Before divulging the three impacts, let me first present a simple and generally accepted model of EI. The model starts in the lower left, quadrant #1 in the diagram below, and says we must first understand ourselves, if we are to be successful managing ourselves, which is quadrant #2. Then the model moves to quadrant #3, where we work to understand the emotions and actions of others, if we are to move to quadrant #4, where we develop healthy positive relationships and an ability to cope with the inevitable conflicts and issues that arise in the workplace and other social settings.

What are the three powerful IMPACTS from emotional intelligence that you, as a talent developer, can use to develop and improve your professional practice?

Impact #1 – on you as a talent developer

EI can have a profound impact on you, the central character in the classroom, or when you design, develop, or deliver training. EI is more than an “added training skill”, like using Powerpoint more effectively or developing better group exercises. EI can change you. It can create more connected communicators, able to manage themselves or a group through positive growth and in those situations where conflict and difficulties arise.

Impact #2 – within an existing course or a course you will create

You can add EI as a component to many existing programs or courses and achieve amazing results. I’ve provided three extremely successful course examples (below), from very different public and private sector entities, that have incorporated the lessons and strengths of EI into their courses.

Impact #3 – You can have an impact by adding an EI course to any of your existing course series or simply as a stand-alone course for your audience.

I’ll show you more than one way to do this below.

Impact #1 – When and how is EI useful to you as a talent developer?

In the talent development arena, you need to be able to persuade, influence, and motivate, in addition to training or coaching. EI can give you the fundamental tools and skills that you can take to every talent development task you engage in, including design, development, training, or coaching. The skills can be used as you work with others, including team members, colleagues, or with training participants.

• Move from unthinking reaction to reflection, an increased ability to listen and more positive, thoughtful, and reasoned responses to situations.
  • EI can give you the awareness and the tools to move from unthinking reaction, which is often counterproductive and negative, to pause and reflection, which will result in a more positive and productive results. This is extremely useful when dealing with someone or a group you wish to influence, a negative participant, or an unruly or uncooperative group.
• EI can provide relief from stress
  • We can either go into a training situation with a calm, mindful, and engaged state of mind or we can take all our stress and worries to the classroom. EI provides the tools for managing stress and freeing oneself to be positive, calm, and “in the training moment”.
• EI can help in a number of other related areas including: putting us more in touch with nonverbal cues and how to use them for improved communication, recognizing our emotions and not allowing them to impede us, and an increased ability to diffuse conflict before it impedes learning and growth.

Impact #2 – Use the addition of EI components, principles, and lessons to strengthen existing courses.

You can add EI as a component to training programs and see results in the form of increased learning, acceptance, and application. Consider these three very different organizations that have effectively incorporated EI into a training program.

The California Public Employees Retirement System (CALPERS)

CALPERS conducts a program called The CORE Journey, delivered by Dr. Dianna Wright, the author of the book of the same name. The course provides a step-by-step guide for sustainable self-direction, professional growth, and personal development. The program effectively uses emotional intelligence as a key tool and technique for achieving this growth and change.

Google

Google’s most popular course for the past three years has been a course entitled, “Search Inside Yourself”. The course was designed to help employees cope with the stress of work and find an acceptable work life balance. The two primary components of the course are emotional intelligence and mindfulness. A book and public workshop have also been developed, based on the success of the course.

US ARMY

The US Army has worked with Martin Seligman, often called the father of positive psychology, to create a training program to improve the resilience and psychological health of soldiers. Though the program has many components, emotional intelligence is deployed as a tool to help soldiers avoid immediate and negative reactions to events. The soldiers are taught to use EI’s tools of recognizing negative trigger emotions and then managing these internal emotions so they result in reasoned and thoughtful responses, versus negative or even violent reactions.

If these three diverse groups can effectively harness the power of EI, imagine what it could do for some of your programs. Note: If you are interested, you can find more about these three programs in this blog – http://getresultsfromtraining.com/what-do-google-the-us-army-and-calpers-have-in-common/

Impact # 3 – You can have an impact by adding an EI course to any of your existing course series or simply as a stand-alone course for your audience.

In my training practice, we use emotional intelligence as a cornerstone of our interpersonal relationship courses. EI provides an understandable structure and approach for participants and is based on the sort of empirical evidence (from cognitive psychology and related fields) demanded by the business and public sector today.

We also add a one- or two-day EI class to many of our problem solving, decision making, supervisory, and management series, which last from eight to fourteen days, delivered over a multi-week period. We find that ending a course series (especially a technical training series) with EI provides a beneficial way to close a series. The participants end their learning with a model for taking their newly learned skills back to the workplace, where the biggest challenge is often how to apply or use new skills. EI gives the participants tools and techniques for improved communication, working through conflict, and embracing change, which are all vital to implementing change and improvement.

If you want to create an EI course for your workplace, there are many examples of existing EI courses you can use as a model. There are so many resources available, that for a modest investment in time, you or a colleague should be able to develop a course of your own. Of course, you could also send your students to an already established and well-reviewed EI course. Finally, you could go to your trusted provider of in-house training and ask them to show or demonstrate their EI course options for you. Many training vendors are using EI in their communications classes, interpersonal skills courses, and to add value to technical course offerings.

Get Results From Training
Bruce Winner
www.GetResultsFromTraining.com

Following are some resources, if you want to learn more about Emotional Intelligence…

“Emotional Intelligence 2.0,” Travis Bradberry, 2009.
An accessible introduction to EI if you are new to the subject and want an easy and low (time or cost) read.

“Put Emotional Intelligence to Work,” Jeff Feldman and Karl Mulle, 2007.
This book provides a more detailed look at EI, but it is well written and organized, and has more examples of using EI in the workplace.

“Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,” Daniel P Goleman, 1995.
Goleman has done as much or more than anyone else to popularize the notion that EQ often matters more than IQ. This is his first of many books on the subject and is a great read for someone who wants a good grounding in EI from one of the recognized experts in the field.

These books below provide further insight into the EI related programs I mentioned in this blog.

“The C.O.R.E Journey: Unleash Your Power to Thrive,” Dianna Wright, PhD, 2013.

“Master Resilience Training in the U.S. Army,” Reivich and Seligman, American Psychologist, January 2011.

“Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness, (and World Peace),” Chade-Meng Tan, 2012.

Are you prepared for some surprising news?

Actually the “secret” is no secret at all. The arena of motivational science has uncovered proven means to motivate ourselves and others. The means to motivate (or destroy motivation) have been rigorously tested in the laboratory and reinforced by studies in the workplace.

This short blog allows for only an introduction to motivational science, but it will provide a way for you to get started, if you are interested in learning more.

If I had to shorten this blog’s message to one sentence it would be the following.

One of the most successful models of motivation is built on:

1. Autonomy,
2. Mastery, and
3. Purpose

The formula provides a path to getting motivated, staying motivated, performing better, and even being more successful and happier in the workplace. The formal name for the model is “self-determination theory” and it has been around years. Surprisingly, in spite of its tremendous power and potential, it has been largely ignored by the private and public sector (and talent development) communities for as many years.

Autonomy

Autonomy may be the most important of the three principles. Humans thrive in autonomous situations. We need to be somewhat self-directed, in order to be satisfied with our jobs and motivated to perform at increasingly higher levels. Of course there must be accountability, but employees need the freedom to search for information, uncover alternatives, and implement their own self-discovered solutions.

This doesn’t mean giving employees total independence, but as Daniel Pink says in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, It means acting with choice – which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.”

But you may wonder how one provides or promotes autonomy. Again, Pink provides a few proven means from the research or methods employed by managers to increase employee job satisfaction by providing “autonomy support”.

Mastery

People strive for mastery; it motivates them to keep going and is proven to make them happier at work. No one has done more work in this arena that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (cheek-sent-me-high) the psychologist and well-known writer, who is probably best known for his concept of “flow”. You may recognize the term from sports, where athletes talk about being fully immersed or engaged in the moment and not only feeling in control, able to perform at their peak, but even feeling an immense joy at being in this state.

This is the same flow state that people can achieve in the workplace. Flow happens while people seek to master a new task or skill and lose themselves in focused concentration. This concentration can be so intense and engaging, that one loses track of time. People find these experiences immensely rewarding and enjoyable. When the conditions for flow are created in the workplace, people become increasingly engaged on the job.

I’m sure you’ve heard colleagues say many times that they can’t wait for the weekend or even to retire, in order to engage in what they think will make them feel their best or “reach a flow state” if they were using Csikszentmihalyi’s language. Surprisingly, after many replicated studies, it is well documented that people are more likely to achieve flow while at work, than during their leisure activities!

Purpose

Work must have a purpose for individuals, if they are to be truly motivated in the workplace. But the good news is that the vast majority of people in the workplace welcome the opportunity to serve, whether it is in service to clients, colleagues, teammates, or family.

Elizabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School puts it this way, “People can be inspired to meet stretch goals and tackle impossible challenges, if they care about the outcome.”

Adam Grant, of the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the book “Give and Take”, provides further evidence that people perform better when they feel purpose driven. In a controlled call center (a call center for a college fundraising entity) Grant divided call center employees into three groups. One group received information nightly about the benefit of working in the call center, while the second group received information about the good things that had happened to students who were the recipients of the fundraising scholarships, and the last group (the control group) received no additional information. The second group, who heard about the how scholarships had changed lives and given recipients new and better opportunities doubled their fundraising over the other two groups. Surprisingly the effect continued for many months after the study ended. People are motivated by having a purpose larger than themselves.

A parting thought on motivation

Remember, people motivate themselves. Tap into their intrinsic motivation (motivation that comes from inside and is not based on external carrots or sticks) by creating the conditions so employees can be optimally motivate themselves. It won’t be easy to do, but the results will be worth it.

Motivated people produce more, are more creative and innovative, and they are happier and more optimistic. They are just the sort of people you want surrounding and supporting you in the workplace.

Get Results From Training
Bruce Winner
www.GetResultsFromTraining.com

With the support of the local ASTD chapter and responses within the chapter LinkedIn group, I was able to conduct a survey and interviews with several local attendees and speakers over the past few weeks. The following are the result of this survey and interviews.

Biggest Takeaways from the Event

• Networking & Success Stories
  Mentioned by almost all respondents, networking was by far the biggest takeaway from the event. I believe it is safe to say that most professionals understand and embrace the value of networking. Given the diversity among attendees, there was much that could be learned by networking with professionals from around the world. Its opportunities such as these that open doors to new opportunities or provide insight enable you to have a breakthrough moment in project development.
• Leadership Buy In and Involvement in the Learning Process
  Several respondents spoke to the importance of gaining buy in from leadership, not just at the beginning of the design, but also throughout the development of the learning program. Maintaining open lines of communication and the involvement of leadership throughout the design process will reduce the risk of a potential disconnect between the learning objectives & outcomes as it relates to the impact on the goals of the organization. In addition, gaining buy in ensure that they understand the value of investing capital and resources into the learning initiative and will provide the necessary support and motivation to see the project through to completion.
• Creating “Training Programs” versus “Training Events”
  Another common theme expressed at the conference was the need to develop “Training Programs” versus “Training Events.” One of my favorite learning quotes clearly explains what this means.

  There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
  ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

  When a training course ends for a learner, doesn’t mean that the learning process ends. Design your learning experiences as comprehensive programs that integrate additional learning and collaboration opportunities leading up to the course as well as after the course. This will increase the potential for enhance learning and on-the-job application of learned concepts or skills. In the end, it is better for the learning and the organization due to higher retention and performance.

• Tech integration for enhanced Learning & Collaboration
  At this point it goes without saying that technology has and will continue to play a significant role in the changing landscape of how we learn. Technology affords us the ability to learn without boundaries. Improvements in technology in the field of learning & development continue to evolve and create new learning capabilities both in the classroom as well as through distance learning and online courseware. Through the use of social media, apps, and other tech tools, you now have a diverse toolbox of resources to deliver learning when & where your learners need it.

Favorite Presentations

• TU102 – Strengths-Based Performance Management: Do What the Best Leaders Do
  Presented by Marcus Buckingham – One of my favorite speakers, Marcus apparently delivered yet another riveting presentation according to one of the respondents who stated, “Marcus Buckingham’s presentation on Strengths-Based Performance Management was excellent. He is such a charismatic and engaging speaker, and his thoughts just resonated with me. His theory is that Training is the ‘seed’ for learning, but a good performance management system and frequent follow-up provide the fertile ground for that seed to grow.” If you’re interested in more from Marcus Buckingham on this topic, he wrote a post dated 12/3/2013 on Harvard Business Review titled “What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?”
• M300 – Case Study: Disney’s Approach to Selection, Training, and Engagement
  What do customers remember more: products or people? When Walt Disney decided the answer was people, he hit upon an essential business truth that led to an immediate and sustained success. At Disney, we sync the mission of small teams with the culture of the whole organization. So while there may be thousands of job classifications, there will always be one common goal: exceptional guest experiences.
• M209 – The Accidental Instructional Designer
  Presented by Cammy Bean – Most of the instructional designers in the e-learning business got here by accident. This session took a look at four key areas to focus on in order to become a well-rounded e-learning designer, talk about ways that you can take your practice to the next level, and share some quick tips for better e-learning design.

There were other presentations mentioned, however given the extensive amount of tracks and presentations available, I highly recommend that you visit the event website (Click Here) and begin your educational journey.

Materials Download

Whether you attended the event or not, a substantial amount of session materials are available for download directly on the ASTD ICE event website. Whether you were unable to attend or perhaps had to make a difficult decision to attend one session versus another, there is a wealth of information available for download. Visit the following link to be sent directly to the materials made available (Click Here).
SPECIAL NOTES: These materials will be removed by August 8, 2014.

Last but not least, I wanted to share some of the insights from one of the speakers at the conference. I was fortunate enough to have a phone conversation with Holly Burkett PhD, SPHR, CPT who is a resident of Sacramento and the Principal of Evaluation Works (more on her company here). Her session was titled “W311 – Sustaining the ROI Process During Changing Times and Shifting Tides.” The interactive session used real-world case scenarios to help attendees identify critical change issues that must be addressed when adopting, maintaining, or sustaining a results-based measurement process. An innovative framework for assessing an organization’s evaluation process and practice maturity was introduced and had an opportunity to use the framework to assess their own organization during the session. They walked away with practical tools and job aids for enhancing the long-term value, and overall change resiliency, of their measurement plans and practices, and identified characteristics of a sustainable measurement process. In conversation with her, she brought up some salient points that have changed the way that I approach performance evaluations and how I will develop them going forward. I highly recommend you explore her materials, as they will be of value to you.

In a follow-up post, I will focus on ways to get more out of your conference experience and prepare you for next year, whether you plan to attend or not. Stay tuned!

Guest Blogger Todd Greider, CPLP®
www.about.me/toddgreider
Twitter: @toddgreider
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/toddgreider

Organizations around the nation are already adopting programs aimed at accomplishing this amazing transformation.

Who are some of these organizations?

They range from large to small and progressive to conservative, but they have one thing in common. These organizations recognize they can play a role in creating more resilient, successful, and even happier employees! Current research confirms that these factors all contribute to increased productivity, reduced turnover, and boosts in employee satisfaction.

• Google – On Google’s Silicon Valley campus, the most popular course for the past three years has been a course called “Search Inside Yourself” or SIY.
  • SIY combines elements of mindfulness and emotional intelligence to help Google employees manage their work-life balance, control their reactions, and increase their self-awareness.
  • A book and course, of the same name, has been launched to promote the concept that this science-based approach can be used by other organizations to achieve the same results.
• The United States Army – The US Army has worked with Martin Seligman, often called the father of positive psychology, to create a training program to improve the resilience and psychological health of soldiers.
  • The training was instituted to help soldiers deal with the stress of deployments, improve their family relationships pre- and post-deployment, and avoid a host of negative outcomes associated with the stressors of combat and the return to civilian life.
  • The program has been rigorously analyzed and proven in its effectiveness in helping soldiers “bounce-back from stressful events or circumstances, while maintaining a stable level of well-being.”
• The California Public Employees Retirement System (CALPERS) is working with Dr. Dianna Wright on a program based on her book “The C.O.R.E. Journey: Unleash Your Power to Thrive”. Dr. Wright pulls from Harvard’s John Kotter’s classic book, “Leading Change”, an action plan for successful organizational change, and translates it to a process for effective individual change. The C.O.R.E. Journey is a step-by-step guide for sustainable self-direction, personal and professional growth and development, and engaging purpose.
  • The program is built on a foundation of mindfulness-based emotional intelligence and energy management.
  • Some of the goals of the process include elevating employee engagement, increasing resilience, enhancing mental focus, and strengthening trust through self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy.

These programs have all adopted elements from the positive psychology movement, founded by Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania, in the early 1990s. Seligman ceased to focus on the negative aspects of psychology (disorders) and began a scientific quest to explore what could be proven and employed to improve people’s well-being.

This short blog doesn’t allow the space for a full examination of positive psychology, but the basics of positive psychology are summarized in an acronym coined by Seligman. Seligman uses the acronym, P.E.R.M.A. to describe the five items he believes are the key elements for achieving well-being. More importantly, he recognizes there are means (including training programs) that can be employed to improve one’s well-being, success, and happiness. I’ve outlined the elements of PERMA below and how training is being used to build well-being in organizations.

Training – Training can provide the means to move this well-being set-point. Methods include physical exercise, learning new ways of responding to adversity, focusing on other people, and even structured periods of capturing and recording one’s gratitude.E – EngagementEngagement is being completely absorbed in a task. Engagement, sometimes referred to as “flow”, is incredibly pleasurable for individuals and can be described as “the experience of working at full capacity”.

Training – Flow has been intensely studied and it is known to “occur when there is an optimal balance between skill and challenge”. There are tested models for encouraging and ensuring flow for employees and enabling flow can have a tremendous impact on productivity and enjoyment, because it is tied directly to an individual’s intrinsic motivation.R – RelationshipsAnother founder of positive psychology, Christopher Peterson, when asked what, in two words or less, positive psychology is all about, replied, “Other people.”

Training – In recognizing that our personal and professional relationships have such a powerful role in our well-being, positive psychology provides many methods and models to understand and improve relationships. One of the most powerful is the Emotional Intelligence model.M – MeaningSeligman defines meaning as “belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self.” For some this is religion, for others it could be an overriding passion for animals, and for others it might be protecting those without rights.

Training – Meaning is a powerful contributor to well-being and can be influenced by encouraging introspection and examination of what is valuable and worthwhile in one’s life.A – AccomplishmentAccomplishment in the model recognizes that some people pursue success, winning, achievement, or mastery for their own sakes. This is a recognition that an individual should and can, free of coercion, choose what they wish to do.

Training – Training can help individuals identify what they wish to accomplish in life and work. In addition, training can build skills in self-control, delayed gratification, and determination, a trait often referred to as “grittiness” in the language of positive psychology. This training can influence one’s success by building a capacity for resilience in work and life.

If you are interested in a few more resources on positive psychology and related topics, I have included some after my sign-off (below).

Get Results From Training
Bruce Winner
www.GetResultsFromTraining.com

References

“The C.O.R.E Journey: Unleash Your Power to Thrive,” Dianna Wright, PhD, 2013.

“Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being,” Martin E.P. Seligman, 2011.

See also Seligman’s website, The Positive Psychology Center, The University of Pennsylvania – http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/ The site has links to additional readings, videos, questionnaires to gauge one’s levels of well-being, etc. If you want to build your knowledge in the arena of positive psychology, this is a great place to start.

“Master Resilience Training in the U.S. Army,” Reivich and Seligman, American Psychologist, January 2011.

“Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness, (and World Peace),” 2012.

“Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 2008.

“Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness,” Susan L. Smalley PhD and Diana Winston, 2010 (both authors are from MARC, the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center).

The intersection where the lessons of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and learning and development meet is influencing the way training professionals approach training design, development, and delivery.

These lessons include:

• The limits of attention and how this affects the acquisition of information
• How exercise and sleep influence learning
• The myth of multitasking or how multitasking results in decreased learning and performance
• How meditation changes the brain and how it can be used to affect workplace performance

Recently, my local ASTD (now Association for Talent Development or ATD Chapter) hosted Dr. Cameron Carter, MD, UC Davis professor of Psychiatry and Psychology and Director of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience. Dr. Carter spoke on the subject of the relation of neuroscience to learning. On the occasion of his talk, I put together the following booklist for those trainer/developers in attendance. The booklist was meant to assist those who wanted to dive further into some of these brain, mind, training, workforce connections. I hope you find the list helpful. In the coming weeks and months I’ll be exploring the topics of mindfulness, attentiveness, engagement, and other topics from positive psychology and neuroscience in upcoming blogs. I hope you will come back and visit some of those blogs.

Book List

Using Brain Science to Make Training Stick, Sharon L. Bowman, 2010. This is a very approachable book and it provides a suitable starting place for anyone interested in exploring the lessons of brain science as they relate to training. Bowman pulls from many secondary sources, as she makes the connections between neuroscience and psychology, for the trainer who wishes to boost engagement, learning, and the resulting application of training.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, John Medina, First published in2009 and revised in 2014. This is a great introduction to the lessons from brain science and it is delivered in a format that a trainer could easily use in classroom or the design and development of curriculum. The 12 rules provide a solid introduction to many of the applicable lessons from neuroscience to the workplace. Some of the rules include: Rule #4 (Attention), We don’t pay attention to boring things; Rule #5 (Short-Term Memory), Repeat to remember; or Rule #8 (Stress), Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.

Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Eric Jensen, first published in 1998 and revised in 2005. Though Eric Jensen Jensen writes for a traditional education audience (primary or secondary school teachers), his book has many lessons for training and development professionals. Jensen explores topics such as motivation, critical thinking skills, memory, and recall. He offers insights on how to tap into the brain’s natural reward system and how social interaction affects the brain. His message to educators is, “You have far more influence on students’ brains than you realize and it behooves you to learn as much as you can from the findings that science is providing.”

Mind, Brain, and Education Science: A Comprehensive Guide to the New Brain-Based Teaching, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa PhD, 2010. This is another book designed primarily for traditional educators. Dr. Tokuhama seeks to clearly explain “mind, brain, and education science” (MBE Science), or the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and education. She focuses on how MBE can be understood and used most effectively by educators. The book explores some of the myths vs the realities of MBE and the lessons for the classroom regarding emotions, motivation, attention, and memory.

Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness, Susan L. Smalley PhD and Diana Winston, 2010. Oneof Sacramento ASTD’s members is on record (from 10 years ago) as having said that mindfulness will be the next workforce competency. It seems to be true as mindfulness is attracting the attention of cognitive neuroscientists, training professionals, and those who want to explore new tools for coping and thriving in the workplace. Dr. Smalley is the Founding Director of UCLA’s MARC Center (Mindful Awareness Research Center) and presents a scientific explanation for how mindfulness positively and powerfully affects the brain and the body. Her coauthorprovides practical guidance to develop and practice mindfulness in the workplace, as well as the rest of one’s life.

Search Inside Yourself: the Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), Chade-Meng Tan (Google engineer and employee # 107), 2012. This is not a book on neuroscience, but the story of how one company, Google, has used the lessons from neuroscience, psychology, and education to build a groundbreaking new training program they call “Search Inside Yourself”. The training program, which has become Google’s most popular campus training program over the past five years, is based on a powerful combination of mindfulness and emotional intelligence training. The program is designed to target attention, self-knowledge and self-mastery, and encourage the creation of useful mental habits. If a company with Google’s resources and insistence on empirical evidence is doing training like this, maybe it is time you consider it as well.

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman, 2014. Lastly, I couldn’t compile a list of books about the brain, psychology, and their connection to the workplace without including a book by Daniel Goleman. Goleman, who most famously writes and speaks about emotional intelligence, says attention is a “little-noticed and underrated mental asset, sorely tested among modern distractions but essential to success in work, play, relationships, and self-awareness.” He draws on neuroscience, case studies, and personal experience to explain focus, which includes concentration, selective attention, self-awareness, and empathy.

Get Results From Training
Bruce Winner
www.GetResultsFromTraining.com

Research

Twitter is a great place to learn and identify research for your learning and development efforts. Over the years, I have conducted research from information I found via Twitter to develop better instructional design methodologies, overall learning strategies, designing better evaluation plans, as well as learning technology vendor comparisons and reviews, just to name a few. Now keep in mind that not everything you read may be accurate, so do your due diligence to ensure the validity of the sources and message. A great way to start your research would be to import your contacts (from Outlook, Gmail, etc.) into Twitter so that you may see which of your contacts are already there and begin following their accounts to see what they may be sharing.

Communities of Practice (TweetChats)

TweetChats are a great way to get like-minded professionals together to discuss a topic. From a learning perspective, trainers may choose to use TweetChats as follow-up discussions to live or e-learning training events. It allows participants to share ideas and answer facilitated questions from a moderator in real-time. Focused on a singular topic, these serve as a great way to facilitate information sharing from individuals, regardless of location. Using tools such as Tweetchat.com, you can easily keep up with the conversation via a stream of commentary that may be paused (for you only), giving you ample time to respond, and then catch back up with the conversation.

Continuing Education (Lists)

The unlimited amount of learning potential from Twitter is one of the greatest reasons I have been using it for the past 5+ years. During this time, I completed my CPLP designation from the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD), for which I was able to find resources and information that I used as sources for my Work Product submissions. In addition, I was able to identify valuable companies and individuals that would have a substantial impact on my learning. Some of whom I follow on Twitter are as follows (My Full Training Resources List):

• Trish Uhl (known as @trishuhl on Twitter), Founder of Owl’s Ledge (CPLP prep materials and coaching) – She is one of the first recipients of the CPLP designation and coaches professionals around the world.
• Training Magazine (known as @TrainingMagUS)
• ASTD Resources:
  • Juana Llorens (Known as @ASTDLearningDev) – Also manages the ASTD Communities of Practice on Yammer
  • ASTD National (@ASTD)
  • ASTD Sacramento (@ASTDSac)
  • TDMag (@TDMag)

If you are concerned about joining the conversation and immediately participating on Twitter (for those new to the platform), it also serves as a great listening device. I encourage you to create an account, start searching for individuals and companies of interest, what they are posting, and learn. I’m always open to share ideas and help others, so feel free to reach out to me if you have questions.

Guest Blogger Todd Greider, CPLP®
www.about.me/toddgreider
Twitter: @toddgreider
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/toddgreider

Today Bruce Winner writes about an extraordinary method for trainers, developers, and training managers to use, in order to experiment their way to greater results and success. This method, pioneered in the Silicon Valley, is changing the way that organizations innovate.

Public and private sector organizations spend thousands of dollars and hours on surveys and other means of collecting information, but often find that people do a poor job of telling them what it is they want or need. This blog will introduce you to “Lean Startup”, a method that many Silicon Valley startups and other forward thinking organizations are using to find out what their customers “really” want. The method has the potential to change the way you develop new products and services and could turn your operation into an innovation machine. Lean Startup will decrease your reliance on survey responses or second-hand information and provide you a means to allow your clients to “show you what they want”.

The Lean Startup Method

The Lean Startup Method originated in the Silicon Valley and has launched startups worth billions. Larger companies have also adopted the method to innovate and speed up development of new products and services. It was first proposed in 2011 by Eric Ries, the author of “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.”

Lean Startup encourages an organization to experiment or:

1. Build – Start small, with a “minimum viable product” or MVP
2. Measure – Follow each step with a measured test (often by a very small groups of users),
3. Learn – Learn lessons from each step (by way of rigorous measurement)

The first step is interesting and differs from a traditional approach for building a new product or service. Most training organizations would spend several months or more building the “perfect” training product or service and try to assure it was absolutely market-ready before launch. This approach dictates starting with a small idea and testing it first to see what you can learn about the viability of the concept.

The goal of the method is to learn more at each iteration or experiment. At the end of each short cycle your group will learn from the experiment and continue to move in the same direction, if the learning was positive. If the learning was negative or indicated a misstep, then you will know to change directions or “pivot” in the language of Lean. In Lean, your internal or external customers are “showing you what they want” by responding to your experiments.

Validated Learning

• Lean Startup is also known as “validated learning” because the goal of each test or experiment is to learn one thing, validate or invalidate the lesson, by paying unbiased attention to the outcome.

The cycle is to build a minimum viable product, test and measure how it works, and then learn from the results. It allows organizations to capture the results of experiment after experiment and build on this learning to achieve greater results and success. A popular phrase among lean practitioners is “fail fast”. Remember, the goal is to learn. The faster you fail, the more you learn, and the sooner you develop a product or service that your audience wants from you.

Can Experimentation like this Really Make a Difference?

Lean Startup originated in the Silicon Valley, so much of the experimentation has been conducted by testing web sites, web-based offers, and examining web-based analytics. If you are like most learning organizations, you too struggle to maximize the use of the web analytics at your disposal.

A few examples from Lean Online Businesses

• An example from an online wine sales site showed a 41% increase in sales, simply by testing and then choosing the top performing web design. All the tested versions had the same information; there were simply design differences between tested versions.
• A recent publication on lean analytics cited a seller of tickets who changed the wording on a call to action button from “Get started free” to “Try it out free”. The test and final selection resulted in a 376% increase in sales!

How can Your Training Organization use this Method?

A/B Tests – The simplest test is the A/B or split test. In this test your group tests one offer or product variation against a control group, that receives the old or original offer or product. For example, Group A receives the standard email offer for a training product or service (the same one or similar to the one you routinely use), but Group B receives the offer with one modification.

Segmentation – In this method you test the same message, product, or service by sending test messages to different demographic segments. This is not a new method and has been used effectively for years by direct mailers. Through the test, the organization can determine if the offer is equally effective from one “segment to another (women vs. men, gen X vs. boomers, etc.).

Cohort Testing or Longitudinal Testing – In this method a number of changes can be introduced over time and the group’s responses (one time period versus the others) are compared.

What Could Training and Development Groups Learn through Testing?

• Consider learning through testing various marketing and promotional offers for your training products or services. This sort of testing can work for internal promotion of courses in a large organization or sales to external clients.
  • Examples:
    • Experiment with various email offers designed to promote your training products or services. (you can test designs, language, or various offers for effectiveness)
    • Test web descriptions or designs that vary the focus on benefits to recipient (student) vs benefits to the department, supervisor, or the person(s) paying or approving the training
• Instead of launching your next training product or service fully formed, consider testing the idea with a low cost 30-minute webinar or even a three-minute YouTube video. Take the product (video or webinar) you have developed and test it with small groups of users. Ask managers or execs who view the webinar or video if they would be willing to commit X number of their employees to a full training session on the topic. (Essentially you are asking them to “purchase” a program or “show you what they want”.) Remember, you can continue to improve or iterate the product if it is received well or go in another direction, “pivot”, if the product or service is rejected by the test audience.
  • You could conduct a similar test for end-users or training participants. Using the same video or webinar, ask the participants if they would be willing to sign up (at the time of viewing) for the course to be offered at a later time. If they are internal customers, ask if they would be willing to send a request to take the course to their immediate supervisor. You are searching for commitment or their willingness to “show you what they want”.

Again, what could testing or rigorous experimentation do for your organization?

Your training group or firm could discover a powerful and attractive product or service that is currently not being offered, and that you may NEVER offer, unless you find audience interest by doing some innovative small group testing.

What do you think? Is the Lean Startup Method a good fit for your organization?

• It is a low-cost method
  • The method allows you to conduct small and inexpensive experiments for marketing, promotion, and especially for innovating or building new training products or services. Do you have a similar mechanism for doing this now?
• Learning is the goal
  • Since learning is the goal, the method seems ideally suited to learning and development organizations. Go ahead, don’t be afraid to take some risks and learn from them. Your organization will appreciate the fact that new things are happening.
• It is truly cutting edge
  • This is a progressive technique that is being used by some of the most forward thinking companies and organizations in the world. Don’t your colleagues or clients deserve the same?

Here are a Few Resources if you Want to Learn More:

• Eric Ries’ book, “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”, published in September, 2011. The “bible” for practitioners of the method, this is the best place to start.
• “Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster”, Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz 2013. For my money, after you read and absorb “The Lean Startup”, this is the book to read. The heart of the Lean Startup Method is disciplined experimentation and an unbiased approach to using the data you collect. This book provides a stepwise approach to building this expertise.
• “Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works”, Ash Maurya. This is the second book in the Lean Book Series, started by Eric Reis. Running Lean will introduce you to the “lean canvas”, an innovative one-page visual business model or plan that that will give you a tool to brainstorm business models, see where to start, and assist you in tracking your learning. The book also provides more detail on doing face-to-face MVP interviewing. This interviewing is the first qualitative step in making sure you don’t have a “solution in search of a problem”, a sure road to failure. I will blog about this qualitative first step in an upcoming blog.
• http://theleanstartup.com/ Eric Ries website and a goldmine of information
• http://lean-startup.meetup.com/ Lean Startup Meetup Groups exist all over the United States and the world. Tap into one of the “meetups” to learn more about how to use the process in your association.

Get Results From Training
Bruce Winner
www.GetResultsFromTraining.com

Training and development professionals no longer need to guess which training methods are the most effective. In many, if not most cases, the empirical evidence has been collected to show the effectiveness of techniques in assessment, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. There is validated proof to show us what to use and why, if we take the time to read and absorb the results.

Ruth Clark is a well-known speaker and writer in the learning and development community and has worked extensively with ASTD. She has presented twice to ASTD Sacramento in the past three years. Clark has written extensively about which training methods and techniques to use for both classroom and online training. A few examples of her findings follow, but you can find much more information about these methods and others in two of her books entitled “Evidence-Based Training Methods” and “E-Learning and the Science of Instruction”.

One widely held belief that many training professions don’t want to abandon is the myth of “Learning Styles”. This is the belief that learners can be categorized into auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners. The concept is that some learners are visual and need pictures while others learn best by touch, contact, or by hearing the information. The research, according to Clark, says otherwise. She makes a clear case that in controlled tests, people who identified themselves as auditory or another style tested equally when taught using any of the three modalities. The results were similar when testing or assessment was conducted to determine a learners “style” before training. Whether self-assessed or assessed by an instrument, the actual learning measured (using mixed styles of presentation) was the same regardless of the learning style. Clark instead recommends using brain based evidence to influence delivery media, communication modes, instructional methods and design architectures. Both books, cited previously, are full of pragmatic and implementable information.

Clark points out that training participants’ prior knowledge of subject matter is a much better indicator of differences in how learning is absorbed. She recommends that training professionals focus their efforts here. In short, the research shows that novices need more structured or step-wise instruction, while intermediate or advanced learners can profit from immersive and less structured training. There are also multiple examples of how to use graphics, photos, audio, and text in different ways for each group. Graphics and photos are much more impactful for novice learners, while intermediate and advanced students are able to absorb and make decisions about what to read and what to skip in text rich materials.

How about an example from the field of e-learning? In Ruth Clarke and Richard Meyer’s illuminating book, “E-Learning and the Science of Instruction”, they discuss the use of text, illustrations, and simultaneous narration to enhance learning. They present ample validated evidence that when creating e-learning, one should avoid using all these means simultaneously. The evidence shows that learners are unable to effectively process this much information at the same time. They recommend visual and text or visual and narration, but not the three together. When the three are used simultaneously, the learner experiences cognitive overload and their learning actually decreases. The book is filled with many more examples and validated findings for the e-learning designer or developer. Though there are scores of insights and lessons to be gained in the books, one overarching lesson permeates both texts. We should avoid guessing whenever possible, by going to the literature for validated research to offer guidance.

Other authors in the world of training are sharing similar empirical evidence for training and development professionals. Sharon Bowman, in her book, “Using Brain Science to make Training Stick”, took the work of John Medina (Brain Rules) and other brain science authors to produce practical advice and guidelines for training and development professionals. Bowman uses a card-playing analogy throughout her book to produce clear lessons about six superior training methods that “trump” inferior ones.

Bowman advocates shorter versus longer teaching moments, or the use of what she calls learning “chunks”. Many trainers will develop an intuitive sense of when to stop and process with their groups, but if you are new to training or worry about when to pause, Bowman provides an easy to follow guideline. She advocates the use of the “ten minute rule”. After ten minutes of delivering any information, Bowman says to pause and allow your learners to do something tangible with the information. Learners can write, discuss, or use the information in an exercise, or any number of other interactive applications. The book points out the training participants can only process so much information before being overloaded. The empirical findings from the research tell us that to maximize short and long-term memory, we need to chunk our teaching into smaller more digestible and retainable pieces and then follow each “chunk” with an exercise to reinforce the learning.

Another of Bowman’s lessons is that movement trumps sitting. She advocates getting training participants to stand up, to move around, and to incorporate this activity and movement into your training plan. Basic physiology reinforces this concept in that the brain needs oxygen and movement increases blood flow and oxygen to the brain. Of course movement also simply enhances learner’s attention by boosting their wakefulness.

Validated research from many fields of study is being synthesized and presented as useful advice to training and development professions. This work is coming from social scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, and the field of positive psychology, among others. I’ll be using upcoming blogs to explore more examples of associated research and how it is being used in the training field.

If you have a favorite example of empirical evidence that you use in your training practice or that your see your contemporaries using, please consider posting it in the comments section.

Lastly, before you make your next training and development decision based on a hunch, stop to see if there is any empirical evidence that would help you make a more informed decision.

Get Results From Training
Bruce Winner
www.GetResultsFromTraining.com

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