I’m inordinately attached to objectives. I freely admit that and I acknowledge this is likely a weakness (maybe even a sickness!). I believe good objectives are the cornerstone for successfully completing any project. It is true a project can be successful without one, but I think that is also a crap shoot and just as often as not, if you don’t have an objective you will miss the mark as hit it. I think meetings without an objective are doomed to be unproductive meetings. I think projects without an objective are not going to meet targets and certainly not in a position to prove it met targets. You get the idea. To me, not having an objective is like driving the car with your eyes shut.

Merriam-Webster defines an defines objective as "something toward which effort is directed : an aim, goal, or end of action." The same dictionary defined the word, outcome, as "something that follows as a result or consequence."

So how do those two words look in action? Here is a scenario: a person has something they need to accomplish. They do something to accomplish that goal, and there is a final result. That person has an objective, they take action, and there is an outcome. We want the outcome to align with the objective, but they are not the same thing. A person does not take action and then end with an objective. They can meet that objective but the objective is the goal, not the result.

So why does our industry still debate these two words? The training industry has come a long way in realizing they need to prove return on investment and share key performance indicators with leadership. We are often the teams that get let go first in a down economy. We know this, we talk about this a lot and I think some amazing work and books have been put out to keep the industry on top of this trend. Historically, we wanted to be the team that took care of our employees and made a difference in organizations. We did things because it was right to do it and honestly, some training organizations resented the hell out of having to prove they were making a difference. Most training professionals I meet today have no problem with measurements and reporting because training DOES have such an enormous, positive impact on a business organization. We rock and we don’t mind showing leadership how much we rock.

But I still see some left over attitudes and behaviors in trainers from "the old days." I heard one trainer say, "I don’t write objectives for my training." I was stunned. OK, I know partly the reason I was stunned is because I’m a little OCD about objectives, but how is that trainer proving value to her organization? When I thought about it later I realized that she probably does actually have objectives sometimes and may not recognize them because we still seem to be discussing what they are (how is that for denial? I managed to decide she actually does what she says she does not).

Objectives and outcomes are not the same thing. They are not even sorta the same thing. They are two entirely different things and best practice is to begin with an objective and end with an outcome. That is how it should be reported out to leadership and how the team stays productive and demonstrates value to an organization. If we as an industry, can agree what our industry terms mean and adopt the objectives-to-outcome development and measurement standard, it would go a long way in improving our reputation for organizational value.

When I speak to the representatives for these companies they all plead work load and technical issues. It seems like organizations are all under-staffed and the staff is under-trained which is probably so they can under-pay these people. When the economy tanked, many organizations scaled back not only in the number of employees they had but in what they were paying employees. So experienced employees were let go and less-experienced (less expensive) employees took over. If there is anything that goes against all good sense it is an organization who is only watching their short game. They ask, "What will benefit us the most right now?" without taking into consideration what it does to their business long-term.

I understand that budgets are strange puzzles and having a smaller number in one column will carry more weight than a larger number in another column but I just don’t understand how any organization or board of directors or shareholders can close one eye to the budget and sign off on the numbers that benefit the short-term.

I was consulting for a large high tech company a while back that had a few rocky profit years some years ago. At that time, they made some "policy" changes. The one I was most aware of was that they no longer hired experienced trainers and instructional designers. They only posted openings for interns. They still had experienced trainers and instructional designers on staff but they weren’t bringing on any new ones. This meant, that they brought in a lot contractors and interns. An organization can save a lot of money by hiring experienced employees because they are more productive and have better situational problem-solving skills. They also have more innovative solutions to learning and development challenges. From what I saw, one experienced employee could have replaced the intern and at least three of the inexperienced contractors. That isn’t a boast. I observed a contractor, who was quite experienced in the industry, burn through the project work without breaking a sweat while the less-experienced contractors and the intern struggled with learning the tool, learning the organization’s process and culture, and required more guidance on overcoming development hurdles.

I don’t mean to paint the less-experienced contractors or interns in a bad light. I believe internships are a wonderful way to gain experience in the industry. I also think money could be better spent by creating an entry-level position for new graduates so that they aren’t leaving right when they are becoming most valuable. Having done contract work myself I can’t fault less-experienced contractors. The very nature of contract work is getting put into situations that are different and probably new which is what is fun about doing contract work. I think for large projects they could be really valuable but keeping a revolving door of contractors rather than hiring an experienced employee just doesn’t make fiscal sense.

This short-term focus allows the organization to point to one number and say, "See! We have less overhead" but somewhere there is a number that is outrageous (turnover, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness) and could be brought down with a few experienced employees. The cost for acquiring an intern and a contractor as well as the cost for ramping them up and for the hit in production the employees take as they get the interns and contractors up to speed is much more than an annual salary.

Another example are the job postings for instructional designers at a local healthcare organization that was offering a salary way below market. The requirements they listed for the position were practically entry-level and they had three of these positions posted. Why in the world wouldn’t they post for a single position, raise the skill requirements and offer a competitive salary (which, by the way, was about half of what they would be paying the three newbies)? In fairness, sometimes it is a leader who may be less-experienced themselves and insecurity makes them afraid of an employee who may have a better skill set than themselves but sometimes it is an organization who doesn’t want to pay for experience and believes it would be cheaper to bring entry-level employees up to speed at a low salary.

The result of this short-term budgeting impacts the business in ways organizations don’t anticipate. Their product quality degrades, their service certainly degrades, and the result is a customer poised to move their business somewhere else the minute it looks like something better has come along.

There is a great (and very true) saying in the customer service industry, "It isn’t the customer who complains that you need to fear, it is the customer who never complains and quietly takes their business elsewhere." By the way, those quiet people far out number the complainers so in addition to the costs I’ve already listed, include loss of business down the road. And just to bring it back to my first paragraph complaint; yes, I have my eyes open for a new lawyer, insurance company, internet provider, and I probably won’t bother hiring the landscaper.

“Students who completed an elaborate test after reading the text remembered 145% more content after a week than students who simply read the text and didn’t do anything else. ”

145% is a powerful percentage! I would like to have seen the research look at different ways of interacting with the content other than reading. This study had participants read text repeatedly between tests. That is such a passive way of interacting with content I’m not surprised that it takes 300% longer to retain the information 145%. I think that number can be better by providing learners with the opportunity to interact more with their content and for having rigorous tests that mirror the way the information will be applied.

So how do we create those great tests that will improve our learner’s learning?

• An assessment or test should only measure the original learning objectives of the content. (This means you probably won’t have a nice, round, 10 question test)
• An assessment or test should resemble the application back on the job. (If the employee has to do something, giving them a bunch of questions asking if they remember terms only measures their memory, not their ability to do the task)

These are very broad strategies that have a lot of details we aren’t covering here. For the sake of the blog post, I’d like to keep this fairly high-level. So my high-level strategy is:

Write great learning objects > The content should support the learning objectives and not go off topic > Write assessments that measure the learning objectives.

My favorite tool for this strategy is Bloom’s Taxonomy. To me, this tool does the heavy lifting for you. Bloom’s breaks learning down into levels and provides action verbs that can be the basis for your learning objective and, ultimately, your assessment. Once you spend a little time with Bloom’s and write great learning objectives, the rest really starts to write itself.

The challenge for trainers is sticking to the level of learning and action verbs that most closely resemble the learning as it is applied back on the job. For example, an employee is supposed to look at information and make a judgment about that information and then take action based on their judgment. An assessment could be written that asks them about terms and what the process flow is, etc. But that isn’t what the employee will do back on the job. The assessment should have the employee look at information that will be the kind of information back on the job, make a judgment., and take action based on the judgment. This means a lot of work for training developers but now you have an assessment that is more predictive of application AND the employee is really getting a chance to practice the task. This means they are learning from the assessment.

One battle I’ve always had in organizations is limiting an employee’s number of tries for the assessment. My colleagues and I felt that as long as the employee passed the assessment by a certain point in time, who cares how many times it took them? People learn at different paces and if we are truly providing the assessment as a learning tool then why restrict it? What do you think? Should employees be limited to a number of tries?

As an instructional designer, I find I frequently educate my organization on what I can accomplish and what they can accomplish with different strategies. Much (if not most) of my work is often not instructional. This is not common for instructional designers. I’ve embraced the fact since it gives me the opportunity to do something different and work with other teams. For example, I create a lot of presentations for leaders and write a lot of reference documentation (often tech writers and ISDs are considered interchangeable which isn’t necessarily true but I can see how people think that). I’ve even thought about referring to myself as an information designer since it is more accurate for the big picture of what I do and gives me the opportunity to expand my reach in business.

There are some really frustrating aspects to organizations not differentiating between instruction and information. For example, I am frequently asked to take information and create a reference. I have no problem with developing something that is not instructional because a lot of the same principles and techniques can be applied beautifully. I try to always explain when something is not instructional and why without long lectures but I see eyes glaze over and I think, “Right, I’m geeking out on them and I don’t blame them for just wanting me to just get on with it already.” However, it rarely fails that they will come back and then want to assess the reference. This generally leads to some head-banging on my part and careful conversations as I try to help them understand why assessing a reference is not an idea that “works.” I will ask them a series of questions:

• What is the objective of the assessment?
• What was the objective of the development?

Most of the time I hear that they want to ensure the recipients “understand” the reference. This is a tough one because now I have to show them that you cannot measure understanding. It is too subjective of a term. There are a lot of things that can be assessed where logically the inference is understanding but it will come down to “show me you can do what you are supposed to do when required.” That ends up being a complex, interactive assessment. It will be a great assessment that does the best job of proving behaviors back on the job but it also is all about instruction and not reference.

If I have verified that the client truly wanted a reference, the assessment is probably going to be about assessing that the recipients use it correctly when they necessary. This makes a lot of sense and I actually like these because we are assessing the use of the tool and not trying to get folks to memorize a ton of stuff they would find in the reference anyway. These assessments can be pretty simple by just offering a number of scenarios when it would be appropriate for them to use the reference tool and ask them what information they access and where.

This whole wind up is leading to a specific scenario that makes me cringe. I was developing a very dry, technical reference for a client and I heard someone on their team promise their leadership that there would be 10 questions written for this reference. This is like nails on a chalkboard for me and I have to really control the eye-roll because what they said makes no sense.

First of all, this is a reference, what are you assessing? What do you need to measure?

Secondly, there are no learning objectives for this reference so where are you coming up with the number 10? People love those nice round numbers but an assessment should be driven by the objectives and content, not by a nice round number. What if there are three learning objectives and to rigorously measure those objectives we only have seven questions? Or maybe we need 17 questions to measure the objectives?

I’ll tell you where they got the 10 question test idea; Kindergarten. (Well, probably it was elementary school but that doesn’t sound as good, does it?) In school we had tests that consisted of nice round numbers (probably easier for figuring out grades) and that sticks with people for the rest of their lives. This is the model of education most people know unless you are an adult education geek and boy, it can be really hard to get people to let go of that model of education. If it was good enough for them back in the day it should be good enough now! Heaven help me.

An example of this is the post office. The United States Post Office is struggling and they have cited reasons such as email, delivery services such as FedEx or UPS, etc. What I hear from these explanations is, “It is changing out there!” but I don’t see them doing a lot to change themselves to fit into our world. They have a few good strategies (the flat rate box IS a good idea) but most of their strategies have actually made it harder to even give them our business. If you want someone to cite two examples of wasting your day in line you say the DMV and the post office. And the customer service at the counter isn’t generally a pleasant experience. I don’t mean to be unfair to the folks who work in the post office because I’ve lived in some little towns where the people behind the counter were some of the loveliest people I have ever met but they are the exception. Rather than address this, the USPS organization decided to shut down some of the offices and raise rates. Honestly, there needs to be an emergency intervention to get this organization back on track because think of our info-structure without a postal service!

Rather than identify what might be making their competitors successful and seeing how those strategies can be applied, or even done better, the USPS is falling back on the focus of the bottom line. The bottom line is just a measurement, it is the result of the organization’s work. Look at your work. Are you doing your work well? Are others doing it better? What can you do to make your work the best? What do your customers want and need today?

I once worked for a high tech company that had been the industry pioneer. But they saw themselves as completely unique and insisted they were unlike any other business or industry. For example, their customer service organization didn’t know any world-class customer service metrics, trends, or even tools. They didn’t look outwardly at other customer service organizations because they truly believed it didn’t apply to them. They believed their business was too unique but they were completely forgetting that while their business might be unique, their customers are not. By the time I came along this company that had once been cutting edge was hopelessly behind technically. The products they released were about five years behind other companies. They spent so much time looking at their own unique business, they weren’t hearing what their customers were telling them.

Both these companies struggle because they don’t look outwardly. They also don’t look at their competitors. They either didn’t have one for so long that when some came along they just got confused or they flat-out refused to admit to having a real competitor. This is a missed opportunity. Great organizations often get there because they have a great competitor that challenges and drives them. Organizations should embrace their rivals!

I went to the University of Southern California who has a very competitive rivalry with UCLA. I looked at the history and accomplishments of the two schools and couldn’t help but seeing that they owed much to each other for their success. They work hard to best each other and this has resulted in two world-class schools that offer spectacular opportunities to their students (and great sports too). I absolutely love that energy they create with the rivalry.

If we don’t look outwardly at other organizations, at our industry, even at other industries, we are resigned to make the same mistakes as others and to miss innovative strategies. We cannot innovate if we only look inward; if we only focus on our bottom line. Our customers are telling us what they want when they choose another business so listen. It really comes down, as it so often does, to not being afraid to change.

Critical thinkers are seen as negative. I don’t know why. It is positively ludicrous to believe an organization or person can be successful with only positive feedback. And we need to remember that recognizing an error or a potentially unsuccessful strategy is not negative. Some of the most valuable information uncovered in research is what doesn’t work because it reveals the method that won’t achieve the objective. Think of it as solving a maze puzzle. Sometimes you hit a few dead ends but that means you know now that a different direction is required. This is not a criticism. This is simply pointing out that the bulls eye is in a different spot than originally believed. Blanchard is frequently criticized apparently and it seems he recently hit his limit and is experimenting with only positive thought. Not surprisingly, it ends up being silly. I think he is having fun with it and I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek response but it also really hit home for me.

I’m not surprised Olivier Blanchard has met resistance and even criticism for simply pointing out inconsistencies and errors because I’ve struggled in my career with organizations and people who are tremendously offended and resist hearing the truth. I’m not talking about hard-to-hear truths that may be embarrassing. I’m talking about simple truths. I was once told I was inappropriate to suggest conducting some kind of root cause analysis to a problem before developing a solution plan. I don’t know why someone would have found that insulting. I didn’t point to anyone and call them names or criticize anyone’s actions. It was a broad suggestion during a strategy meeting. Not surprising to me, that organization has struggled a great deal over the last few years and don’t seem to be quite hitting the mark with any of their solutions or products as a company overall.

Simple logic and basic knowledge. It isn’t witchcraft and it isn’t higher thinking. I’m rarely the smartest person in the room so why are so many people resistant to the truth? Sometimes I think it is because it is simple. Are people offended that their problem may not require the most complicated solution possible? Maybe they want to believe that with all their experience, they know the basics so well that they don’t need to consciously go back to the beginning.

When I’ve struggled with whether or not I should point a flaw or problem out I think back to The Emperor’s New Clothes which is a great analogy for critical thinking. I just don’t want to be one of those people who can see something is wrong but doesn’t say anything out of fear or embarrassment. Some truths are not going to be positive. A person who practices critical thinking isn’t being negative and sometimes snarky remarks are a great way to add humor to information. Constant positiveness and back slapping is disingenuous. Blanchard’s new uber-positive outlook  is a sugary diet I can’t take for long. Snark is the fiber we all require for good health. Let’s encourage each other to be critical thinkers and to embrace the snarky-rich goodness. I want my Brand Builder back!

When iPad first launched I thought, “Cool! we are no longer restricted to a specific training room!” I realize laptops actually answered that question but I never saw those being utilized for this. Laptops are a personal computer. It seems I wasn’t the only one who saw the mobility potential for elarning and tablets.

I was a little disappointed at first. I wanted this to be a conversation about making learning measurements about performance and not about the learning event itself (testing, course taken, etc.) but it does offer some ideas for analytics outside an LMS which provides valuable data to designers.

It always seemed like I was the negative voice when it comes to narration in elearning. But this article supports what I’ve known as a user from the start. We should all try our own products and set aside the love of what we created for how easy and useful it is to use.

There is some interesting research really rocking our worlds out there. I like Cathy Moore’s summary best. Is the theory of learning styles unsupported? have we been operating (and passing on) flawed practices? My first reaction is I never put a ton of stock in the specific categories different theories had but it is important to acknowledge that learners do learn differently from each other and having some broad strategies to adapt when a learner may be struggling is important. There is something to not repeating the same information the same way over and over and expecting to be successful. I’ve also always thought we should be teaching people how to learn. People should learn they can be active participants in their development.

Another industry stat debunked! I’m disappointed about this one because it just sounded so good! It was always my great argument against lecturing to death.

Feel free to pass on the tip!

During economic downturns, employees are less likely to voluntarily leave a position which can make organizations complacent about their retention and engagement programs. But an organization can lose an employee without the employee actually walking out the door. Unhappy people are less productive and right now no organization can afford a workforce that isn’t producing as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Managers should be working as hard on employee retention and engagement now as they have during economic upturns. Replacing people is incredibly expensive. Over the years different studies have placed the cost of replacing an employee anywhere from 70% of the employee’s salary to 200% of that salary. Neither of those costs is easily absorbed by organizations, regardless of the economic climate.

So what are you doing to lose your employee’s engagement and, eventually, their talent? Here are ten fatal strategies:

Don’t Remove Barriers

If you want to frustrate your employees, let barriers such as bad processes, outdated equipment, workplace bullies, or overwhelming workloads remain in place preventing your employees from being successful. If you really want to frustrate them, actively work against any work-arounds they have in place to deal with the barriers. Your employees want to do a good job and they are inventive. But if their solutions aren’t allowed and you aren’t providing a solution, they’ll end up leaving the problems behind.

Don’t Set Clear Expectations

Vague instructions and goals may make your life easier at first but everyone is going to be disappointed when the end result isn’t the desired output. Your employees have tremendous incentive to make you happy. They want successful careers and earning power. By not telling them what success looks like (and you have to tell them more than “do better” or “try harder” because that means something different to all of us), you are gambling with the results. Without direction your teams are feeling like they may have failed and are planning an exit strategy.

Don’t Protect Their Credibility

Your people hear when you have thrown then under the bus. Word gets around. Talk bad about them and they will stop trusting and protecting you. If someone approaches you about a project that one of your employees is working on, whatever you do, don’t pull that employee into the meeting to help answer questions. Communicating to the organization in general that your people actually own their projects and that you don’t have to “manage” them reflects on you because it speaks to your leadership and ability to help your employees grow and develop. An employee that feels they don’t have a credible reputation in the organization will opt to go where they have some ownership and respect so that they feel like they may be successful in the future.

Don’t Respond to Their Requests

It is one thing to tell your people that they can come to you whenever they need help but it is another thing to actually do something to help them. If you are always dismissing what they say, not providing advice or help, getting angry at them for not taking care of this on their own (without giving them the tools), you are actually punishing them for keeping you in the loop and asking for coaching. You have now become one of their barriers giving them no other option than to move on.

Make Everything a Priority

It is a leader’s role to prioritize workloads. As the leader you are supposed to have your eye on the big picture while your employees see their parts. Helping your teams prioritize their work does not mean they can’t manage their workload. It means that as the leader, you have additional information they don’t and you can guide the work most efficiently. Making everything a priority results in a lot of wheel spinning and missed deadlines. Everything can’t be a priority and maintain any kind of real productivity.

Don’t Accept That Your Employees Know Something You Don’t

If things are done right, your skill set is in leadership and your employees’ skill sets fit their job descriptions. This may mean your individual contributors know more than you do about some subjects. Think of the value of a team with such a varied knowledge set. But if you really want to get rid of valuable employees, don’t listen to their experience or education. Be sure to dismiss them and their ideas. One of the top reasons an employee feels happy at a job is because they feel valued. The great thing about this tactic is that the more experienced and educated the team member, the more likely they are to take that talent elsewhere.

Don’t Provide Feedback Immediately

People make mistakes and often they are learning on the job. Part of your role as their leader is to help them develop. The most effective strategy for that is to provide feedback to guide your employees’ behaviors. Providing feedback immediately helps an employee understand exactly what they need to do different (or the same) because they just exhibited the behavior. Be sure to save your feedback so that the employee is less sure about your direction and may even take the feedback badly because they repeated the behavior additional times out of ignorance. If someone feels like they are failing they will decide their chances at your organization are over and they should go somewhere else.

Don’t Trust Your Teams

Be sure to examine their projects in minutia with the objective of finding what they did wrong. This may seem like constructive feedback but ultimately it is demoralizing. If you look hard enough you are always going to find something that could be done better. The same could be said for your own projects. The only employees who will put up with this for long are the employees who don’t really care about doing a great job. If that is the workforce you want, this is the strategy for you!

Don’t Demonstrate the Behaviors You Demand from Your Employees

Are you late to meetings? Do you prepare for meetings? Do you answer your phone or IMs during those meetings? Do you ignore emails and repeatedly ask for the same information over and over? Do you expect your teams to do none of these? Some leaders believe they are exempt from these “niceties” because they are busy managers. But your employees aren’t kids and they don’t respect you because of this contradiction. They want to work with someone they respect and they are probably deciding that is in another organization.

Don’t Allow Mistakes

No one is perfect and the more hectic and pressurized an environment the more mistakes people will make. If you don’t allow for honest mistakes, something that isn’t likely to happen again, you are inhibiting innovation and entrepreneurialism. Your teams could be great but their energy is spent watching minutia and their backs. Your people will also start turning on each other to keep out of the cross-hairs. The employees that want to focus on doing a great job don’t have the patience for this strategy of yours.

Unhappy employees are polishing that resume to take quick action when opportunities arise. Look at your strategies to see who you are nurturing and who you are driving away. No organization or manager can afford to drive away their good employees. An economic downturn means it is even more important to keep employees and engage them. They are the best strategy for surviving.

The ELearning Blog is a great resource for anyone designing or building elearning courses. I liked this post in particular because it called out something I’ve suspected for a while (and we all like validation, don’t we?). I think my favorite point he makes is that we really probably shouldn’t be hiring someone that doesn’t recognize a play button. Thank you! These are the same buttons we had on our boom boxes (I’m SO old!) and VCRs.

This is an interesting article that examines succession planning. I think the alternative of having a mature team ready for a budding CEO rather than an immature, unproductive team that needs "fixing" is a more realistic, and ultimately successful, option for executive succession.

Diversity Executive magazine examines women in leadership position. I agree with them that it isn’t just about putting a woman in a leadership seat but about re-examining how leadership operates. It is about behaving differently not just a diversity issue. Leadership development programs often are about providing the same behaviors and values to everyone rather than looking at what different people can bring to leadership.

Traditional performance reviews don’t accomplish their objectives. Time to stop the patronizing, punishing, demoralizing process and make performance a DAILY discussion. It isn’t always about the person but more frequently about the tools, resources, and processes. It is leadership’s job to make sure none of these prevent top performance.