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Conrad Gottfredson on Meeting Moments of Learning Need
Conrad Gottfredson is the chief learningstrategist at APPLY Synergies, wherehe helps learning organizations design tools to meet the five moments of learningneed. The eLearning Guild recognized Con as a Guild Master in 2014. He recentlytalked to Learning Solutions Magazine about meeting the five moments of learningneed using workflow learning. For an introduction to workflow learning, pleaserefer to our interview with Con’s partner, Bob Mosher.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
PH: You and Bob Mosher write extensively about what yourefer to as the “5 Moments of Learning Need.” Let’s talk about how that integrateswith workflow learning.
CG: That’s at the heart of it all. It’s how youoperationalize 70-20-10; it tells the whole picture of what we need to attendto in learning!
PH: In an article you and Bob wrote for LearningSolutions Magazine a few years ago, you said that organizations were stillstuck in a “learning event” paradigm, taking learners out of the workflow fortraining classes. Has that changed?
CG: Sadly, far too many organizations remain stuck in thatparadigm. If you go to conferences, you’ll find that the primary focus is stillon formal learning.
The good news is—we have a performance support community ofclose to four thousand people who are working to advance the discipline ofperformance support. We’re also seeing more discussion around workflow learning,which is really important. But the methodology governing how most L&Dgroups design and develop solutions treats performance support as anafterthought: It’s something that you do after training.
And there are serious misperceptions about workflow learning—oneof which is that if you’re providing learners access to eLearning in theirworkflow, you have workflow learning. This isn’t true at all. So, in practice,we’re still in the formal learning paradigm, I think.
PH: How can we change that?
CG: Well that’s a journey. It requires a cultural change. Welove our classes; we love our eLearning; we love the formal side of things. Andfrankly, we have control over all of that. The minute you step into workflow,you’ve got a whole set of new challenges. It’s not our turf. We can bringpeople into our classroom; that’s our turf. We can bring them into an eLearningcourse; that’s our turf. We can bring them into a virtual course; that’s ourturf. We can be in control of all of that. But when we step into the workflow,we’re on the turf of the business. It requires us to form a very different kindof partnership.
Then there are all the challenges when we build solutionsthat extend into the workflow. They have to be kept current and relevant, andthat requires us to build a relationship with the organization that wegenerally haven’t had.
PH: Let’s talk about the five moments. I’d like to helpreaders understand the five moments of learning need in the context of workflowlearning. (The five moments are: Learn New, Learn More, Change, Solve, andApply. For a deeper discussion, please see “AreYou Meeting All Five Moments of Learning Need?”) Let’s talk a little bitmore about the differences between the moments. If I understand the momentscorrectly, any of them could take place during Apply, that is, in the workflow.Is that right?
CG: Everything happens at the moment of Apply; you’re right.At the moment of Apply, I might need to remember or adapt or adjust to theuniqueness of the work. I may need to Learn something New or I may need toLearn More; I may need to unlearn and relearn—that’s Change. Or I may need toSolve a problem. All of that can happen at the moment of Apply.
Here’s the difference. If I am LearningNew or Learning More as I do my job, that’s true workflow learning. To thedegree that I stop my work, I move more toward formal learning.
From time to time, employees may needto just stop for a few minutes and learn something to help them performeffectively on their job. That’s an important part of workflow learning. But whatmost organizations miss is this whole notion of learning as employees do their work.
Stopping work to learn is costly to organizations. And wehave an opportunity in the framework of the “5 Moments of Learning Need” tobuild solutions where people can learn as they do their jobs. That’s reallypowerful. That’s a game changer—learning while you do your job, while you doyour work. And that’s what true performance support infrastructure enables.
PH: The moment of “Apply” requiresmore than rote recall of information; it’s applying that information indifferent situations.
CG: Right, right. It’s applying it in different situations.The moment of Apply is what’s so very important because that’s the challenge. Ican be trained, but at the moment of Apply, not be able to do beans. BecauseI’ve forgotten all of it—or because I haven’t transferred it. When I learnoutside the workflow, I don’t have context. So I might practice and do otherkinds of things, if I’m lucky enough to have that practice, but it’s not thereal work. So now, I get to the workplace, and it’s different and it’schallenging and I have got to remember and somehow translate that to on-the-jobperformance. Well, a true performance support solution provides me two-click,10-second access to just what I need at my moment of need, to be able tocomplete any job task that I need to complete—that I learned in the training.Plus, everything else that I didn’t learn in the training that I need to beable to do—the tasks I can learn as I do them.
PH: So, with performance support, it sounds like all five momentscan be met in the workflow.
CG: Absolutely. All five moments happen in the workflow. Butthere is some confusion about when we focus on the moments of Learn New andLearn More in the workflow. Just-in-time access to an eLearning course isn’t agood example of workflow learning. You can be in the workflow and actually stopyour work, if you do you an eLearning course for 45 minutes. You’re on yourjob, but you’re not in the workflow.
PH: When you say that just-in-time access to eLearning isn’ta good example of workflow learning, what do you mean?
CG: To the degree that employees stop working to learn, theystep away from the context of their flow of work. We want to help people learn whilethey are actually doing their work as much as we can. If they need to stoptheir work to learn, we want to make sure that learners have immediate accessto “just enough” learning.
PH: As opposed to learning being something separate?
CG: Right. There’s a mid-ground. Microlearning is where Ican get to a little learning burst. Rather than stopping my work and trying tosort through a 30-minute eLearning, if I can get to a three- to four-minutelearning burst or segment, a microlearning piece that I can do right in thecontext of what I need, that’s very effective. So there’s this continuum thatwe work with, in terms of learning. It begins with learning while you areperforming your job, extending along the spectrum with short micro-learningbursts, and ending with people completely stopping their work to learn for anextended period of time.
A “5 Moments” learning solution is a solution that isoptimized along this spectrum. We pull people from their work for those skillswhere the impact of failure is critical to catastrophic. We shift the rest toworkflow learning using an EPSS (an embedded performance support solution) to enablelearning while people work. The pyramid [that Bob Mosher described] is the design methodology for an EPSS. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: Performance support pyramidfrom APPLY Synergies
PH: So an EPSS is a performance support solution that canmeet all five moments of learning need?
CG: Yes. The “5 Moments of Learning Need” is a frameworkto guide the allocation of resources within the pyramid design for an EPSS; it isstructured to address these moments as people transition across the threestages for gaining and sustaining effective performance on the job.
PH: What are those three stages?
CG: The three stages are train, transfer, and sustain.
The “train” stage is what we do formally,when we pull people away from their work to learn. As I mentioned, there aretimes at which this is important to do. But unfortunately, too often we try totrain on everything, and that’s where the mistake lies. It’s our experiencethat we can push, on average, half of what we’re forcing into a classroom, intothe workflow to be learned as people perform their jobs using an EPSS.
Figure 2: Stages of learning
We train, primarily, to help learners master tasks andconcepts to the degree we can. The role of performance support is to make surethat people are able to—at the moment of Apply—take whatever they learnedduring training and have the help they need to be able to transfer that toeffective on-the-job performance. Without performance support, learners quicklyforget what they learn. They also have a tendency to make mistakes—some ofwhich could be costly. And, the time it takes to get to competent performanceis way too long.
PH: So is that the transfer part? Or is it transfer andsustain together?
CG: Transfer is about transferringwhat you learned to the actual moment of Apply—achieving on-the-job competence.Duringthe third stage, we need to sustain an employee’s ability to perform again andagain and again, in the nuances and the challenges of an ever-changingworkplace. You’re not going to do that without an effectively designed EPSS.
Here’s the challenge for training today: Over the years,we’ve had less and less time to train on more and more stuff. So we keepcramming more and more content, more and more learning objectives intotraining. What’s happened is, although we call our content-dense courses training,they’re really just delivering content. We may be delivering that contentcreatively and powerfully and making it enjoyable and fun—but we’re not reallytraining, just delivering content.
What’s lost is practice with feedback and integratedpractice—where we don’t just practice one task, but we actually integratemultiple tasks and knowledge into realistic cases—instructional practices thatreally matter. All of that has fallen out of the classroom because there is notime.
If we’ve designed for the five moments, we have acomprehensive solution that deals with the classroom and the workflow andaddresses learners as they make the journey through their training and transferstages, and then it sustains them as they perform in the workflow. An EPSSsupports them across all of it. An effectively designed performance support solutionhelps people learn in the classroom, it helps them transfer what they learnedto their work, and it helps them sustain effective performance on the job.
PH: In a perfect world of workflow learning, would therestill be a training stage that takes people out of workflow?
CG: Oh sure; as I’ve said, sometimes it is necessary. Youmay have a project where everything can be learned in the workflow becausethere aren’t any skills where the critical impact of failure is significant tocatastrophic. Therefore, you can build a performance support tool and peoplecan learn it all in the workflow, as they do their jobs.
There are other instances where the majority of the skillsare so critical-to-catastrophic that you need to pull people away from work todo all of it. The point is that, from project to project, the degree to whichyou need to pull people away from their work to learn can vary.
It’s wonderful if you have a project where people can learnentirely in the workflow with an EPSS; that’s a great thing. Generally, wedon’t find that’s the case.
