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The description begins this way:
As workplace learning-and-performance professionals, we live in world of shiny toys, blinding clouds of floating ash, and darkness. While we have passion and good intentions, we are unable to maximize performance because we are infected with misinformation about how learning really works.
Should be fun!
In this scenario, John and his best instructional-design team have to decide whether to utilize concept mapping, question answering, or multiple sessions instead of just presenting material in the normal way. Can you help them make the best decisions?
After years of being embedded as a consultant in organizations who have struggled to move their stakeholders beyond a training-centric model to a performance-improvement approach, I finally realized that our painstakingly slow progress might be due to our own failures in getting our messages heard.
We in the workplace learning field are over-reliant on conveying our messages in a way that attempts to connect to our stakeholders' logical, analytical, conscious cognitive processing. The problem with this -- beside the fact that it is obviously not working -- is that most cognition occurs subsconciously. We've been trying to sing underwater.
I've always been enamored with the idea that we need to find the most important causal factors and focus on those--not on the hundreds of factors that might have minor impact. I've followed this approach in reviewing the learning research -- finding the most important learning factors, not the fad-of-the-year learning factors. But this leverage-point approach applies to our workplace-learning organizations as well. We should be looking for our most potent leverage points and focusing on those.
So, after some lengthy reflection, I have written a book chapter which describes how our leaders -- our chief learning officers, training managers, and other learning executives -- might restructure some of their organizations' standard operating procedures to send stealth messages that resonate at both a conscious and unconscious level with their stakeholders.
You can access this chapter -- which I should warn you is in rough-draft form -- by clicking here.
If link doesn't work for you, go to Work-Learning Research catalog.
Also, come here me talk about this at the ASTD International Conference next week (May 7-9, 2012 in Denver, Colorado, US). Here are the details:
Tuesday 10:00 to 11:15AM
- Room: Mile High 1F
- Research-Inspired Rubrics to Boost Training Transfer to On-the-Job Performance: The Example of the Course Review
- Co-Presenter: Russ Spaulding of DIA
Wednesday 10:30 to 11:45 AM
- Room: Mile High 1F
- How Learning Executives Can Use Stealth Messages to Change Their Organizations. For Example: Moving from a Training-Centric Approach to a Performance-Improvement Approach
I'm speaking under the auspices of the ASTD Forum, a group of organizations who meet regularly to share best practices.
The Work-Learning Research website is ranked as follows:
When searching for "learning research."
Interestingly, we hardly ever get paid to do research. Mostly we get paid to use research wisdom to make practical recommendations, for example in the following areas:
Research for me is a labor of love, and also, a way to help clients cut through opinions and get to practical truths that will actually make a difference.
But still, we are happy that the world-according-to-search-engines (WOTSE) values the research perspective we offer.
And here's a secret. We don't pay any search-optimizer companies, nor do we do anything intentional to raise our search profile (who has time or money for that?). Must be our dance moves or something...
My post on the Five Failures of Workplace Learning Professionals has been translated into French:
Many thanks to Frédéric Domon of Entreprise Collaborative.
Who is better at crafting an instructional message about science, scientists or instructional designers?
I say we instructional designers SHOULD be able to do a better job, so I'm encouraging YOU, my colleagues, to give Alan Alda's Flame Challenge a try.
Here's Alda's challenge:
"We’re asking scientists to answer the question – “What is a flame?” – in a way that an 11-year-old would find intelligible and maybe even fun."
You can read the full challenge by clicking here.
The deadline is April 2nd, so you better get moving!!
To see what you're up against, consider the content, which you can find, for example, on Wikipedia, under the entry for flame.
Some thoughts on how to be successful:
Good Luck Instructional-Design Team!!
The Neon Elephant Award 2011 went to a researcher whose work translates complicated research into instructional-design models with practical value.