Nuts and Bolts: The Story in the Slide Deck by Jane Bozarth

by Jane Bozarth

March 3, 2015

“Finding your 20 percent is made especially challenging by what Chip and Dan Heath, in their excellent book Made To Stick, call the Curse of Knowledge, ‘The trap of believing everything that you know is important and interesting to your learners.’”

At a recent conference I took the opportunity to sit in on Cammy Bean’s great Writing Better Scripts for eLearning presentation. Key messages included reminders to keep it short and snappy, to write the way people talk, to look for the active voice, and to find a narrative thread. It got me thinking about some past work I’d done in teaching others to edit ruthlessly so I thought I’d share some of that here.  

I wrote about this in June 2010 and figured it would be OK to revisit this image (Figure 1). Before you begin designing, identify the two or three ideas most critical to successful performance on the job. What must the learner know? Start there and build out only as much as necessary. (As opposed to starting on the outside and stuffing as much content as possible into the allotted module size or class time.) I call this “finding your 20 percent,” and have always envisioned it as looking like this (Figure 1)”  

Figure 1: Find your 20 percent

Finding your 20 percent is made especially challenging by what Chip and Dan Heath, in their excellent book Made To Stick, call the Curse of Knowledge, “The trap of believing everything that you know is important and interesting to your learners.” It’s the outside box in Figure 1, where everything there is to know about a topic resides. And where the most seasoned subject matter experts (SMEs) usually start when you say, “Tell me what you do.” It’s hard to drill down to that smallest central point.

 Cammy reminded me of this when she said, “Find the story in the slide deck.” I recall once being handed a giant pile of “content” for use in management training. The request was for an online course on the organization’s budget processes, formerly offered as a two-day classroom program taught by SMEs. I had a big box of materials and manuals and policies and handouts. I’d struggled with it for weeks when a friend in the accounting office wrapped her arms around it all and said, “Jane, this is what a manager needs to know: If she wants new uniforms for her police officers, or new tires for a Jeep at a state park, or a new wing on a building, or travel money to send her staff to a conference, what words does she need to use and what details will she have to provide and what forms does she need to file?” That was the story in the slide deck. That was the 20 percent. 

Topics Covered

Design Strategies, Getting Started, Instructional Design, Learning Media, Training Strategies

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