Nuts and Bolts: How to Be an Overnight Success

I was in a conversation the other day with Lynda.com’sKoreen Olbrish and Float Learning’s Chad Udell. We were poking at a workshop ongamification with a description that promised: “You will build a learning gamein 60 minutes!” When Koreen said, “I could build a game in 60 minutes,” Chadresponded, “Yes, 60 minutes and the rest of your life up to that point.”*   

We deal with that a lot in this business: theoversimplification of complex tasks, the marginalization of hard-earnedknowledge. It often takes the form of a problem I think of as “develop beforedesign.” People want a quick tool that will crank out a beautiful and effectiveeLearning program without putting any time into crafting a sound solution or asound treatment for the content. Or they want a product that will take a static,template-based, text-heavy slide deck and, with the push of a magic button,turn it into an engaging, performance-enhancing course. The expectation is akinto driving a Kia into a carwash and expecting it to come out a Lexus.  

I hear it when people say to colleagues, “My kid coulddesign a logo for a lot less than you charge!” or “I want an online simulationlike that one you built for Acme, you know, with characters and voices and agood story. I’m guessing that just takes a day or two, right?” Or, “You have twograduate degrees in training and development? Really? Can you come teach mypeople how to do great instructional design? We’re having a staff meeting Wednesdayat 3:00 PM.”  I see it all the time intraining session descriptions: Ninety-minute or half-day programs in whichattendees will “learn to build an effective team,” “change organizationalculture,” or “build a mobile app.” 

Last year an article in the Atlantic, reporting on the success of the Obama campaign’sengineers, quoted one as saying, “It’s not complicated, it’s just hard.” Andthat’s the thing: Good practice is made up of work, and thought, and mistakes,and time. Things that look easy in the hands of a skilled professional areoften the end result of years of practice and experience: According to Peter Sims’sLittle Bets, Chris Rock spends asmuch as a year polishing a new joke in small venues, publicly failing moreoften than not.  

Finding an interesting eLearning treatment for dry contentoften comes not from a stroke of brilliance but from years of learning to siftthrough stakeholder requests and experts’ war stories and performance issuesand case studies. Sure, you could go to a half-day workshop that will teach youto create a catapult game. Probably someday a simple authoring tool that willlet you build a catapult game will exist. But it won’t be Angry Birds. (And bythe way: Game companies, including Rovio, develop and launch many games. Onlyone became Angry Birds. Success often involves a lot of failure.)

The “Nuts and Bolts” part of this? It’s meant as advice tonewish folks: A huge part of your job will be expectations management. There’snothing wrong with speeding up a clunky process or streamlining steps orcircumventing barriers. There’s nothing wrong with finding an easier way to dosomething. There are tools that canmake your life much easier. I don’t know that everything takes the 10,000 hourssome authors say, but good practice will require … practice. When you’relooking at building an app in 15 minutes, or creating a game in an hour, oryour boss comes back from a trade show on fire about building “engaging,interactive courses” at the rate of 10 a day, learn to recognize the parts thatare easy and the parts that are not. Recognize that you need to design beforedeveloping. Recognize that sometimes “rapid” means “plus all your life up tillnow.”

*Disclosure: When I said I wanted to repeat thisconversation, Chad said he had heard the “rest of your life” line somewhere andwanted to be clear that it was not his—it’s been variously attributed to bothPicasso and Warhol.

Thanks to Koreen Olbrish, Julie Dirksen, and Chad Udell.

Madrigal, A. “When the Nerds Go Marching In.” The Atlantic, November 16, 2012.Available at https://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/. Mentioned by Russell Davies: https://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2013/01/its-not-complicated-its-just-hard.html

Sims, Peter. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. Free Press,2012.

Up for some Twitter fun? The #lrnbk chat will be discussingCharles Duhigg’s Power of Habitbeginning July 9. Details here.