Airline safety briefings suck. Maybe that's okay.
Airline safety briefings suck. Maybe that's okay.
Reflections of a lazy passenger
When I catch my flight to London later this week, I probably won’t pay attention to the safety briefing.
I won’t be so rude as to talk through it. I might even take my earphones out as a sign of respect.
But I won’t really be listening.
Instead, I’ll most likely be thinking about the learning design of the demonstration. Because, apparently, I don’t get enough of this stuff at work.
Like most of my fellow passengers, I’ll tell myself I know all this already — lifejacket under your seat, fit your own mask before assisting others, nearest usable exit may be behind you, yadayadayada.
Of course, the problem these briefings solve for airlines isn’t just passenger safety, but regulatory compliance. Whether I’m listening or not, the airline is obliged to tell me about the plane’s safety features and protocols.
And if they have to do it anyway, they may as well use the opportunity to promote their brand.
In recent years, many airlines have ditched the standard safety demonstration in favor of slick instructional videos featuring celebrities, Hobbits, and even a dancing pink teddybear.
While research suggests this form of ‘infotainment’ might be effective at grabbing passengers’ attention and improving their overall mood, it appears they are less effective when it comes to promoting knowledge retention.
But does this matter?
On the one hand, it’s not hard to imagine a more effective intervention than the traditional safety briefing. The question is: Are any of the alternatives desirable, when weighed against their costs in terms of time, money, and the customer experience?
The reality is that the vast majority of airline passengers will never have to apply any of the theory covered in a typical safety briefing. And even in the extremely rare cases where something does go wrong, it’s inherently difficult to measure the impact of these briefings on survival rates and other outcomes.
On balance, positively influencing how passengers feel (and, therefore, behave) on a typical flight may be more important than influencing what they do on an atypical one.
There are relevant analogs for L&D here.
Just like airline passengers, employees are regularly asked to sit through courses they’ve completed countless times. Often, these interventions are designed to prepare staff for challenges they’re likely to face in their roles. But other times, they’re primarily designed to meet a compliance need.
Take modern slavery training, for example.
While organizations certainly have a duty to combat modern slavery, most employees have little power to influence this day to day.
The solution? Do as the airlines do.
For colleagues whose roles require them to consider modern slavery when making decisions (i.e. those in procurement), provide scenario-based training that is targeted to their needs.
For everyone else, provide a link to the organization’s policy, then focus your efforts on what you want your audience to feel. Tell them why the issue matters to the business, and show them what’s being done to address it. Just don’t shove information down their throats and expect them to pay attention.
Need help getting your learning strategy to take flight? Then contact custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
How do L&D leaders decide where to spend their time? Who gets access to their budget? How do we deal with those colleagues where we have to say: 'No, that's not a priority'.
In this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross G chats L&D governance with a panel of pros: From Phoenix Group, Carl Akintola-Davies; from Mitie, Dolly Ogundimu and Marc Harvey; and, from Merlin Entertainments, James Clemence.
The panel discusses:
how to prioritize inbound requests and seek out opportunities
how to work with business stakeholders to shape their needs
how to measure the value that L&D teams bring to their organizations.
You can hear the full conversation here:
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
In a previous edition of the Dispatch, Ross G mentioned that our team has primarily been using tools like ChatGPT and Bard as an ‘always-on braintrust’: a source of inspiration; a jumping-off point for the creative work we do on the Custom team at Mind Tools.
Until now, I’ve told myself that these LLMs aren’t as creative as me at my best. They’re quick, sure. A useful resource, certainly. But no match for Ross Dickie on a good day.
Or, at least, so I thought…
A new working paper from researchers at Wharton has given me pause.
Pitting product-design students against ChatGPT, the study used human judges to evaluate ideas for new consumer products. And GPT trounced the students.
Not only did the AI generate more ideas, as you might expect, but the ideas were deemed to be of higher quality, as measured by purchase-intent scores. Of the 40 top-rated ideas in the study, 35 were generated by ChatGPT.
But there’s hope for us humans yet. As the researchers conclude:
‘[…] the critical task in innovation practice may shift from idea generation to idea evaluation and selection, a task for which LLMs do not yet appear to be particularly well suited.’
Girotra, Karan and Meincke, Lennart and Terwiesch, Christian and Ulrich, Karl T. (2023). Ideas are Dimes a Dozen: Large Language Models for Idea Generation in Innovation. SSRN.
👹 Missing links
🙉 Can’t hear the dialogue in your streaming show? You’re not alone.
When my wife and I watch a TV show together, we tend to turn on the subtitles. This isn’t because either of us is hard of hearing — it’s simply because TV dialogue has become increasingly mumbly. ‘What did he just say?’, we’ll ask one another, before rewinding the clip and rewatching it. I’d assumed I was just getting old, but it turns out there are various reasons why dialogue is increasingly difficult to make out in TV shows. For one thing, the design of TV sets has changed in recent years. As manufacturers have pushed to make thinner devices with edge-to-edge displays, they’ve had to move the speakers elsewhere, angling sound away from the viewer. Thought it might be the aging thing, too.
🤖 Designing generative AI to work for people with disabilities
In this HBR article, Laurie Henneborn advocates for an approach to generative AI that is inclusive by design. She cautions that previous advancements in technology have deepened the divide between people with disabilities and others, noting that while one billion people experience some form of disability, just 3% of the top one million websites are fully accessible. Henneborn believes these mistakes can be avoided with AI through inclusive, human-centric design.
🦉 How much can Duolingo teach us?
As someone who studied modern languages at university, I’ve long been fascinated by Duolingo. It’s an interesting time for the company. On the one hand, GPT integrations could allow users to practice continuous conversation with a human-like speaker. On the other hand, it’s hard to see demand for language-learning growing in a world where accurate, ‘Babel fish’-like translation is available at the touch of a button. In this interview, Duolingo’s founder discusses how AI will impact not just language-learning, but learning and teaching more broadly.
👋 And finally…
Regular readers will know that Ross G and I are big fans of Nicholas Thompson’s #MostInterestingThingInTech series on LinkedIn. Last week, this series led me to ‘Deeplomacy’, a GPT-powered world map which allows users to explore the political relationships between different countries. Check it out!
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mind Tools! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or email custom@mindtools.com.
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