Motivation and Simplicity - Back to the Basics

"I was once told by a manager of a software company that customers were complaining that they couldn't find anything on the support section of the Web site. The response of the technical writers was that the customers weren't searching hard enough."

The article, "Simplicity is Hard Work", that this quote comes from is great. One of those pieces that you'll want to read and re-read because it summarizes a concept that is both basic and key: the difficulty of designing a lesson that is simple and easy for the learner.

But there was a reason that the quote caught my attention. The attitude is so easy for a designer to adopt:
"The learners don't want to learn touchy-feely stuff."
"The company culture is against change."
"They just want to get the information they can use immediately, they don't want to learn any of the background material, even though it's crucial for success."
"We have a bunch of non-adopters."
How often have we heard excuses such as these for the failure of our training programs? I know I used one or two of these after my first professional design. The one where the students were too intimidated to complete the assignments.

There is some truth to all of these statements but, after performance testing, motivating the learner is the most important role of the designer. The article: "The Magic of Learner Motivation: The ARCS Model" offers a great summary of the ARCS model and also suggests some questions to determine learner motivation. As Kevin Kruse, the author of the article says "Designers must strive to create a deeper motivation in learners for them to learn new skills and transfer those skills back into the work environment."

After I got over my first disappointment in the success of my lesson, I admit that it was my responsibility to make the activities familiar and achievable for the learners. And it's the responsibility of the people writing the reference material to make reading it easier than a call to tech support. And, unless we take this responsibility to heart, we could just as well have the SMEs write the training material.

Cultural Differences

According to Slate:
"The Los Angeles Times fronts the commission but leads with more worry from Iraqis that the draft constitution is too Islam-heavy. The piece also acknowledges, as Slate's Mickey Kaus has argued, that the draft is actually so vague that nobody know how it will play out.
"Considering Iraq's draft constitution, one Islamic scholar in the U.S. said, "It's not a workable document. They brushed their differences under the carpet and crafted language that they could vote for." He added Sudan tried something similar 20 years ago. What followed was a 20-year internal war."

This makes me think about contracts and the approaches different cultures have to them. As I learned in the culture section of my instruction design classes, some culture view contracts as commitment to a relationship, rather than encompassing all imaginable contingencies. The details are left to be worked out in practice since an overspecification is seen as a lack of trust. If this caused a 20-year war in the Sudan, is it that this style of contract is worse than our own, or is it that the war was inevitable due to irreconcilable goals?

That area of the world seems to be pretty fractious. Are there more wars or fewer wars in places with looser contracts. Has contractual language changed in Europe, leading to fewer battles and eventual union?

Possibly, if two people are committed to a decision, a contract maintains that commitment. If they are not, the most finely-worded document could not hold them together.

Curated Knowledge

Untechnical Writing has several metaphors for the technical writer:

• Writer as translator - translating Technese into normal language.
  
• Writer as host - welcoming guests to a new, scary complicated place.
  
• Writer as friend - making friends feel comfortable while helping them master a new experience.
  
• Writer as nerd next door - knowing the inner workings of technology, and telling people what to do and where to get more information.
  
• Writer as teacher - lighting the spark of knowledge in your students.
  
• Writer as intrepid explorer - documenting a discovery process so others can see the sights while avoiding the pitfalls.
  
• Writer as tour guide - guiding tourists through a dangerous foreign land. Protecting them while showing them a good time.

I think these are equally true of instructional designers, though I could imagine Thiagi arguing that instructional designers are not any of these things. Writing is content development, not instructional design. Designers DESIGN: they determine what people need to be able to do in order to solve significant performance gaps. Then they figure out participants can receive feedback indicating whether or not the gap has been closed. The in-between stuff should be engaging, but it's more-or-less the responsibility of the participants.

I'd like to argue with my imaginary Thiagi by adding another metaphor to the list: instructional designer as curator. There is a lot of information out there. A whole, awful, lot if you include the internet. Even if you're given specific pieces of information, it takes a lot of knowledge to be able to know what to do with them. For example, after an undergraduate degree and a year as a PhD student, I finally learned how to take apart a psychology article in less than an hour. I can describe the point of the article and any elegancies or flaws.

Imagine what it would have been like to attend my very first psychology class and, instead of having a structured syllabus, to be given the tests, the books, all of the handouts and the instructor's contact information. "Call me day or night." the instructor says, "See you in 16 weeks."

Yeah, I'd have all of the information and would know exactly what I was expected to know and do. I'm also pretty sure that, as a complete novice, it would take me much longer than 16 weeks to figure out how everything fit together - if I ever did.

By providing structure, by telling me what specific piece of information I needed at a specific time, I was able to easily and enjoyably master the subject. The professor acted as a curator, not only assembling all of the information, but also arranging it so it told a coherent story. Even better was my instructional design professor, who fed me the information in such perfect chunks that it felt like the theory and skill blossomed within me. I still don't feel like I "learned" anything in her class, though my abilities after her class were of a different magnitude than those I had going in.

Shouldn't one of a designer's goals be providing Flow? Flow is a state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced CHICK-sent-me-high), where challenge and ability are perfectly balanced. When you're in Flow, you are completely engaged - unaware of time or other distractions. As designers, if we can accurately gauge the abilities of our students, we should be able to bring them to this state, feeding them new information while increasing the challenge of an exercise. They would feel exhilarated instead of exhausted, and be excited by the prospect of practicing the new skill in the real world.

Here's a couple of Mihaly articles in Fast Company, for the interested:

The Art of Work
There's No Business Like FLOW Business

Learning and Development Operations

Marketing Profs has published an article called "Marketing Operations: Solving Marketing's Seven Deadly Sins"

If you replace "Marketing" with "Learning and Development" throughout the article, it offers just as good advice to us.

One thought: since Marketing and L&D have such similar needs, why aren't they more closely allied in most companies?

World Wide Web: Just-in-time performance support?

I would argue that the World Wide Web is very much becoming a just-in-time performance support tool for everybody with access. I would also argue that people are making an analogy between the web and other performance support tools that they use, thus applying the same expectations.

For example, when I was speaking to a coworker, she expressed her frustration with the company's intranet. I agreed with her: it is unwieldy and unsearchable. I once spent 15 minutes trying to find my way to an application that the entire company uses constantly. We agreed that part of the problem is that computers have become so easy to use: I can find most anything posted on the internet in a few seconds with Google, and I even have the Google application that will search my desktop as well.

Accordingly, I believe that the world is ready for knowledge management systems. People are very receptive to using company intranet sites to find just about anything that they need for their job. The caveat is that dumping all the information that you have into an enormous, unsearchable database (which I've seen in no few places) will no longer fly. We're too used to an environment where you can find anything from a graduate thesis to movie clips showing dance steps to household cleaning tips by typing a few words into a box and clicking a button.

Interesting Article: Web vs. Print

Recall Ability: Web Content Versus Print Content discusses how people use web media differently than printed media. It argues that people are much more goal-oriented when on the web.

This jibes with an observation of mine: more computer-literate people move their eyes less when navigating a program or surfing the Internet. It appears that they do a quick scan to identify what they need to do next, then do it. Less computer-literate people spend more time reading everything on the screen. I contextualize this using the hours and hours and hours I wasted when first using the Internet. German guinea pigs, water garden supplies and plants, diaper-fetishists, the world at my fingertips - days were drained from my life. My time is more precious now, so I only use the web when Googling something or buying a book on Amazon. If my next step isn't readily apparent, or there are too many options, I get frustrated quickly.

The article further goes on to state that we are using the web as a personal memory upgrade: I don't need to remember who Samuel Adams was, a quick glance at Wikipedia gives me everything I could possibly use. Can't remember who did a song? Query Google using the one line you can remember.

I see two content stereotypes emerging for computers: games and the super-functional use of the web.

I think that both these facts - the task-focused use of the web and the reliance on computers as know-all references - should inform how we use the web for performance support and will also impact the expectations people have of CBTs and other computer-based media. The less like a game your CBT is, the more streamlined and to-the-point it has to be.

Some ideas for improving Performance Support

"Great trainers used to be defined by great delivery," Rossett says. "They were magnificent in the classroom. Nowadays, they have to be magnificent in the results." www.workforce.com

This Workforce.com quote once again illustrates the fact that changed performance is the essential purpose for training. This is something that is easy to lose sight of in the everyday bustle of creating content and the difficulties of pinning down valid performance measures.

Much of the time, the feedback we receive supports the theory that training does help, that our trainees are more successful, faster. It is this success which proves that it is time to raise the bar. If we can get great feedback with only the most rudimentary forms of performance-measurement, just think of the successes we could create with the ability to measure success on the job.

In my experience, there are two things stymie performance measurement and support in a Learning and Development department: client-focus and measurement abilities.

Much of the time, training is ordered: a supervisor is having trouble, senior management are starting a new initiative, what have you. We do our best to push back, to do a needs analysis and a task analysis to define the root problem and figure out what to do about it. My contention is that speaking with the learner during the analysis is already too late. We need to be in front of the problem, constantly supporting and communicating with our learner population. That way we can provide performance support tools and modify our training before problems arise. If we wait, frequently the supervisor or manager must detail a plan before getting the go-ahead to request training from L&D. Going back and getting new approvals based on the needs analysis can be too time-consuming or can increase the chance of a final veto.

This strategy has many problems as well, but these must be surmounted in order to push ahead as performance technologists.

The other problem is our measurement abilities. How can you judge training's impact on sales figures when your salespeople transfer between products (requiring re-training), quit, come from different backgrounds, have different sized territories, different markets and have different success metrics?

My response is to hire a statistician. Your local university should have one tucked away in the business department, or psychology, sociology or anthropology. These disciplines understand the complexities of measuring human performance.

A statistician should be able to help you sort through the data that is available and decide what new measurements are needed. (And tell you what other measurements you could use when you can't get the reports that you need.) Then, they could analyze the data and coach you on what it means. The good news is that the consultation about the needed data would only be required the first year, with occasional updates as the focus of the department changes.

The analysis itself should take very little time as well (probably less than a day). It's likely you could get some real data to use in departmental strategy, budget requests, etc. for around $1000 the first year. It's also likely that the solid numbers could justify much more money being spent on learning and development.

Pet Peeve - Apostrophes: a funny

I'm reading "Untechnical Writing" by Michael Bremer. In a side bar, he includes a quote from Dave Barry's "Tips for Writers." I'm sharing this because it clearly and succinctly sums up my feelings about the use of apostrophes. Also, I can't stop laughing about it.

Dear Mister Language Person:

What is the purpose of the apostrophe?

Answer:

The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader that an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S. Another important grammer concept to bear in mind when creating hand-lettered business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.