Is it fun?
Is it fun?
If you’re boring yourself, you’re probably also boring your learners.
In last week’s Dispatch, Ross G wrote about one of our favorite questions to ask clients: ‘What would be the consequence of doing nothing?’
We love this question because it challenges the client to explain why an intervention is needed, and what success would look like.
But we don’t just ask these kinds of questions externally. We also ask them within our own team.
A question Ross G and I regularly ask one another is: ‘Is it fun?’
This question emerged from a ‘writers room’ exercise Ross G hosted a few years ago.
The goal of the exercise was to write a series of animation scripts for our Mind Tools toolkit, then read them aloud for the group. ‘Is it fun?’ was the question Ross would ask whenever he thought a draft had missed the mark.
Naturally, I took great delight in flipping that question back on Ross when I thought one of his own scripts didn’t reflect his best work.
Since then, ‘Is it fun?’ has become a shorthand between the two of us.
Whether we’re working on this newsletter, reviewing an e-learning build, or brainstorming ideas for a new project, ‘Is it fun?’ is our polite way of challenging one another to do better.
In my mind, the question we’re really asking is: ‘Why should I care about this?’
Whenever I review a project for a member of our team, I try to approach it as if it’s been assigned to me on my organization’s LMS.
When I open the module or attend the workshop, will it strike me as a productive use of my time? Or will I roll my eyes, and resolve to get through it as quickly as possible so I can get back to ‘real work’?
Of course, we shouldn’t assume that our concerns as learning designers are the same as those of our learners. As we’ve written about extensively in this newsletter, it’s worth taking the time to explore these concerns by conducting surveys, interviews, or focus groups.
But in the absence of these things, your own boredom can be a remarkable guide.
If it isn’t ‘fun’ for you, why would you expect it to be for anyone else?
Need help creating experiences your learners care about? Then email custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter if you’re reading it in your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
Why do some ideas take off, while others don’t? This is the question at the heart of John A. List’s The Voltage Effect, which explores the science of scaling, and describes strategies for promoting ‘voltage gains’ and avoiding ‘voltage drops’.
On this week’s episode of the Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Gemma, Owen and I discuss the book and its potential implications for L&D.
As Owen points out, one of the biggest challenges is knowing when to stop throwing resources at an intervention that just isn’t working:
It’s very hard to stop doing something that you’ve done for a period of time or to accept something that you’ve invested your blood, sweat and tears into… only to find that it’s not having much of an impact at all.
Listen to the full episode 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
Last week, I ran a personal best in the Edinburgh Half Marathon. It was the third organized race I’d participated in, and probably the most satisfying of the bunch. What made it so enjoyable was that my fitness was perfectly aligned to the goal I’d set for myself, and the level of challenge involved in completing the course.
In other words, the race was ‘desirably difficult’: tough enough to seriously test my abilities, but not so tough that I couldn’t achieve my goal.
The term ‘desirable difficulty’ was coined by psychologist Robert A. Bjork in 1994, and generally describes the relationship between learning and the level of challenge associated with a given task. The idea is that, up to a certain point, increased difficulty can lead to increased learning. Beyond that point, the difficulty becomes ‘undesirable’ and can have the opposite effect:
Many difficulties are undesirable during instruction and forever after. Desirable difficulties, versus the array of undesirable difficulties, are desirable because they trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering. If, however, the learner does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond to them successfully, they become undesirable difficulties.
One simple way of introducing desirable difficulty into your learning design is by using testing as a learning event, rather than simply as a means of assessment.
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). ‘Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning’. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64).
👹 Missing links
👾 Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Mind
This week’s Ezra Klein plug comes not from me but from Ross G, who kindly sent me this article. In the piece, Ezra makes the case that while AI will allow us to do many things faster and more efficiently, this isn’t necessarily desirable. He argues that, even though he could outsource reading 100-page Supreme Court documents, the time invested doing that work himself allows him to form new connections, and have thoughts he would not otherwise have had.
🥅 What’s the goal of training?
Is the goal of training performance or behavior change? Is it productivity? Or could it be something else entirely? I found this informal LinkedIn poll from Don Taylor, and the ensuing conversation in the comments, usefully provocative. I think I come down on the ‘performance’ side of the argument, but I’m open to being persuaded I’m wrong.
🏢 The $500 billion ‘Office real estate apocalypse’
In a paper published last year, researchers from NYU and Columbia University forecast a 28% drop in New York City office values by 2029, equating to $500 billion value loss nationwide. More recently, they’ve updated their estimate to 44% decline over the same period. As businesses continue the shift to a hybrid or fully-remote operating model, what will become of the office block?
And finally…
Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson’s ‘most interesting thing in tech’ series on LinkedIn is a great source of weird and wonderful news from the worlds of science and technology. One fine example is this visualization of migrating birds, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
👍 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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