Learning Leader Julie Dirksen Advises: Diagnose the Problem Before Turning to Training

Training can’t solve everything.

Guild Master and consultant Julie Dirksen of Usable Learning wants instructionaldesigners, managers, and others engaged with creating and using eLearning andother corporate training and performance support to internalize that essentialmessage.

When managers want to see behavior change—whether it’sgetting learners to start doing something new, stop an unwanted behavior, orapply a new procedure to an existing task—they often turn to training. But whenbehavior doesn’t change? “A lot of times it isn’t necessarily a trainingproblem,” Dirksen said. She’s specifically referring to situations where peopleknow what to do or how to do it, whatever the new or desired behavioris—whether it’s following hand-washing protocols in a medical office orproviding effective feedback to direct reports—but they are either not doing itor doing it ineffectively.

“These are complex human behaviors; they need a whole lot ofanalysis—and there are some really good models out there for how to structurethat analysis so that you can feel that you’re being thorough in looking at theproblem and breaking it down.”

Dirksen mentions the behavior change wheel, based on theCOM-B model, out of University College London, as a good diagnostic model.COM-B looks at capability, opportunity, and motivation; behavior is aninteraction of these elements; behavior change requires a change in at leastone of these elements. 

If it’s not a training problem, what is it? According toDirksen, the problem could be:

• Lack of feedback or invisible feedback (See: “Learning Leaders: Julie Dirksen on the Importance of Feedback in Changing Behavior”)
• Lack of opportunity
• Misaligned incentives
• Lack of motivation
• Learners don’t know or understand theconsequences of noncompliance
• Learners experience fear, anxiety, or discomfortaround the requested behavior or around change in general

For example, in the case of hand-washing protocols: “One ofthe things when they teach hand-washing classes is, they tell you to talk toother people when you see mistakes being made. They tell you to talk to your co-workersif you see that they’re not washing their hands,” Dirksen said. “Nobody wantsto do that!”

A protocol like that, fraught in any setting, can becomeimpossible where “there is a power differential like nurses talking todoctors,” and a lot depends on the culture of the organization, she said. It’salso a question of what the training covered. If people are taught theprocedure and told to follow it—and they are told to have thoseconversations with colleagues who didn’t follow the procedure, information-basedtraining is not enough.

“That’s not something that you’re going to get people to dojust by saying, ‘Hey, it’s really important for you to do this.’ The approachthat you would have for that would be really different. You would do somethinglike actually practice and role-play having those scenarios so that people geta little bit less scared by the idea of talking to somebody about their hand-washing.They would have a set of gentle and non-judgmental explanations and a way ofdoing it that they feel comfortable with,” Dirksen said. “That’s a case where I’mpretty sure that a knowledge-based approach of just telling people it’simportant isn’t going to make a significant dent in the behavior. You’re goingto need to actually give people good tool sets for those—and they do exist.There are different kinds of models for having different difficultconversations.”

Effectively diagnosing the problem helps instructionaldesigners understand what can—and cannot—be fixed by training. This, in turn,helps set appropriate expectations for eLearning and can turn the focus tosolving the actual problem. In this case, the real issue was learners’ anxietyor discomfort over calling out co-workers for their noncompliant behavior.

Other times, the problem might be misaligned incentives ormotivation. Dirksen cites another example: “I was working with an insurer; wewere working on multinational policies. Insurance policies that have to coverseveral different countries are really complicated because you have to dealwith the laws in all the different countries,” she explained. While she wasworking on the training, she was asked by the client, “Can we do something thatreally emphasizes the importance of entering the information accurately? I don’tthink our data entry people are always as careful as they should be aboutentering the data accurately.” That was a clue. “I said, ‘Sure, we can do that,but before we do, why don’t you tell me a little bit about how they getfeedback, how their incentive systems work?’”

It turned out that the incentive system rewarded the dataentry staff based on how many applications they entered per hour. Just as WellsFargo’s emphasis on tellers opening numerous accounts for each customer led to tellers’and managers’ deplorable—even criminal—behavior, incentives that rewarded dataentry volume rather than quality led to sloppy work. “That’s not a trainingproblem. That’s very emphatically not a training problem,” Dirksen said. “That’sa case where it really is the misaligned incentives. But I think we often, intraining and development, get handed some of these kinds of things with theexpectation that we’ll magically fix it through training.”

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