You'll love change (once you give it a chance)
You'll love change (once you give it a chance)
Change is inevitable, so make your life easier by embracing it.
Last week, Ross D highlighted five key attributes of an effective learning designer. This week, I’d like to add a sixth: an enthusiasm for change. Not tolerance of change, or grudging acceptance of it, but enthusiasm for it.
Change Is Gonna Come
Ten years ago, when I first started working at GoodPractice (now Mind Tools) as a learning designer, our approach to developing e-learning was painfully linear.
🕵️ Scoping
We would meet with a subject matter expert and go through an adapted version of Cathy Moore’s action mapping process. This process itself is great and we still use it today. But our mistake was to assume that we could capture everything we needed during scoping to deliver a successful final product.
Scoping would end with the production of an ‘Outcomes Framework’, basically an outline of the course. Then we’d wait a few weeks while the framework sat in our client’s inbox, gathering dust among their many other priorities.
📖 Storyboarding
When we finally got the framework signed off, we’d turn to storyboarding. Elaborate 10,000-word documents would contain both the course’s written content and descriptions of functionality:
‘Clicking A will trigger dialog B, where the learner can select C or D to generate E.’
Each storyboard went through an extensive internal QA process, going round and round until finally we presented it triumphantly to the client with a clear caveat: Read this thoroughly, because no more changes can be made after this point.
Any momentum the project had would end at this point. Faced with the mammoth task of reading such a document, and the consequences of providing ‘sign-off’, most clients would leave it for another day.
⚙️ Build
With enough nudging, we’d eventually get the client to say they had read the storyboard and signed it off. Maybe some of them even had.
Then we’d disappear for four weeks and return with a beautiful course, usually developed in Articulate Storyline.
In most cases, client feedback would be extensive. The course wasn’t what they had pictured at all, they wanted to re-write everything, some ideas that seemed good during storyboarding just didn’t work in the execution. In the worst cases, a new senior stakeholder would turn up for the final sign-off and demand a complete overhaul.
Well, dang…
Hopefully you can see the issues with this classic ‘waterfall’ approach. There’s no flexibility. An insistence that we could make all decisions upfront, and that no change would be possible later, induced project paralysis.
When change was introduced, as it inevitably was, it caused blockages, negotiations and conflict.
We were only starting out, and we only had about five clients who we bent over backwards for, but we made our lives (and theirs) far more difficult than it needed to be.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!
Contrast this with how our development approach has evolved:
🦸🏽 Scoping (Version 2!)
We still use action mapping, but we’ve expanded our scoping workshops to bring in all sorts of performance consulting questions.
It’s all very well to ask a client what their end goal is, but many of the stakeholders we work with aren’t very sure or struggle to articulate it. We spend more time here engaging with a wider stakeholder group to build consensus, and ultimately define a ‘north star’ that can help control future change requests.
In particular, we’ll ask:
‘Who has the authority to kill this project at a later date?’
Then we invite them to input into the project, right at the start.
🧑🤝🧑Enter the end users
These days, we treat our scoping sessions as an ‘assumption gathering’ exercise. Wherever possible, we’ll use focus groups, interviews, surveys and observations to test those assumptions before going any further.
Sometimes this is informal: a chat with a few of our target population to get their perspectives.
In other cases, our Insights team will use their skills as social scientists to collect and synthesize qualitative and quantitative data.
The output of all of this is our old friend the 'outcomes framework’. But no more formal sign-off and threats about the difficulty of making changes later.
We present our findings and the rationale for suggestions, and seek broad acceptance that we’re heading in the right direction; underpinned by a clear understanding that we can change it later if it’s not working.
🔥 Goodbye, storyboard…
No more storyboards. We don’t do this anymore. Few stakeholders ever read them. Would you?
📐 Hello, wireframe!
By switching from Storyline as our main development tool to Evolve, we were able to build courses far more quickly and adopt an agile methodology. We wouldn’t waste time on graphics or branding at first. Instead, we’d throw interactive elements together and produce a fully functioning wireframe in just a few days.
Now, clients don’t have to imagine the end output based on a written description. They can see it, play with it, and leave comments right in the tool.
And we welcome these comments. We want as many as possible, from as many stakeholders as possible, because all that time we saved on storyboarding (and waiting) can now be spent on testing and iterating.
📹 Multimedia
Finally, we layer on graphics, animation, video and any other media that needs to be created. The last elements of a waterfall approach exist in these but, even here, change is welcomed.
Roll With The Changes
I started this post by highlighting that an enthusiasm for change is the sixth major attribute of a successful learning designer. But it’s not without nuance.
We’re not looking for a learning designer who makes erratic changes every day as stakeholders flip-flop back-and-forth.
Instead, we’re looking for learning designers who can effectively articulate problems to be solved, define the root cause of those problems, and build consensus around proposed solutions.
The changes we embrace are less like hard pivots based on conflict, and more like minor corrections based on a partnership toward a shared goal. As shown in this crude diagram I made in Paint:
(Don’t Go) Waiting On The World To Change
Looking to the future, change is coming with ever greater frequency. Tools like Evolve, Kwantic, Arist and Articulate are incorporating generative AI into their feature set, which means the ‘build’ part of the development process is just going to get faster.
This also means that it’s easier than ever to create garbage content that fails to address real problems.
As we continue to evolve our practice, learning designers in general need to make sure that they really understand the problems that they are trying to solve; that they work with stakeholders to define and measure those problems; and test their solutions in the real-world to make sure that change is an outcome, and not just an input.
Ready to transform your learning approach? Let’s discuss how embracing change can drive measurable results for your organization. Book a free scoping call today by emailing custom@mindtools.com or by replying to this newsletter.
🎧 On the podcast
Last week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Owen and I explored how the 70:20:10 model is being applied by three L&D Practitioners: Ceri Sharples, Cath Addis, and Carl Akintola-Davis. This week, we wanted to follow up on some of the challenges posed during that discussion with The 70:20:10 Institute’s Charles Jennings.
What does it really mean to 'integrate learning into the workflow', and how does 70:20:10 move us towards a performance focus?
We discussed:
Where the numbers ‘70’, ‘20’ and ‘10’ come from
How a focus on ‘learning’ tends to lead to a ‘10+’ approach
Examples of interventions that have focused on supporting performance, rather than formal learning.
Check out the episode below. 👇
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
I've written (and spoken) before about the surprise I experienced when I discovered that none of my friends had any interest in ChatGPT. Even the physicists and engineers in the group gave little more than an indifferent shrug when I was waxing lyrical about it.
Now it turns out that they're not alone.
In fact, they're in the majority.
In an essay published on his blog, tech analyst Benedict Evans points out that, although ChatGPT reached 100m users in just two months, most people try it once or twice and then never go back.
In the US, just over 50% of people have heard of it. In the UK, that figure approaches 60%.
But less than 20% of Americans use it weekly, and less than 10% of Brits.
Much more common across the world is monthly visits, or using it 'once or twice'.
The Enterprise space is awash with 'pilots, experiments and trials', but only a small number of organizations trust ChatGPT to do anything meaningful.
The big winners so far seem to be consultants. Per Evans' blog:
‘Last summer it proudly announced that it had already done $300m of ‘generative AI’ work for clients… and that it had done 300 projects. Even an LLM can divide 300 by 300 - that’s a lot of pilots, not deployment. The number has gone up a lot since then, but what’s the mix? Indeed, with BCG saying that it expects 20% of its revenue this year will be helping big companies work out what to do about generative AI, the single biggest business from this in 2024 might be for consultants explaining what it is.’
This isn't to crap on ChatGPT or other GenAI tools. Anyone who uses them can see that they are amazing. The question is: Are they a product? Or are they the foundation upon which new tech products will emerge and existing tech products will evolve?
Evans, B. (2024). 'The AI Summer'. ben-evans.com
(Hat tip to Martin Couzins for sharing this article on LinkedIn).
👹 Missing links
Earlier this month, New York Times reporter David Segal published his take on the world of HR after attending the Unleash conference in Las Vegas. The article, titled 'So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable?' catalogued all the ways that HR departments make life difficult for regular employees, while also bemoaning the fact that HR professionals are leaving their jobs in droves because it's so soul destroying. In response to this, HR professional Jessica Donahue shared her insider take on LinkedIn, arguing that it’s often HR who act as advocates for colleagues, even if that advocacy happens in the shadows.
🖊️ Can we provide attribution for GenAI content?
There’s an ongoing debate just now about the extent to which generative AI tools are profiting off the back of copyright theft. Are they using copyrighted materials to generate answers, or is it more like they have digested a load of material and are now providing their own answers off the back of it? In this video, Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, discusses the work that ProRata.ai are doing to ‘reverse engineer’ generative AI content. In essence, the ProRata are trying to identify where genAI content came from, and then pay the original creator for that contribution.
🛠️ Your L&D offering is a product
If you work in L&D, then your learning offering is a product. That means you need to think about it as a product by highlighting the benefits it offers, defining a product roadmap, and thinking about competitors. That’s the argument of Ashley Sinclair of MAAS Marketing, and I think it’s a useful way to think about everything you do to improve the performance of your people and teams.
👋 And finally…
In the spirit of this week’s newsletter, I thought it’d be fun to start the week with some classic Tom Waits (albeit, not exactly a ‘banger’).
👍 Thanks!
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