Training

Why “Best Practices” Will Blow Up In Your Face

If I hear one more highly-paid consultant talking about “best practices” I may just have to drop kick them through the uprights on the practice field.  The whole idea is such a crock that I’m amazed anyone takes it seriously.

Here’s a 30-second video of the “Best Practice To Light Your Charcoal Grill Quickly”.  Take a look.

Will you be using this technique soon?  I won’t — unless I want to lose my deck, my wife, and melt my Weber Kettle down into slag.

The point (he has a point?) is that the concept of “Best Practice” assumes that we all share the same conditions, the same metrics for success, and the same risk/reward structure.  The guy in the video was only interested in how quickly he could get that charcoal going — so, for him, it truly was the “Best Practice”.

In my field, learning, I see the same thing happen.  Someone comes out with a list of “Best Practices In e-Learning” with no context.  They suggest that you offer multiple methods for learners to take in the information.  They suggest that you include rich animations, videos, talking parrots and streaming video.  They suggest that you comply with SCORM, NORM, and NNPT. Not to mention offering versions for the deaf, the visually impaired, and those who are allergic to keyboard dust mites.

Uh huh.  My development budget is $250 this quarter.  Not gonna happen.

The whole concept of a “best” anything is a crock, anyway.  What’s the “best” car?  Well, I’m partial to the Jaguar XJS V-12, but it’s hard to haul plywood home in it from Home Depot.

xjsv12

So why do people keep publishing this dreck?  Because we want to THINK we can come up with some kind of one-size-fits all listing of answers that won’t require you to actually know anything about the discipline involved to be an expert.  Sure would be nice:

Jet Pilot
“Best Practice if engines go out, hit big red “fix it” button on control panel.”

Neurosurgeon
“Best Practice if patient acts nutters, stick long steel rod up nose and stir around.”

Hockey Player
“Best Practice to score goals, hit puck thingy into net thingy.”

The harsh truth is that there ARE no real “Best Practices”.  Unless you come up with an exhaustive list of conditions and specifications — developed by an expert who understands both the situation and the discipline — and even then, all you’re getting is an educated guess.

Fire your consultants.  Hire someone who’s actually done it, multiple times, successfully.

Are You “Testing” The Temperature In Your House?

People on Twitter often notice that I’ve got some creds in the “eddication” area, and ask me questions about how to fix the schools down here in South Carolina. We’re currently about 56th out of the 50 states in terms of quality of education, so there’s a lot of talk going on. And they’re usually looking for some kind of quick-fix — bigger budgets, smaller class sizes, charter schools, magic beans — rather than any kind of basic systemic change.

The one thing most everyone down here can agree on is that “testing” is unfair.  Students here fail miserably at the No Child Left Behind testing, and the program is reviled.  So one of the ways I try to talk with people about education is to ask them about their HVAC system.

“Do you have air conditioning and heating in your house?  Good!  Now, does your thermostat wait until the end of the day to measure whether it’s too hot or cold, and then decide which one to turn on?  It doesn’t, does it?  It’s constantly assessing the temperature all the time, based on the limits that you set. And as soon as the temperature gets outside those limits, something happens…”

hot-sun-thermometerThat’s how learning happens in the best systems.  We create “goals” (temperature limits) and constantly keep making “assessments” (measurements) of how we’re doing in reaching those goals.  So there’s no real surprise at 10PM each night — we know already whether it’s been hot or cold, and we’ve taken action to change what we’re doing based on that.

A Charter School is probably going to be more successful than our traditional public schools for just that reason.  They begin with a clear set of goals — or educational objectives — and will be scrutinized closely by folks who’d like to see them succeed.  And, more importantly, by folks who’d like to see them fail.  So they’ll be doing lots of assessment along the way, rather than waiting for that “test” at the end of the year.

I suspect that you’ll see many of them succeed for just that reason.

Help! I Have To Make A Speech!

A couple of mornings ago I found myself sitting near the front of a very large room, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder with several hundred other folks.  We all wanted to learn the secrets speakerof success that were stored away in the carefully moussed head of an amazingly handsome and talented young man who knew way more than we did.  I had looked forward to the opportunity to improve my skills, to understand how he had succeeded when so many others had failed, and to leave that morning with lots of ideas on how to make things happen.

One hour later, I walked out half asleep, desperate for coffee and fresh air. One day later, I’m not sure that I could have told you one single main point of his presentation.  What happened?

He made a speech, and those don’t work anymore.  It was very nicely done — the PowerPoint slides were attractive, the images appropriate, and he had his subject down cold.  But within a few minutes, my attention began to wander.  I checked my email, started dissecting his presentation design, looked around at the other attendees, looked at my watch — there just wasn’t enough there to hold my attention.

We live in a world where we expect to be engaged – commenting, writing, replying, sharing — and the one-to-many model of a lecture is no longer effective for educating a group about your topic.

So what do you do, if you’d actually like to make your ideas stick after the applause ends and the projector cools off?  Here are a few ideas:

  • Check For Understanding Ask members of the audience to give examples of situations where your idea could be used or implemented — this requires us to pay attention, and lets you know if we got the point
  • Get Our Input Have “blank” PowerPoint slides where we call out ideas to put on the list, and you add them.  The five most important things about…  The worst ways to do…
  • Talk To Us First Before your lecture, talk to the audience — then during your talk, use that information.  “John over there — in his hospital, he has this problem.  Tell us about it…”
  • Tell Us Stories Storytelling is the most effective way of communicating — that’s why there are drawings in caves.  Don’t just say what to do — give us the context.
  • Do The Q & A First, Not Last Before you start talking, ask us what we want to hear — and list our questions on a flip chart.  Keep referencing back to that during your talk — you’ll be a hero, and you can tailor what you say to just what we need.
  • Sum It Up For Us Have a summation or “take-aways” slide ready — and use it.  Leave it up there at the end when you’re done.
  • Don’t Complain No matter how much time you get, even if it’s half what you were promised, don’t complain.  Make it work.  Have a plan for 75%, 50%, 25% of what you were promised and be ready to do it.

And my personal favorite “must do”?  Give us a link! Provide us a simple link to get more information on your web or blog that contains links to everything you mention in your lecture.  Don’t make us work for it.  This also lets us share out your wisdom with all our little friends.

If you accomplish just part of this you’re well on the road to being an amazing speaker.

Saving Money On Training

As someone who’s been involved in the training world for longer than I like to admit, one of the questions that seems to come up in conversation lately is how to save money on axetraining. In most tough economic times, the training department is usually one of the first to feel the knife — there’s an assumption that people can just learn on the job, or that they really don’t need to travel to those expensive seminars.

I’ll hold off on the theoretical discussion of whether or not this is a good idea (hint: NOT!) for right now, and just give you some suggestions on how you can stretch your training dollar a bit further.


Cancel Any Training Not Tied To A Meaningful Assessment
While this is good advice at any time, it’s especially important now. If the class, workshop, seminar or speech doesn’t have a solid assessment component — don’t spend your money on it. (And if you don’t know what “solid assessment component” means, and can’t recite Kirkpatrick’s Levels by heart, stop right now and hire someone who can.)

Cancel Any Training With The Words “Overview”, “Introduction” or “Update” In The Title
Difficult times require that you focus on adding skills and improving performance — and learning that is generalized or unfocused should be the first to go.  (Yes, I’m a big fan of context — I’m an Instructional Designer, after all!) But you can’t sell context to your customers.

Cancel Any Training That Has Not Been Updated In The Last Two Years
If you’re going to cut, take a good hard look at the stuff that is old and stale.  If nobody in your org has been willing to pay to have a course spruced up in two years, that’s a pretty good signal that it isn’t really valued much.  Or, that you have achieved perfection and it shouldn’t be touched.  Pick one.

Cancel Any Training That Has More Than 20 PowerPoint Slides Per Hour Of Learning
That’s not training.  That’s a speech.

Cancel Any Training By An Instructor Who Doesn’t Get Stellar Reviews
You are doing performance reviews of your instructors/facilitators, right?  And it’s not just smile sheets?  Well if they’re not walking on water, it either means they’re not great trainers or it’s not great material — and in either case, it gets the boot.

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That should be a pretty good start — in most of the organizations I’ve worked with, I just cut your training budget between 50 and 70%.  You can mail me the check.

Why They Call Me An “Instructional Designer”

I wear a lot of hats in the work I do. Teacher, trainer, writer, coach, cheerleader, critic, speaker, listener, expert, dumb guy, resource, questioner, confidant… But the one that I like best (and I really think defines my skill set most clearly) is “Instructional Designer”.

Unfortunately, most of the folks I work with (and for) don’t really get that part. They see ID work as mostly taking the brain dump of every single thing their experts know about the subject and just pouring it into the muffin tins of a course outline. (I’m reminded of those videos of the uniformed men on the Tokyo subways who push and strain to jam just one more passenger onto the cars before the doors close.)

subway_pusherThe goal of many of my clients is to jam in just one more fact, procedure or policy so that they can claim to have presented it to the learners during the day or training. Then they’re confident that every single possible important item has been covered, and the job is complete. Whew!

And with this model, there really isn’t much need for any “design” — just keep that muffin tin as level as you can, and when it slops over the edge keep pouring and pouring and pouring. It will all fit in, somehow.

I’m currently working on a course where I’m actually contributing quite a bit of Instructional Design skill — and it we’re having a great time actually developing some learning materials that will drive the content into the pointy little heads of the students rather than just parade slide after slide past their glazed little eyeballs.

Why? Because we started with the basics: Who are these people? What do they need? How do they learn? How will we provide it for them? Where can we engage them in learning? What resources do they need? Who do they respect to learn from? What activities will engage them and get them to actually participate?

Would it have been easier to just put together two days of PowerPoint slides with loverly animations and color washes? You bet. But I always feel a little guilty as I stand in the back of the room, listening to the heads hit the chests as they doze off.

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