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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Nuts and Bolts: How (and Why) to Show Your Work by Jane Bozarth

by Jane Bozarth

May 6, 2014

“Want to share your work or help others share theirs? This shouldn’t be hard, or involve big launches or implementations of platforms, or require the use of tools with a long learning curve. Pay attention to where it could fit into your workflow. Look at your existing systems and channels.”

In August 2012 I wrote a column about narrating work, focused largely on watching my friend Gloria work and learn out loud on Facebook about the art of cookie making. The experience of seeing someone share photographic examples of small challenges, mistakes, and wins over a span of months—and watching others comment and even join in learning with her—was fascinating.

I was intrigued by the possibilities that doing better at showing our work could have on organizations, on each other, and on our own professional development. That column turned into an Ignite! session at DevLearn 2012, then into a popular longer conference session. And now—it’s a book.

Really, we know that a lot of “traditional” knowledge management approaches don’t work very well. We have piles of status reports and documented standard operating procedures and what have you, and still, data says we spend a quarter of our time looking for something—or someone—with the information we really need (Figure 1).

Figure 1: One of the best reasons for showing your work is that it ultimately helps you

You find out after a project is finished that someone in another building already did something just like it, or a key person leaves and no one can step in. Or you struggle to self-learn enough to complete a project and later run into someone at the office holiday party who, it turns out, has a degree in the thing you struggled to learn last spring. We are constantly documenting procedures while learning and relearning to handle exceptions to them, often keeping that data in our own heads.

Working efficiently and effectively isn’t just about capturing “information.” We need to do better, not at documenting what people do, but how they get things done. This will help our organizations, our coworkers, and others who engage in our practice. It will support your credibility and establish or strengthen your brand. And it’s how we help each other learn.

It means telling others at a meeting, or blogging, or making a video on your phone, or sketching on a chart pad, or drawing on a wall, or tweeting pictures, or uploading a document to SharePoint. Or perhaps, mentioning on Yammer something like: How I learned that. Where I got that idea. My problem and how I solved it. Before-and-after examples. What we did in class today. My slide deck from the big sale last week, with notes about how I handled objections. An obstacle and how I overcame it. How I spent my day. What was hard about that? Why we did it that way.

“I Was Struggling to Figure Out What to do with this Content”: Instead of showing off a finished, polished course, Matt Guyan took to his blog to describe his struggle to come up with an interesting treatment for the content—and where he found the inspiration for his solution: http://learningsnippets.wordpress.com/2013/11/28/showing-my-work-3/ “This Doesn’t Happen Overnight”: Kevin Thorn (Nuggethead Studioz), while working on a serious comic for HIV awareness, shows the evolution of the comic’s characters from rough sketch to final form as the story itself developed: http://www.learnnuggets.com/2013/02/serious-comic-character-development/ “Why I Did It That Way”: The process for choosing a font, with considerations alien to many of us but critical to designers, and from which any of us who design instructional materials can learn: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3285-the-typography-and-layout-behind- “Here’s What I Did. Please Ask Me About It”: The eLearning Guild hosts wonderful events at which attendees can show their work: mLearning DemoFest, which happens every summer at mLearnCon; eLearning DemoFest, held in the fall at DevLearn (Figure 2); and SolutionFest, which takes place at the spring Learning Solutions conference. Conversation is lively and often goes beyond just “how did you do that?” to “how did you do that with no money?” or “how did you do that given the time constraints and conflicting stakeholder ideas?” Guild members can access the “Best of” webinars after each event; for example, “Best of SolutionFest 2014.”

Figure 2: mLearning DemoFest and MobileFest in the summer, eLearning DemoFest in the fall, and SolutionFest in the spring feature dozens of designers and developers showing their best work

“This is How I Managed That Project”: Nancy Duarte tweeted about her process for designing a book. She lays it out in PowerPoint, then prints out the slides and gets down on the floor with them. “We Learn From Sharing Our Mistakes”: Hospital mortality and morbidity conferences routinely held meetings at which physicians gather to discuss unusual cases, how they handled them and why, and what they might do differently next time.“What I Learned Because Others Showed Their Work”: Leslie Jensen-Inman talks about an early job in a design studio, and learning from pressmen how to make her design work better—to make her work stronger—by avoiding things that could cause common printing problems. “They shared with me design decisions designers made that really ticked them off—things that made the pressmen’s jobs harder and sometimes impossible. In essence, the pressmen showed me how to make my work stronger. They showed me how to think beyond just being a designer and they helped me to design as a maker. They did this by encouraging my curiosity. They did this by sharing their experiences and their knowledge.” (https://the-pastry-box-project.net/leslie-jensen-inman/2013-march-24)

Want to share your work or help others share theirs? This shouldn’t be hard, or involve big launches or implementations of platforms, or require the use of tools with a long learning curve. Pay attention to where it could fit into your workflow. Look at your existing systems and channels. When considering how to show your work, or encourage others to show theirs, Charles Jennings reminds us: “The point is to extract learning from work, not create more work.”

Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-Tos of Working Out Loud, is available from Wiley.com, Amazon.com, and other booksellers worldwide.

More examples—including yours, if you send them Jane’s way—are available at http://www.pinterest.com/janebozarth/show-your-work-book-coming-may-2014/

Learn how to create an awesome collaborative learning experience by connecting mobile learners through social media! You can, by attending the great sessions at the leading mobile learning conference and expo, The eLearning Guild's mLearnCon 2014 in San Diego June 24-26. Multiple sessions addressing the state of mLearning + social media today and the directions we are moving toward tomorrow, together with the new Mobile Foundations program (included as part of your conference registration), will give you comprehensive guidance for defining your mobile learning strategy, enhancing it with social media, and connecting to business results. And we've added mLearning DemoFest to show you mobile learning solutions that your colleagues have already executed in a wide variety of organizations!

Topics Covered

Design Strategies, Development Strategies, Getting Started, Professional Development, Social Media

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Nuts and Bolts: Lean Solutions by Jane Bozarth

by Jane Bozarth

June 3, 2014

“So consider: What brings the most value? What gets you the performance you need in the least amount of time at the lowest cost, without taking people away from work for longer than necessary, and without piles of paper manuals printed, shipped, and never used?”

This month I delivered a special workshop on lean eLearning. The preparation brought to mind my first epiphany about lean eLearning back in the early 2000s, when I was working on the first draft of my first book, eLearning Solutions on a Shoestring. Even then I had already seen way too many “over-solutions”—usually in the form of far more content than the problem required—and solutions intended to be a one-size-fits-all training answer for employees who were in vastly different jobs for which one size of training most decidedly didn’t fit all.

The example I was working with involved the terminal performance objective, “learner will differentiate heart sounds.” The answer: a screen with clickable links to different, labeled audio clips of heart sounds available free online. Could learners perform after reviewing the sounds? Yes, provided we didn’t ask them to deal with too many at once, and we gave them ample opportunities to review. Were stakeholders happy with the solution? Of course not.

Apart from what seemed to be a general distrust of anything so simple, things quickly fell into the common sins of waste: over-production, over-processing, and waiting.

Although listening to heart sounds is a purely auditory task, for heaven’s sake, we needed visuals. We needed graphics. We needed an accompanying printed workbook. We needed more interactivity. We needed a cartoon avatar, or animated hearts, or whatever else would delay the project four months and add $50k to what otherwise was a free solution. Again: the learner could achieve the performance with what was essentially a zero-cost, 10-minute-to-build solution.

I’d used “heartbeats” as an example in workshops for a couple of years, and found immense satisfaction in 2006 when Time.com ran a piece about growing concerns that doctors, losing the ability to listen to heart sounds, were ordering expensive diagnostic tests when good stethoscope skills would do. The solution? Having physicians learn by listening to heart sounds on iPods. So there!

That first book on inexpensive eLearning is now nearly 10 years old and woefully out of date. The first couple of years after publication the industry evolved as new eLearning-course tools and simple communication technologies came into popular use: this new authoring tool, that new discussion board format, etc. Then things began to evolve in other ways. Social tools offered vast new opportunities for student collaboration. Web 2.0 technologies like YouTube and blogging products put creating content and publishing to the web into the hands of Everyman, not just IT and programmers and people with access to servers and expensive photo-editing software.

Lately I’ve seen examples of lean solutions that were the perfect answer to a performance problem. There are things like Snapguide-created job aids, collaborative Pinterest boards, and six-second Vine videos. I’ve seen skilful repurposing of the YouTube comments section go from endless empty responses to lengthy meaningful conversation about a video scenario. A participant at an eLearning Guild DevLearn DemoFest showcased a great example of using voiceover with still images to create an online simulation quickly, without the cost of video production. And just yesterday I went looking through the library of Articulate-member-created videos in search of a solution for a colleague.

So consider: What brings the most value? What gets you the performance you need in the least amount of time at the lowest cost, without taking people away from work for longer than necessary, and without piles of paper manuals printed, shipped, and never used?

So what are some lean solutions in 2014?

Classics, like the Mecklenburg County Public Library-designed 23 Things, that used a blog to deliver a whole, fun course based on the premise: If they need to learn to use tech, how can we have them use the tech while learning about the tech?Snapguide, a delightfully straightforward tool, tutorial built-in, for creating concise job aids with user-generated images.Pinterest, a visual-bookmarking tool allowing quick aggregation from web and user images. Better: items allow for comment, and boards can be collaborative. Think: board offering a virtual tour of an employee’s first day at work.Screenr videos for the Articulate community, with end users sharing their quick solutions of use to others.Apps, not courses: “Apps for the Army.” This one is decidedly not “cheap,” but consider how many other, wasteful, solutions, they could have developed. Embedding. Using still images and voiceover instead of video.A six-second Vine video showing how to tie a knot. Using the YouTube comments section for actual conversation, not mindless commentary.My favorite lean solution: Go Google, “Soldier reading book to child via Skype.”

Still interested in resources for low-cost eLearning design? Tracy Parish is building a wonderfully complete mindmap of tools, grouped by uses. Go contribute.

And go Google! That, folks, is a solution.

So what are your suggestions for or examples of lean solutions?

Topics Covered

Design & Development Tools, Emerging Topics, Getting Started, Instructional Design, Training Strategies

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