Disrupting Employee Development

I work for a truly wonderful company that creates the best training you can imagine. For an instructional design nerd like me, I'm in the candy store every day. It is a dream job. I work with the smartest people, the most creative folks, to design and build projects for the most visionary organizations doing the most important work. Wow. Just. Wow.

As the manager of the ID team, there are challenges, though. For starters, our standards for what our folks have to be able to do are going up every day. The technology we are designing for keeps evolving and emerging. Yesterday it was elearning. Today it's virtual reality with a side of augmentation. Who knows what exciting things will begin to show up tomorrow.

Plus we are growing like mad. The projects are coming in the door fast and furious. I'm a working manager, so I staff projects that might want a little white-glove attention or maybe just need a senior level ID.

So, what to do -- how to give my team the opportunity to grow and learn, in a way that they will enjoy and doesn't take a ton of my energy? That's when I came up with the idea of a flash mob approach.

As you know, a "flash mob" is a crowd that is organized on social media, comes together to do one thing, and then disperses. Instead of singing the Halleluia Chorus in Grand Central Station, I call people together to think about one thing, and then to make an example of it. The first flash mob was around infographics - what are they, when should they be used, and here's one we made. I asked people to form themselves into teams, and I said the teams had to have at least one of each role. Teams had a (very) limited time to work together, and then they presented to me (Director of Instructional Design), the Chief Creative Officer, and a creative director.

People loved it! We collected what we learned and now knew about infographics. Everyone said they wanted to do it again.

So we did, this time on the topic of games. Games are a hot topic in instructional design, and most IDs want to be able to point to one in their portfolio. But the budget for them can be steep, and obviously they aren't suited to every project or client. So not everyone has had the opportunity to work on a game project.

For the games flash mob, I made the high level design (topic outline, learning objectives, and audience description) and course content available to a few projects with different modalities (elearning, ILT, vILT). Again, I asked people to form teams, with at least one person of each discipline on the team. I gave the teams a short period to work and had a couple of checkins. I invited some folks to be "judges," and created a scoring rubric for them to use. I shared that with the teams, and told them that they would get extra points if their design was reusable and could be added to our library.

It was a huge success -- people got the opportunity to work with team members they hadn't worked with before. And we saw some amazing games come out of it.

If you are looking for a way to breathe life into your employee development, here's my best advice:

1. Give people a choice, about what they are doing and/or who they are doing it with. Adults like choice.
2. Train people on things that will improve their personal portfolios.
3. Choose topics that the company needs a deeper pool of talent in, and let the trainees know that they are going to be a part of the company's future by participating.
4. Always stay true to your corporate values. Teamwork, thinking outside the box, creativity are all part of my company's DNA. The flash mob concept seemed natural and comfortable to folks because of that.

And don't be afraid to try something completely different. Modeling creative thinking to your team is more than something you talk about. It is taking a risk and trying something new. It sure worked for me!

I'm In!

I got it in writing!

Yesterday I got the very exciting news that I've been accepted to the MS program in Applied Experimental Psychology and Engineering at RIT. I am absolutely thrilled. Here's what I said in my Personal Statement:

I’m currently working at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf as the department chair for the Educational Design Resources department. Part of my job is to develop new and novel instructional assets to support the education of deaf students. One project that I’ve been working on is the development of asynchronous e-learning for deaf students.

I am interested in figuring out how to use the features of ASL to inform the graphical presentation of asynchronous e-learning. I think that certain features of ASL will perform as a schema that will reduce cognitive load, and increase retention and knowledge transfer for signing students.

The sad fact is that much of the way instruction is presented is not effective. In order to increase effectiveness of my instruction, from the beginning of my career, I’ve turned to research. And happily, there is a lot of research out there. But it’s about hearing students, not deaf.   So to answer my specific questions, I am going to have to do this research myself.  My hope is that this program will equip me with the tools and venue to discover the answers to my questions so that I can apply what I discover in my instruction.

I am joyful and passionate about my work. I believe that what I am doing will make a material difference in the lives of our students.  It probably sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I really feel that this work will be my legacy in the world – that it will improve how instruction for deaf students is developed.

My work style is flexible and collaborative.  At work I see my primary role as connection maker and obstacle remover. And it’s the same outside of work.

I’ve worked as an instructional designer for fourteen years, developing a wide variety of content for both web and instructor-led instruction. I have thought and written on instructional design topics and cognition. Joining this program is an extension of the work I’ve done up to this point.

The program specifically at RIT is a good fit for several reasons. First, I’m interested in deaf cognition, and NTID is the place to be for that. Second, this is program has a focus on application. I actually want to apply what the results of research to my work. And I’m working here, so the convenience of the location and support of my Chair are indeed factors.

Information Costs and Six Sigma

Probably one of three most important concepts I learned at the Simon School was information cost. (The other two were: Buy and hold a diversified portfolio, and sunk costs are irrelevant. There -- you just got the benefit of an MBA education. Go forth and prosper!) Information cost is the costs that occur because the person making the decision is too far away from the process to understand exactly what is happening. In many organizations, not only do the misplace decision makers not know the impact of the decision, but even worse, they don't know what they don't know.

So, when applying Six Sigma to a process, one critical place where the whole thing can go south in a hurry is having someone make decisions about sensitive systems when the person doesn't truly understand the system.

Here's an example from my past. I worked for a company that made, among other things, e-learning. The courses were divided into lessons, the lessons into topics. The content was complex. If it were easy, people would have figured it out on their own. They wouldn't need us to teach them how to do it.

Typically, we worked on a lesson basis. The process started with a planning meeting, and then was written, edited, and animated. This mean that there was some time waiting in for the content to get to you, especially if the previous lesson was smaller, or for some reason you finished the work early. Management watched utilization very closely, and decided that handing off lesson-by-lesson resulted in too much waiting, and we should hand off topic-by-topic.

The problem with that is that the entire process had been built with the assumption of lesson-level hand offs. We were accustomed to moving content around in lessons, adding or deleting topics, and so forth when the lesson was edited. When we were forced to edit topic by topic, once the topic went by your part of the process, that was it. If you got to a later topic and made an edit that affected (or need to affect) something in an earlier topic, well that was just too bad. As the content reviewer, I started having to pull back early topics. This resulted in re-work all the way down the line. It was a nightmare. At first management didn't want to hear anything about going back to a lesson-level hand off system. They stubbornly clung to their decision. But eventually their own figures  on cycle time convinced them to reverse themselves. What a happy announcement that was!

The take-away is, I think, that we have to approach process improvement with humility and collegiality. We need to watch the impact of our changes, and be ready to tweak as necessary. And we need to think about the unchanged systems affected by this process. It is only by attention to these that process changes will be successful, and not include some unexpected and unhappy results!

Make it Easy, Take it Easy

One of the things that really grosses me out is a wet sponge, used and covered with little particles of food and debris, sitting in a sink. I don't like looking at them, smelling them, or touching them. Ick!

The Scene of the Ickiness

So, when I encountered a truly disgusting example in the break-room sink at work, I was faced with some options. Break-room sinks are even more disgusting than most because no one takes ownership for them, so they never are really clean. When I found our department sponge mouldering in a puddle, I wondered who would leave it there, and how could anyone wash their dishes using it?

I could have just ignored it. After all, I don't actually wash my dishes at work. I take them home. But I do occasionally wash my hands there. So I would see the sponge again.

I could have rinsed it out, squeezed it out, and put it on the counter to dry. But I would have to actually touch it (ick, ick, and double ick!) tomorrow, and the day after that. And the day after that. The prospect of becoming the icky sponge monitor wasn't appealing.

So, I did something else. I bought and installed a sponge holder. Now when the sponge is used, the user can set it in the conveniently located holder. The effort required is zero, and the sponge will tend to stay drier.

I think that people don't wake up in the morning thinking, "How can I gross Clare out today?" They just tend to follow the path of least resistance. They choose to take the alternative that seems like it benefits them the most. So my teammate sponge users didn't want to fuss around with the sponge. They just wanted to wash and go. Throwing the sponge into the sink was born for a desire to not be doing the washing anymore.

When things aren't going the way you desire, take a look at the system that behavior is a part of, and ask yourself if the system can be tweaked to give you the outcome you desire. Be careful, though. Sometimes the tweaks can result in unexpected outcomes, not all desirable. A while back I installed  edging in my garden at home. I wanted to keep the nice tillable dirt in the garden and out of the lawn. I wanted to keep the grass in the yard and out of the garden. A few dollars and several feet of pound-in edging later, I was happy. But what I didn't realize was that the area of lawn I had just isolated from the garden was the low point in my yard. And come the next rain, I had "Lake Felgert" in my back yard. By keeping the dirt in the garden and the grass in the yard, I also kept the water in the lowest point! So it's important to re-evaluate your tweaks and make sure that the result you have is the result you want.