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Learning Leaders: Julie Dirksen on the Importance of Feedback in Changing Behavior
Julie Dirksen of Usable Learning is a learning strategy consultant; she writes, teaches, andconsults on eLearning design. Her book, Design for How People Learn, isnot only a fantastic introduction to instructional design, it is a fun andentertaining read. The eLearning Guild recognized Julie as a Guild Master atDevLearn 2016 Conference & Expo. She is a frequent presenter at Guildconferences and online events. I recently spoke with Julie about the challengesof getting training and behavior change to stick, and the role of feedback ininfluencing learner behavior. This portion of our interview has been edited forlength and clarity.
Pamela Hogle (PH):eLearning encompasses a range from training to performance support and includesjust-in-time information, job aids, automated reminders, etc. What is the bestway to design an eLearning program that supports lasting behavior change?
Julie Dirksen (JD): Whenwe get into the behavior change piece, a lot of times we’re looking atbehaviors that are difficult to change. The way that I usually define it when Italk about it is: things where people know the right thing to do, but they’restill not doing it. …
We, as a field, in learning and development and ineLearning, have pretty good tools already for when the problem is reallyinformation-based—people just don’t know the answer, they don’t know how to usea particular piece of software; we’ve already got a decent tool set for thosekinds of procedural or knowledge-based problems. But when that’s not enough,when you’ve got a more challenging behavior-change question, that’s when Ithink we need to start looking at some other models and other solutions.
The big issue I have with a lot of the behavior-change problemsis really making sure that you are solving the right problem. One of ourtraditional approaches to behavior change is to just tell people louder andmore emphatically that it’s really, really important. And I think we can allextrapolate how well that works in certain scenarios.
So, then it becomes an issue of looking at, ‘Well, what’s reallygoing on?’ The answer is usually complicated stuff, right? So, for example,I’ve got a diagnostic worksheet that I use whenever I’m dealing with diagnosinga behavior-change problem.
One of the most common elements I see in behavior-changeproblems is an absence of concrete or visual feedback for the behavior. So, wereally want people to do this, but nobody is paying any attention, and theperson isn’t getting any feedback on whether they’re doing it right or evenfeedback acknowledging that they are doing the behavior. Basically, it’s kindof existing in a vacuum. I’d say that’s probably the number one reason why mostof the behavior-change problems occur: an absence of visible or tangiblefeedback on the behavior itself.
For example, one of the behavior-change problems that I useas an example is hand washing in healthcare facilities. It’s a classicbehavior-change problem that everybody understands. Every healthcare facilityhas wrestled with it. The people who are engaging in health care are good,dedicated professionals who want to do the right thing, and yet we still seeproblems with compliance with enough hand-washing behaviors. The estimates thatI’ve seen, in terms of research studies, put it at somewhere between, onaverage, somewhere around 70 percent of required hand washing.
If we start to break that problem down and say, ‘What’s going on there?’ thereis a bunch of things that are going on. One is the issue of absent or invisiblefeedback. Some hospitals have put programs in place so that people can getfeedback on it. But the activity itself is, well, you have to have faith thatyour hands have bacteria on them. Everybody knows that they do, but you don’treally see it. I think that, if your hands turned blue when they had bacteriaon them, we wouldn’t have a hand-washing problem. You’d go, ‘Oh, my hands areblue. I have to wash my hands.’ And that would be the end of the story.Everybody would be pretty much completely compliant.
But it’s not like that; it’s actually invisible. You know,intellectually, that your hands are clean after you’ve done a good job ofwashing them, but they don’t usually look all that different. In healthcaresituations, it’s not like you’re scrubbing off dirt. You’re taking hands thatostensibly look clean, and you’re making them really clean, as opposed to justkind of clean.
PH: That’s whatyou mean by visible feedback, then? There’s no result from the action thatlooks different from when you didn’t do it?
JD: Yes. Thosetend to be tough behaviors to change, because even when people know that itmakes a difference and that there is bacteria, they are having to persist inthe behavior based on this cognitive knowledge that there is bacteria, ratherthan some visible progress. …
If we talk about a traditional leadership activity thatwe’ve got a lot of training about—this is in every management training thatyou’re ever going to see: ‘How do you do a good job of giving feedback to yourdirect reports?’
That’s another one where, maybe you give somebody feedback,and there is an immediate visible benefit: They stop doing something that theywere doing before, or they start doing something new. But a lot of times it’snot that concrete—it’s not that definite a behavior. And so, hopefully, you’redoing that thing [the new behavior], but you’re not really getting an immediateresult.
When we think about Fitbit apps and things like that—the popularityof these fitness apps—a big part of what that’s doing is trying to takesomething that’s invisible and make it visible to people. So, for example,people want to exercise so that they can get into shape. But getting inshape isn’t a concrete goal per se. You could argue—I want to improve myblood oxygen; I want my pulse to be this instead of that when I do a 30-secondstep test. That is something that makes it concrete. Going for a walk is not;you know you’ve done something, but you don’t know what you’ve accomplished. So,the Fitbit takes that and turns it into actual numbers. You have a concretegoal. You can take something that’s a little bit vague—I should really get moreexercise—and you can turn it into something where you can actually measure itand track it and see your progress. That’s what the benefit of those devicesis.
Getting that kind of real, visible feedback is hard, andit’s rare, and it happens slowly. It’s tough to stay motivated if you aren’tgetting some kind of encouragement with it. So, that’s a case of diagnosing: Isone of the problems with this behavior change that people aren’t gettingtangible feedback on what they’re doing? And if that’s the case, then, guesswhat? It may not be a training problem at all; it may be a problem about whatthe feedback mechanism is on it. But then at least you’re not trying to solvethe wrong problem.
PH: You’vementioned the VHIL (Virtual HumanInteraction Lab) at Stanford in some of your work; they are studying whetherimmersive experiences drive behavior change. What do you think of the potentialof these types of experiences to have long-lasting effects on learners’behavior?
JD: I haven’tseen anything yet where they’ve done long-term research on using that strategy,but this study was interesting to me for a couple reasons. One has to do with theidea of knowledge versus belief. We tend to adapt our behavior based on belief:Ibelieve that this is a good thing to do; I believe that thisis important—as opposed to I know.
I realize that’s kind of a weird, subtle distinction, andI’m working on clarifying that distinction. There’s something about visceralexperience that seems—I’m using very qualified terms because, again, thereisn’t that much research yet—it seems that having a visceral experience, ratherthan being cognitively told some things, may make a difference in not only yourknowledge of the topic but also your belief in its importance or your belief intaking action on it. So that’s one of the reasons that I think that particularstudy is interesting.
I don’t know how we’re doing longitudinally—whether it’smore durable in terms of effect. [Editor’s note: The VHIL is conductinglongitudinal studies now, but the published research looks only at behaviorchanges immediately following an immersive experience.] We know behaviorsare more durable when people perceive them to be tied to their values or theysee some bigger purpose. We know that when we use extrinsic rewardsystems—we’re essentially sort of bribing people into the behavior—that that’snot a very durable model. There are better and worse qualities of motivation.If you tie behavior to people’s value system and help them see how it’s part ofthings they value or things they think are important, it’s more likely to be adurable behavior. If you tie things to more intrinsic things, like relatednessor social connectedness, it’s also a more durable behavior. …
We talk about emotional appeal, and sometimes a littledisdainfully because we’ve got this ‘religion’ of rational thought. But theissue with it is that we use emotionality as a gauge for how importantsomething is: ‘If I feel strongly about it…’ We don’ttalk about thinking strongly about something. There’s an elementof emotionality there, and that’s how I know that something is important. If Idon’t feel anything in particular about a topic, I immediately go, ‘Apparently,that topic is really not that important to me, and I don’t care that much. I amgoing to back-burner it.’ So, that’s part of behavior change as well. Becauseif something feels abstract, then my brain is going to decide that it might notbe that important: ‘We’re not going to worry about that right now; I believeyou, but it just doesn’t feel that important.’
That is why I think the Stanford virtual reality stuff isinteresting. I think they’re getting at that level of understanding aboutparticular topics. If I have physical experience of something, am I going to feeldifferently about it—and is that going to change my behavior?
PH: Is thereanything else about approaching eLearning design that you’d like to share forreaders who might be new to this?
JD: Tips forbeginners—that’s what I do most of the time.
I think really understanding what kind of a problem you’retrying to solve is a big one; and not oversimplifying certain things.
My standard tip for beginners is: Do user testing of yourstuff. That’s the short version of my tips—learn how to do good user testing.Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think is probably the best singleresource for getting started with that.
I’d say if you are new to eLearning and you don’t doanything else—if you can do user testing of the materials that you’re makingand make sure that you’ve got a good feedback loop on what you’re building,that’s probably the single most important thing that you can do.
