the first choice isn’t working for me.  Having different tracks have different schedules doesn’t work.  And as a speaker and an attendee,  I don’t like short sessions.  Give me at least an hour as a speaker to set the tone, present the topic, talk about the issues and tradeoffs, and talk about the way forward.  Similarly as an audience member, I want suitable depth.  30 minutes just isn’t enough.

Breaks: And then I want a break.  The break should be long enough to potentially chat  with the speaker at the preceding event, get out and find some sustenance, use the facilities, have a conversation or two, and get to the next event.  Workshop breaks can be shorter, as you’re with a group for a half or full day, but for separating concurrent sessions, they need to be sufficiently long.

Events: I love having social events, as a way to have those important serendipitous  conversations. An evening reception after the first day is mandatory.  I like sufficient nibbles to fend off the need to escape to dinner, or dinner actually provided. And for the end of the day, I like social lubricant.  Preferably on demand, not via a limited ration.  It doesn’t have to be a broad selection, but not having to worry about  logistics means my mind is free to focus on conversations.  I assume lunch is provided, of course, and it doesn’t have to be fancy or rich, just healthy, substantive, and reasonably tasty.  Other events, such as mid afternoon treat breaks, and mid morning snack breaks are great.  I really like it if some form of breakfast is available as well.  I think I’m not the only one who prefers to eat little bits over time, not big meals.

Expo Hall: I like to have an exhibition. I like to see what’s around. Yes, I don’t like walking past and being grabbed, but I do like it if I can go up, have an intelligent conversation about the problem solution, and not feel pressured. I like to see the alternatives, and take the temperature of the market. And I like people who might have real needs to be able to explore real solutions.  Having events  in  the expo area  makes sense to me and the vendors.

App: I used to get a PDF of the program and put it on my tablet.  Now I am happy using an app, and it’s become a must-have. I like it when I can choose sessions for my schedule and have reminders.  I like having a stream of information, though it could be via Twitter. I like having an expo map if the expo is of any size at all.  And I don’t really care for  gamification to reward participation.  While I like the engagement of users, it leads to too many frivolous posts.  I really like it if presentation material is  available through the app, and happy to do evaluations that way.

Bookstore: I think a bookstore is important, for several reasons.  For one, you can get a heads up on a speaker before you see them. Or if you miss a session, you can graze what you might have missed.  You might also want to get the works of someone who you really were intrigued by. It’s also a way to see what’s happening in the field.

Rest areas: I don’t really need speaker prep.  Sometimes it may be handy if the event is really big, but the main things is, instead, having good connection to event staff. And I think that’s true for all, not just speakers.  Having places to sit for all attendees means that  anyone needing a break whether social or physical can achieve that end.

People:  The staff makes quite a big difference when they’re knowledgeable and helpful.  This has almost always been the case, but it’s nice to have informed people ready and willing to help.  This is true for vendors as well, having friendly and knowledgeable people trumps having shills who can chat you up but can’t really answer questions.

So, what have I forgotten to address?

I realize that there are different audiences,  purposes, and business models for these events, and so not all things are comparable.  And this is also my opinion, and your motives may differ, but I hope I’ve laid out some of the thinking to help you think about what works for you.  And I hope to see you at a conference sometime!

Non-invasive Brain Surgery

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Changing behavior is hard. The brain is arguably the most complex thing in the known universe. Simplistic approaches aren‘t likely to work. To rewire it, one approach is to try surgery. This is problematic for a several reasons: it‘s dangerous, it‘s messy, and we really don’t understand enough about it. What‘s a person to do?

Well, we do know that the brain can rewire itself, if we do it right. This is called learning. And if we design learning, e.g. instruction, we can potentially change the brain without surgery. However, (and yes, this is my point) treating it as anything less than brain surgery (or rocket science), isn‘t doing justice to what‘s known and what‘s to be done.

The number of ways to get it wrong is long. Information dump instead of skills practice. Massed practice instead of spaced. Rote knowledge assessment. Lack of emotional engagement. The list goes on. (Cue the Serious eLearning Manifesto.) In short, if you don‘t know what you‘re doing, you‘re likely doing it wrong and are not going to have an effect. Sure, you‘re not likely to kill anyone (unless you‘re doing this where it matters), but you‘ll waste money and time. Scandalous.

Again, the brain is complex, and consequently so is learning design. So why, in the name of sense and money, do we treat it as trivial? Why would anyone buy a story that we can achieve anything meaningful by taking content and adding a quiz (read: rapid eLearning)? As if a quiz is somehow going to make people do better. Who would believe that just anyone can present material and learning will occur? (Do you know the circumstances when that will work?) And really, throwing fuzzy objects around the room and ice-breakers will somehow make a difference? Please. If you can afford to throw money down the drain (ok, if you insist, throw it here ;), and don‘t care if any meaningful change happens, I pity you, but I can‘t condone it.

Let‘s get real. Let‘s be honest. There‘s a lot (a lot) of things being done in the name of learning that are just nonsensical. I could laugh, if I didn‘t care so much. But I care about learning. And we know what leads to learning. It‘s not easy. It‘s not even cheap. But it will work. It requires good analysis, and some creativity, and attention to detail, and even some testing and refinement, but we know how to do this.

So let‘s stop pretending. Let‘s stop paying lip-service. Let‘s treat learning design as the true blend of art and science that it is. It‘s not the last refuge of the untalented, it‘s one of the most challenging, and rewarding, things a person can do. When it‘s done right. So let‘s do it right! We‘re performing brain surgery, non-invasively, and we should be willing to do the hard yards to actually achieve success, and then reap the accolades.

OK, that‘s my rant, trying to stop what‘s being perpetrated and provide frameworks that might help change the game. What‘s your take?

The Polymath Proposition

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At the recent DevLearn conference, one of the keynotes was Adam Savage.  And he said something that gave me a sense of validation. He was talking about being a polymath, and I think that’s worth understanding.

His point was that his broad knowledge of a lot of things was valuable.  While he wasn’t the world’s expert in any particular thing, he knew a lot about a lot of things.  Now if you don’t know him, it helps to understand that he’s one of the two hosts of Mythbusters, a show that takes urban myths and puts them to the test.  This requires designing experiments that fit within pragmatic constraints of cost and safety, and will answer the question. Good experiment design is an art as well as a science, and given the broad range of what the myths cover, this ends up requiring a large amount of ingenuity.

The reason I like this is that my interests vary broadly (ok, I’m coming to terms with a wee bit of ADD ;).  The large picture is how technology can be designed  to help us think, work, and learn.  This ends up meaning I have to understand things like cognition and learning (my Ph.D. is in cognitive psychology), computers (I’ve programmed and designed architectures at many levels), design (I’ve looked at usability, software engineering, industrial design, architectural design, and more), and organizational issues (social, innovation…). It’s led to explorations covering things like games, mobile, and strategy (e.g. the topics of my books).  And  more; I’ve led development of adaptive learning systems, content models, learning content, performance support, social environments, and so on.  It’s led me further, too, exploring  org change and culture, myth and ritual, engagement and fun, aesthetics and media, and other things I can’t even recall right now.

And I draw upon  models from as many fields as I can.  My Ph.D. research was related to the power of models as a basis for solving new problems in uncertain domains, and so I continue to collect them like others collect autographs or music.  I look for commonalities, and  try to make my understanding explicit by continuing to diagram and write about my reflections.  I immodestly think I draw upon a broad swath of areas. And  I particularly push learning to learn and meta-cognition to others because it’s been so core to my own success.

What I thrive on is finding situations where the automatic solutions don’t apply. It’s not just a clear case for ID, or performance support, or…  Where technology can be used (or used better) in systemic ways to create new opportunities. Where I really contribute is where it’s clear that change is needed, but what, how, and where to start aren’t obvious.  I’ve a reliable track record of finding unique, and yet pragmatic solutions to such situations, including the above named areas I’ve innovated  in.  And it is a commitment of mine to do so in ways that pass on that knowledge, to work in collaboration to co-develop the approach and share the concepts driving it, to hand off ownership to the client. I’m not looking for a sinecure; I want to help while I’m adding value and move on when I’m not.  And many folks have been happy to have my assistance.

It’s hard for me to talk about myself in this way, but I reckon I bring that  polymath ability of a broad background to organizations trying to advance.   It’s been  in assisting their ability to develop design processes that yield better learning outcomes, through mobile strategies and solutions that meet their situation, to overarching organizational strategies that map from concepts to system.  There’s a pretty fair track record to back up what I say.

I am  deep in a lot of areas, and have the ability to synthesize solutions  across  these areas in integrated ways. I may not be the deepest in any one, but when you need to look across them and integrate a systemic solution, I like to think and try to ensure that I’m your guy. I help organizations envision a future state, identify the benefits and costs, and prioritize the opportunities to define a strategy.  I  have operated independently or with partners, but I adamantly retain my freedom  to say what I truly think so that you get an unbiased response from the broad suite of  principles I have to hand.  That’s my commitment to integrity.

I didn’t intend this to be a commercial, but I did like his perspective and it made me reflect on what my own value proposition is.  I welcome your thoughts.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog already in progress…

Revolution Roadmap: Assess

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Last week, I wrote about a process to follow in moving forward on the L&D  Revolution. The first step is  Assess,  and I’ve been thinking about what that means.   So here, let me lay out some preliminary thoughts.

The first level are the broad categories.  As I’m talking about aligning with how we think, work, and learn, those are the three top areas where I feel we fail to recognize what’s known about cognition, individually and together. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m looking at how we use technology to facilitate productivity in ways specifically focused on helping people learn. But let me be clear, here I’m talking about the big picture of learning – problem-solving, design, research, innovation, etc – as they call fall under the category of things we don’t know the answer to when we begin.

I started with how we think. Too often we don’t put information in the world when we can, yet we know that all our thinking isn’t in our head.  So we can ask :

  • Are you using performance consulting?
  • Are you taking responsibility for resource development?
  • Are you ensuring  the information architecture for resources  is  user-focused?

The next area is working, and here the revelation is that the best outcomes come from people working together.  Creative friction, when done in consonance with how we work together best, is where the best solutions and the best new ideas will come from. So you can look at:

  • Are people communicating?
  • Are people collaborating?
  • Do you  have in place a learning culture?

Finally,  with learning, as the area most familiar to L&D, we need to look at whether we’re applying what’s known about making learning work.  We should start with Serious eLearning, but we can go farther.  Things to look at include:

  • Are  you practicing  deeper learning design?
  • Are you  designing  engagement into learning?
  • Are you developing  meta-learning?

In addition to each of these areas, there are cross-category issues.  Things to look at for each include:

  • Do you have infrastructure?
  • What are you measuring?

All of these areas have nuances underneath, but at the top level these strike me as the core categories of questions.  This is working down to  a finer grain than I  looked at in the book (c.f. Figure 8.1), though that was a good start at evaluating where one is.

I’m convinced that the first step for change is to understand where you are (before the next step, Learn, about where you could be).  I’ve yet to see many organizations that are in full swing here, and I have persistently made the case that the status quo isn’t sufficient.  So, are you ready to take the first step to assess where you are?

 

Biz tech

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One of my arguments for the L&D revolution is the role that L&D  could be playing.  I believe that if L&D were truly enabling optimal execution as well as facilitating continual innovation (read: learning), then they’d be as critical to the organization as IT. And that made me think about how this role would differ.

To be sure, IT is critical.  In today’s business, we track our business, do our modeling, run operations, and more with IT.  There is  plenty of vertical-specific software, from  product design to transaction tracking, and of course more general business software such as document generation, financials, etc.  So how does L&D be as ubiquitous as other software?  Several ways.

First, formal learning software is really enterprise-wide.  Whether it’s simulations/scenarios/serious games, spaced learning delivered via mobile, or user-generated content (note: I’m deliberately avoiding the LMS and courses ;), these things should play a role in preparing the audience to optimally execute and being accessed by a large proportion of the audience.  And that’s not including our tools to develop same.

Similarly, our performance support solutions – portals housing job aids and context-sensitive support – should be broadly distributed.  Yes, IT may own the portals, but in most cases they are not to be trusted to do a user- and usage-centered solution.  L&D should be involved in ensuring that the solutions both articulate with and reflect the formal learning, and are organized by user need not business silo.

And of course the social network software – profiles and locators as well as communication and collaboration tools – should be under the purview of L&D. Again, IT may own them or maintain them, but the facilitation of their use, the understanding of the different roles and ensuring they’re being used efficiently, is a role for L&D.

My point here is that there is an enterprise-wide category of software, supporting learning in the big sense (including problem-solving, research, design, innovation), that should be under the oversight of L&D.  And this is the way in which L&D becomes more critical to the enterprise.  That it’s not just about taking people away from work and doing things to them before sending them back, but facilitating productive engagement and interaction throughout the workflow.  At least at the places where they’re stepping outside of the known solutions, and that is increasingly going to be the case.

Embrace Plan B

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The past two weeks, I’ve been on the road (hence the paucity of posts).  And they’ve been great opportunities to engage around interesting topics, but also have provided some learning opportunities (ahem).  The title of this post, by the way, came from m’lady, who was quoting what a senior Girl Scout said was the biggest lesson she learned from her leader, “to embrace Plan B” ;).

So two weeks ago I was visiting a client working on upping their learning game. This is a challenge in a production environment, but as I discussed many times in posts over the second half of 2014 and some this year, I think there are some serious actions that can be taken.  What is needed are better ways to work with SMEs, better constraints around what makes useful content, and perhaps most importantly what makes meaningful interaction and practice.  I firmly believe that  there are practical ways to get serious elearning going without radical change, though some initial hiccups  will be experienced.

This past week I spoke twice. First on a broad spectrum of learning directions to a group that was doing distance learning and wanted to take a step back and review what they’d been doing and look for improvement opportunities. I covered deeper learning, social learning, meta-learning, and more. Then I went beyond and talked about 70:20:10, measurement,  games and simulations, mlearning, the performance ecosystem, and more.  I then moved  on to a separate (and delightful) event in Vancouver to promote the Revolution.

It was the transition between the two events last week that threw me. So, Plan A was to fly back home on Tuesday, and then fly on to Vancouver on Wed morning.   But, well, life happened.  All my flights were delayed (thanks, American) on my flight there and back to the first engagement, and both of the first flights such that I missed the connection. On the way out I just got in later than I expected (leading to 4.5 hours sleep before the long and detailed presentation).  But on the way back, I missed the last connecting flight home.  And this had several consequences.

So, instead of spending Tuesday night in my own bed, and repacking for the next day, I spent the night in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.  Since they blamed it on weather (tho’ if the incoming flight had been on time, it might’ve gotten out in time to avoid the storm), they didn’t have any obligation to provide accommodation, but there were cots and blankets available. I tried to pull into a dark and quiet place, but most of the good ones were taken already. I found a boarding gate that was out of the way, but it was bright and loud.  I gave up after an hour or so and headed off to another area, where I found a lounge where I could pull together a couple of armchairs and managed to doze for 2.5 or so hours, before getting up and on the hunt for some breakfast.  Lesson: if something’s not working, change!

I caught a flight back home in just enough time to catch the next one up to Vancouver. The problem was, I wasn’t able to swap out my clothes, so I was desperately in need of some laundry.  Upon arriving, I threw one of the shirts, socks, etc into a sink and gave them a wash and hung them up. (I also took a shower, which was not only a necessity after a rough night but a great way to gather myself and feel a bit more human).  The next morning, as I went to put on the shirt, I found a stain!  I couldn’t get up in front of all those people with a stained shirt.  Plan B was out the door. Also, the other shirt had acquired one too!  Plan C on the dust heap. Now what?  Fortunately, my presentation was in the afternoon, but I needed to do something.

So I went downstairs and found a souvenir shop in the hotel, but the shirts were all a wee bit too loud.  I didn’t really want to pander to the crowd quite so egregiously. I asked at the hotel desk if there was a place I could buy a shirt within walking distance, and indeed there was.  I was well and truly on Plan D by this time.  So I hiked on out to a store and fortunately found another shirt I could throw on.  Lesson: keep changing!

I actually made the story part of my presentation.  I made  the point that just like in my case, organizations need not only optimal execution of the plans, but then also the ability to innovate if the plan isn’t working.  And L&D  can (and should) play a role in this.  So, help your people be prepared to create and embrace Plan B (and C and…however many adaptations they need to have).

And one other lesson for me: be better prepared for tight connections to go awry!

Got Game?

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Why should you, as a learning designer, take a game design workshop?  What is the relationship between games and learning?  I want to suggest that there are  very  important reasons why you should.

Just so you don’t think I’m the only one saying it, in the decade since I wrote the book  Engaging Learning:  Designing e-Learning Simulation Games, there have been a large variety of books on the topic. Clark Aldrich has written three, at least count. James Paul Gee has pointed out how the semantic features of games match to the way our brains learn, as has David  Williamson Shaeffer.  People like Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuhler, Henry Jenkins, and Sasha Barab have been strong advocates of games for learning. And of course Karl Kapp has a recent book on the topic.  You could also argue that Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun is another vote given that his premise is that fun  is learning. So I’m not alone in this.

But more specifically, why get steeped in it?  And I want to give you three reasons: understanding engagement, understanding practice, and understanding design.  Not to say you don’t know these, but I’ll suggest that there are depths which you’re not yet incorporating into your learning, and  you could and should.  After all, learning  should be ‘hard fun’.

The difference between a simulation and a game is pretty straightforward.  A simulation is just a model of the world, and it can be in any legal state and be taken to any other.  A self-motivated and effective self-learner can use that to discover what they need to know.  But for specific learning purposes, we put that simulation into an initial state, and ask the learner to take it to a goal state, and we’ve chosen those so that they can’t do it until they understand the relationships we want them to understand. That’s what I call a scenario, and we typically wrap a story around it to motivate the goal.  We can tune that into a game.  Yes, we turn it into a game, but by tuning.

And that’s the important point about engagement. We can’t call it game; only our players can tell us whether it’s a game or not. To achieve that goal, we have to understand what motivates our learners, what they care about, and figure out how to integrate that into the learning.  It’s about not designing a learning event, but designing a learning  experience.  And, by studying how games achieve that, we can learn how to take our learning from mundane to meaningful.   Whether or not we have the resources and desire to build actual games, we can learn valuable lesssons to apply to any of our learning design. It’s the emotional element most ID leaves behind.

I also maintain that, next to mentored live practice, games are the best thing going (and individual mentoring doesn’t scale well, and live practice can be expensive both to develop but particularly when mistakes are made).  Games  build upon that by providing deep practice; embedding important decisions in a context that makes the experience as meaningful as when it really counts.  We use game techniques to heighten and deep the experience, which makes it closer to live practice, reducing transfer distance. And we can provide repeated practice.  Again, even if we’re not able to implement full game engines, there are many important lessons to take to designing other learning experiences: how to design better multiple choice questions, the value of branching scenarios, and more.  Practical improvements that will increase engagement and increase outcomes.

Finally, game designers use design processes that have a lot to offer to formal learning design. Their practices in terms of information collection (analysis), prototyping and refinement, and evaluation are advanced by the simple requirement that their output is such that people will actually pay for the experience.  There are valuable elements that can be transferred to learning design even if you aren’t expecting to have an outcome so valuable you can charge for it.

As professionals, it behooves us to look to other fields with implications that could influence and improve our outcomes. Interface design, graphic design, software engineering, and more are all relevant areas to explore. So is game design, and arguably the most relevant one we can.

So, if you’re interested in tapping into this, I encourage you to consider the game design workshop I’ll be running for the ATD Atlanta chapter on the 3rd of June. Their price is fair even if you’re not a chapter member, and it’s great deal if you are.  Further, it’s a tried and tested format that’s been well received since I first started offering it. The night before, I’ll be busting myths at the chapter meeting.  I hope I’ll see you there!