It’s always interesting at year’s end to review my columnsfor the annual “Happy New Year” piece. My interests continue to be dividedbetween community nurturing and social learning, instructional design, andprofessional growth. In looking over some themes for last year here are thingsthat stand out.
Space
A number of columns dealt one way or another with userexperience. There was a piece on physical spaces for learning, both formal and informal, at DukeUniversity’s new medical school building. The building includes room to relaxand just stop and gather, with touches that showed an understanding of learnerneeds including lockers tall enough to hang a lab coat and showers for studentswho bike to class.
This attention to end user needs goes for developing andnurturing community, either in person or virtual. Pay attention to the thingsthat enhance and support learning rather than focusing on those that largely onlymake administrative chores easier. Be intentionaland think through why you want a community, what your expectations of it are,and make it a place where people want to connect and talk.
As discussed in the piece on Kimberly-Clark’s “One K-C Jam” experience, take care to include those oftenmarginalized or left out of conversations that usually focus on “knowledgeworkers,” and remember that you’ll never have 100 percent participation foranything. And give people space to breathe: in other work interactions peopletalk about cats and lunch and what their kids did yesterday. We spend millionsof dollars teaching salespeople to make personal connections with clients for areason.
Practice
Last year brought a new presentation on lean design,giving me an opportunity to review some basics. The nuts and bolts? Be carefulof over-solving and over-engineering. Watch out for sneaky dangers like wasteand scope-creep and waiting. Other “nuts and bolts” issues visited:
- Better needs assessment helpsyou solve the right problem. Is it even a training issue? Ask some differentquestions from the list I offer. Talk to multiple stakeholders (especially thelearners). Being part of a better solution will ultimately enhance bothtraining’s and your reputation. Work to position the training function as apartner in performance improvement, not just the deliverer of one type of intervention.
- Rememberthat what you measure is what you get: Number of calls answered in an hour.Number of tickets closed. But is that really what matters? So what if they canpass the multiple-choice test but can’t actually perform the heart surgery? Payattention to measures that matter. Try to find things that are meaningful, thatgive you real information to help real people do their jobs and to helporganizations perform more efficiently. Beware of easy measures and vanitymetrics.
- Atheme that spans my whole career: attempts by vendors and consultants andnon-practitioners to minimize the fact that a good solution will usuallyrequire some actual work. Beware of advice that’s too good to be true and promises of steps that seem tooconvenient. It’s called “practice” for a reason.
Grow
We’re all busy and it’s only natural to move from task toproject to chore without stopping for breath. Making some time for reflection can help us intellectualize our practice, become clearerabout our own philosophies of teaching and learning, refine our views oflearners and our work, and help us to reconcile ideal with reality and theorywith practice. Ultimately, consciously reaching to become a reflectivepractitioner can help us work more efficiently and effectively while findingmore satisfaction in the work that we do. It can also help us learn, bythinking through decisions and processes and politics and mistakes and “nexttimes.”
The next step: Share that reflection with others. Whileyou’re reflecting, consider whether what you’ve been working on might be ofvalue to someone else. We have piles of status reports and documented standardoperating procedures and what have you, and still, the data says we spend a quarter of our timelooking for something—or someone—with the information we really need. If you struggled to learn it, or solve it, orstop it from leaking, or put it out while it was on fire, then don’t keep it toyourself. Work out simple ways to show your work that fit into your workflow.
Finally: Just do it
Just do it. Figure it out. Figure out how to do it without money, or on time, or withdull content, or without enough time. And quit weighing and meeting and musing.As you move into this new year, remember what Euan Semple once tweeted: “Quitreading case-study porn and get on with it.”
